National Football League

Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston in Fast Company on how the show’s staff collaborates:

Whenever anything doesn’t quite sit well, you just call it a “bump,” which is a more palatable way of saying “I have a problem with this.” But if you start a sentence with “I have a problem with what you wrote, and here’s how we’re gonna fix it,” as opposed to, “Something bumped me, and I have a pitch.” It’s not saying, “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s what we’re gonna do.” It’s saying, “This is a problem for me and if you’re invested in this storytelling, you want to smooth out the rough edges.”

You want to be able to satisfy because I’m not coming as an empty vessel to work. I’m coming because I’m passionately involved in this and I have something to offer. So do you as the writer and you as the director. Together we’re stronger. We do a dance.

Read the Emmy Award-winner’s entire interview at Fast Company.

“I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s. An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!” — Jon Bell

Jon Bell utilizes this tactic, what he calls “The McDonald’s Theory” to help break deadlock. It’s a simple technique to surface ideas from an otherwise timid room. He continues:

The next time a project is being discussed in its early stages, grab a marker, go to the board, and throw something up there. The idea will probably be stupid, but that’s good! McDonald’s Theory teaches us that it will trigger the group into action.

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From NFL Cheerleader to MMA Fighter

This time last year, Rachel Wray was spending her Sundays on the sidelines of Arrowhead Stadium as an NFL cheerleader for the Kansas City Chiefs. She stumbled onto an MMA gym looking for a way to change up her workouts and before long she preferred the feel of the canvas to the stadium turf. Now she’s left the NFL for the fighter’s life. These days when her lips are red at work, it’s not lipstick—it’s blood. Wray talked to us about leaving cheerleading and how she’s prepping for her upcoming fight at the Voodoo Lounge in Kansas City later this month. 

FIGHTLAND: Is there any similarity between fight training and cheerleader training?
Rachel Wray: [Laughs] There is nothing similar between fight training and cheerleader training. To be a professional cheerleader you need dance practice, swimsuit modeling, football knowledge, public speaking, and have perfect hair, nails, and makeup at all times. I always laugh when I get out of a fight practice because I always look so disgusting —drenched in sweat, no makeup, hair a huge mess. As a cheerleader if your lipstick isn’t perfect at practice, you get in trouble. They are polar-opposite worlds.

Why did you leave cheerleading to become an MMA fighter?
The reason I chose to leave cheerleading to fight was simple: I enjoyed it more. Just when I was really getting into the MMA training, Chiefs cheerleader auditions were approaching. I had to make a decision. It was impossible to do both. I knew it was right because on nights when I had cheer practice, all I could think about was being at High-Davis Mixed Martial Arts gym. Fighting made me happier than cheerleading. I enjoyed it so much more, I made the switch. 

Read the rest over at FIGHTLAND.

The best photographs don’t always make the best covers. It takes a smart concept, a meticulously executed image, smoothly integrated typography and the combination of all those factors to create an immediate and lasting impact. Our top ten photographic covers of 2012 show exquisite use of photography.

The most notable is New York Magazine’s magnificent cover by photographer Iwan Baan of a half blacked-out Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy. It’s instantly iconic and will become one of the greatest covers of all time. In the mix is also W‘s stunning fashion cover image of Marion Cotillard, ESPN‘s high-concept “Fantasy Football” cover, depicting an NFL player in a magical forest with a unicorn, and a photojournalistic cover, the Economist’s powerful image documenting the personal toll of the conflict in Gaza.

We also decided to include two covers in the mix that were striking photo-based illustrations. An aged Obama on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek as well as a thoughtful commission by the New York Times Magazine for the visual artist Idris Kahn to reinterpret an iconic landmark on their London-themed cover.

A great cover is always a collaborative effort. To caption each of our selected covers, we spoke to a mix of editors, photo directors, art directors and photographers who took part during different stages of the creative process. In our selection, we refrained from choosing any TIME covers, though if we were to choose one, it would be Martin Schoeller’s arresting image of a mother breast-feeding her 4-year-old son, “Are You Mom Enough?”

—Kira Pollack, Director of Photography

Tecmo Bowl is an arcade game developed and released in 1988. The godfather of football video games, Tecmo once ruled the controllers of sports fans everywhere. The documentary features coverage of an annual Tecmo Bowl tournament in Madison, Wisconsin, along with retired NFL players who played and starred in the game, most notably Christian Okoye.

http://vimeo.com/51962489

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That crazy leap that Felix Baumgartner made was astonishing.

And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet.

That won’t happen anytime soon, though. Death-defying jumps from outer space aside, there are only a few live events that millions of people want to watch at the same time. Basically, a handful of award shows like the Oscars, and big-time sports.

Even if YouTube wanted to pay up to get its hands on that programming, it’s going to have to wait, because the TV guys have the rights locked up for a long time. The next set of NFL deals, for instance, won’t be available for a decade.

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche.

Here’s some of the stuff YouTube has streamed live in the last year or so:

• A concert from Psy, the “Gangnam style” guy
• A concert from AKB48, a Japanese girl group
• A bunch of EDM shows (that’s “DJs playing music for big crowds,” for the rest of us)
• A concert by Jay-Z at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn
• A World of Warcraft launch event, which featured gamers playing Mists of Pandaria around the world
• A bunch of solar and lunar eclipses

None of these shows drew more than a couple-hundred-thousand concurrent viewers, which would make them the equivalent of a poorly rated cable TV show.

And that makes sense: Since the Internet has trained us to watch anything we want, whenever we want to, why do we have to watch when everyone else does? (A semi-secret about the live video streaming that news sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal* and the Huffington Post do, for instance: Almost all the viewing comes after the fact, via on-demand clips.)

On the other hand, as YouTube proved conclusively yesterday, it can now mount this stuff without breaking a sweat. Now it’s basically a plug-and-play option for any grown-up company that wants to do business with Google. And YouTube is going to make it increasingly available to the rest of us, too.

That’s the result of a year of around-the-clock work by a couple-dozen YouTube engineers, to prep the video site for the Olympics in July.

YouTube software engineering director Jason Gaedtke,who oversaw that effort, says the livestreams the company put out during the Olympics were seven times better than the standard video-on-demand stuff YouTube puts out everyday. His team is now applying the lessons it learned from that effort, and using it to upgrade YouTube’s video more broadly.

So, yes. If someone else wants to grab the world’s attention by breaking the sound barrier aided only by gravity, you’ll be able to watch it alongside a global audience of millions.

But the future of live video on YouTube is probably going to look like something else: You and several thousand other people, watching something most of the world doesn’t care about.

And that can be thrilling in its own way.

*The Journal is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

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As part of Bologna's Frontier project, Italian artist Andreco has created a 59-foot mural which he hopes will clean up the city's air. Representing a huge "Tree of Knowledge," the artwork is made of photocatalytic paint, a special substance which, according to manufacturers, breaks down mono-nitrogen oxides, harmful chemicals produced by cars and other motor vehicles. One company claims that "every square meter painted is like taking eight cars off the road."

But do these claims stand up to scrutiny? According to a 2010 advisory note issued by the UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the jury is still out on whether photocatalytic paint actually has a significant effect on air pollution. While studies in...

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