Inside The Economist Magazine

This interview with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief at The Economist magazine may seem a little dull, after all, Micklethwait is hardly a celebrity. But that’s the point, The Economist does not print bylines, so the very nature of those who write for it is anonymity. However, in a period when traditional newspapers look extremely fragile, from local rags to the laurel resting, but dull and myopic New York Times, publications like the Economist, look like the only news properties with any future. And here Micklethwait talks about the future of newspapers.

If anyone wants to challenge me on the notion that the New York Times is boring, consider their recent-ish headline: “No Anthrax Found in Pond”. This roughly translates as: “Nothing Happened in an Insignificant Body of Water”. If I were teaching a journalism class, I would use this as a case study example of a poor headline.

Hoover Institution, Stanford University
42 min 47 sec Feb 5, 2007www.hoover.org

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China vs the US – The Battle for Oil

China is perhaps too different from the US culturally and not different enough ideologically for there to be an immediate threat of actual war, however history shows that competition for natural resources tends to cause conflict.

For now, its more natural to secure a beachhead for access to oil resources by fighting against people who are both close enough and just different enough for there to be natural animosity. We fight people who believe in another branch of the Abrahamic religion, Islam rather than Christianity. In the global scheme of things, this is a hair splitting difference not dissimilar from Shia vs Sunni. These people have the resources that the US may eventually end up at war with China over.

Places that have wealth built on natural resources favor bullies who can grab it rather than the educated who have an upper hand when wealth needs to be created rather than mined. Places rich in natural resources: The Democratic Republic of the Congo; Saudi Arabia and Texas are therefore inherently pugnacious and anti-intellectual. From these places fighting springs naturally.

The battle in the subject of this movie is metaphorical. It could very well be figurative.
50 min 6 sec Jan 4, 2008

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1 comment politics, world

Paris Hilton

Its really hard to recognize what defines a decade when you are in it, but I would hazard a guess that mindless celebrity culture might be it. Obviously, celebrity has always been a huge component of culture, but recently it has become the dominant one. This has been a decade where America went to war and nobody paid attention because they were more interested in Paris Hilton’s court outfit.

There are three ways to become famous: create something, kill someone or take your clothes off in public. Paris chose the latter and, amazingly, managed to become a stable of mainstream TV, where you can’t say the word fuck, by actually fucking in front of millions. Paris Hilton is interesting because she wanted fame not fortune, she already had money. A person so utterly desperate for fame that she literally prostituted herself to bootstrap it, when she really didn’t have to turn any tricks.

I can’t get away with accusing Paris Hilton for her part in the downfall of Empire, like the decadents of latter day Rome, without a theory as to why that might be, so here it is:

It’s the Internet’s fault.

When you connect things together to make information flow more easily, you exacerbate the fame effect. No single theater actor had ever been as famous as Valentino had become, within a few years of the development of cinema. The Internet is an even bigger force for celebrity, but its not in the web savvy people’s interest to acknowledge, so people will automatically champion ideas of benign plurality like ‘the long tail’.

There is a long tail, but it is of finite size, the number of niches within it being defined by people’s natural grouping and competition for their attention. This fixed size is analogous to the distribution of species on earth which is incredibly constant. In other words there may be a place for a guy from Ohio who knows everything about folding bicycles to do very well on the internet, but only at the expense of the other folding bicycle niche sites. At the other end of the spectrum we have Paris Hilton, who occupies of of the niches that is larger than the entire long tail itself. Paris Hilton is a Gorgon monster whose fame is big enough to swallow whole, 99.9% of all the other niche celebrities put together by occupying the slice marked: mainstream.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, thankfully. The Internet will create a more bland YouTube, celebrity clip culture, but like the span of clips themselves, the lifespan and churn of mega stardom with be faster than ever before. Life will be hard for celebrities as they realize that the meritocracy of the Internet is not in the ability to be famous, but the fact that fame and fall from grace are in the hands of the masses, like never before.

In 2018 most people will never have heard of Paris Hilton. But her fall into obscurity will be as traumatic as being shown fucking on YouTube would be for all of us who will, thankfully, always be obscure.

Here is a documentary that examines this morbid reality.
44 min 11 sec Jan 3, 2008

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3 comments biography, society

Miss Peanut (Leigh Bowery)

The highlight of MOMA’s Lucian Freud etchings exhibition is a tiny six inch oil painting of Leigh Bowery who regularly sat for Freud. Bowery was basically a transvestite nightclub diva, but with so much originality that his act transcended camp superficiality and his outfits are now recognized as works of art, like Freuds paintings of him without them.

