Well, as I mentioned last month, I like to take a month a year off of looking at any news. And it’s always August, because the combination of nothing happening in August and the need/desire of news to keep people breathlessly interested, means that August is a time for swift boating, death panels, shocking fake-heartfelt […]
You should be watching Mad Men.
Ok, this is some pretty good looking stuff. Loving the dude with the white shirt. (via J Kottke.
Rock on, Comic Sans.
I always liked Howard Zinn. Along with Studs Turkel, he defined for me an old-school commitment to listening to people and caring about what they said and did, without great self-promotion. Hearing about his passing today, I wonder where the Zinn’s of today and tomorrow are. Time for a drink and another pass through A […]
I have a sort of interesting question, though perhaps it’s less interesting than I imagine it to be. Given the following two scenarios, which is more likely and why? Scenario 1: In the first case, we have a series of attributes attached to a person, and then we can make arguments (empirical, theoretical) about how […]
Gabriel had a thoughtful post about Jay Leno, comparing his programming to NPR and classical music over the past couple decades. I’m much more sympathetic to Grant McCracken’s view of Leno as a failure because he misses the contemporary moment’s desire for specificity and instead provides the blandest of something-for-everyone variety. Though McCracken and Rossman […]
Ok, this is impressive. And I’ve seen Primer three times and still don’t 100% have the timeline worked out.
One of Erving Goffman’s brilliant insights is the extent to which people engage in presentations of self. Front-stage behavior is the display meant for ‘public’ consumption: witty, urbane, dangerous, smart, smooth, down-to-earth, intellectual, anti-intellectual. This depends on the audience, of course, and it is meant to make oneself look good. Backstage behavior is closer to […]
There’s a longer post I intend on the ways political/social discourse gets hijacked by experts, well-covered territory to be sure but important nevertheless. In the meantime, I’m still on something of a news hiatus. So I am coming to this a little belatedly. Apparently, Niall Ferguson, a professor dude who writes about money, wrote an […]