Current Zeitgeist
Buttheaditis - The Demoralization of the American Male
Let me describe four television ads you might see on any evening - perhaps one following the other - for example during the football playoffs.
A man feverishly scratches a lottery ticket in the hopes of winning an unwinnable prize, while a baby with an adult consciousness sitting next to him mocks the man's expectation that he will win - and his stupidity for this expectation. The man loses and expresses his stupid disappointment as the baby makes a stupid face. (E-trade)
While I like to keep the main focus of my Beautiful Minds blog on actual beautiful minds, I do like to talk time to time about not-so-beautiful minds. In my view, covering the full gamut of human thinking and behavior can inform the extraordinary thinking that does contribute positively to society.
What a difference 20 years makes! On Dec. 17, 1989, the still-infant Fox Broadcasting Co. aired the first episode of "The Simpsons," the animated show about a dysfunctional family from Springfield that has since become the longest-running prime-time series in American history. It's hard to overstate the show's impact. It has spawned a merchandising empire ("Simpsons" air freshener, anyone?), been at the center of a culture war (Barbara Bush called it “the dumbest thing I’d ever seen”) and inspired a hit movie (not to mention comedy writers' rooms everywhere).
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
By Steven Johnson
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
In recent months, longtime supporters of a more expansive federal government have lamented that getting stuck with crippled industries like Detroit and the financial sector wasn't exactly what they had in mind. Paul Krugman and Bob Reich both call it lemon socialism—the national takeover of sectors that are not only too big to fail but too failed to want. (This is not to be confused with lemon capitalism, a term coined by Timothy Noah, who was six years ahead of Krugman in seeing the dangers of Davos.)
Are we dangerously dependent on Wikipedia?
The author of a new book says no, and talks about how a site spawned by an Ayn Rand enthusiast became our most popular encyclopedia.
By Vincent Rossmeier
Mar. 24, 2009 |
The late Huw Wheldon of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London. At one stage, this had involved tracking down an ancient retiree who had toiled in the British Museum’s reading room during the Victorian epoch. Asked if he could remember a certain Karl Marx, the wheezing old pensioner at first came up empty.
My father was a child of the Great Depression. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1921 to Italian immigrant parents, he experienced the economic crisis head-on. He took a job working in an eyeglass factory in the city’s Ironbound section in 1934, at age 13, combining his wages with those of his father, mother, and six siblings to make a single-family income. When I was growing up, he spoke often of his memories of breadlines, tent cities, and government-issued clothing.
For you and me, Twitter is a fun way to procrastinate. But for Silicon Valley's chattering classes, the microblogging company has emerged as something much more—the next Google, the next Facebook, or maybe some unbeatable combination of the two. "It's time to start thinking of Twitter as a search engine," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington declared this week, joining a chorus that includes John Battelle, the San Jose Mercury News, and some of Twitter's venture funders.
It's been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today's preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.