The irony of Freud’s paintings are that Bowery, famous for being clothed and glam is show unceremoniously naked and fat. In similar ironic vein, here is Bowery in New York parading around a sun bleached, decrepit city that looks like New York used to, in one of his outfits: Leigh on Bowery, in the flesh but fully clothed.

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BLOOD OF THE POET 1930

This was Jean Cocteau’s first feature film. A surrealist film style that is interesting today primarily because of its continuing influence on people like David Lynch.
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1 comment drama

Visions Of The Future – The Intelligence Revolution

This documentary celebrates the possibility that we are entering a period where science will change from discovery about the word to mastery over it. In a world of post millennial global warming, peak oil and impending Malthusian crises its a touching piece of optimism.

This world view is logically in direct opposition to something like the Green movement, because what it is suggesting, is that the environment is something we can control rather than defer to. It could be argued that our only way out of global environmental catastrophe is to hit the gas.

Of course none of these political issues come into play here, but it would be an interesting way to stir up complacency on both sides of the spectrum, by pitting the opposition to the Green movement as being something whose tone is liberal, mystical and positive, rather like this film.

I am in favor of environmentalism, but think that with it we have to accept that we will return to a dystopian, feudal past as a payoff to save the planet for other species.

The film is presented by Michio Kaku who made a name for himself as a popularizer of science, in the media. Which is odd, because he’s not a great presenter but is a truly great physicist, being, amongst other things, one of the co-inventors, as it were, of String Theory.

If you can get through the excruciating platitudes of the opening of this documentary the substance is really good.

(This is the first in a 3 part series).

51 min 54 sec Dec 11, 2007

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9 comments environment, science

Death in Rome

A film about the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978. This was a seminal moment in Italy’s history, comparable to the assassination of JFK. Its also been the subject of so much fiction that its good to watch a documentary on the subject.
45 min 0 sec Dec 15, 2007

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1 comment biography, history, politics

The Sex Blog Girls

I’m hesitant to post this, since the title makes it sound like link bait. Similarly, I’m not really interested in the subject matter itself for exactly the same reason i.e. this is the TV equivalent of link bait. That said, on a meta level, its entertaining enough to blog about watching a documentary about blogging.

In other words, this is voyeurism – and not because of the sex.
47 min 45 sec Dec 20, 2007

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1 comment society, technology

Jonathan Meades :: Fast Food

If you want a more erudite look at the same topic as Fast Food Nation or Supersize me, look no further. And if you watch till the end you will get to see the legendary deep frying of a Mars Bar.

Another Jonathan Meades classic, whereupon he looks at fast food from its mid 19th Century origins when Sephardic Jews in the East End of London took the tradition of deep frying in olive oil to what became the first fried fast food: fish and chips.

The problem was that in the UK, only animal fats rather than high temperature olive oil were available, leading to the tradition of soggy, dangerous, Anglo Saxon food that now plagues the US. The combination of primogeniture (land ownership passed to the first born) and flattish landscape created conditions where farming was the dominion of the few and therefore there was no tradition of peasant food production or ultimately cooking and gastronomy through Protestant meanness. Again this is something which has come to a head in recent years in the US, where the farming population has reduced to an insignificant amount in the last few decades.

The food we eat today is the food of amusement parks, MSM (Mechanically Separated Meat) hot dogs and burgers cooked at high temperature to kill the bacteria from the excrement. Food is something we consume on our lap while watching celebrity pseudo chefs show how to do something most of us don’t intend to practice – cook.

The most telling point in this film is where he asks young children where meat comes from, and none of them know. This is documentary making at its best. A political subject is shown artistically and in historical context, with simultaneous passion, wit and logic rather than alienating rage.
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2 comments history, society

Athens – The truth about Democracy

Don’t be put off by the title, this is not a conspiracy theory piece, but a very interesting (if rather pedestrian in format) re-examination of 5th Century BCE Athens ‘ democracy. This hundred year period two and a half millennia ago, is the model for all Western democracy, yet the reality of its mechanism and outcome is not what has become commonly accepted.

Its a great premise for learning from history, both literally and by analogy.

(These documentaries are wrongly labeled on Google – Part 2 is part one and part 2 is unlabeled)
48 min 4 sec Nov 30, 2007

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1 comment history, politics