CJR: Why We Love The Political Gabfest
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Though it is (broadly) a political analysis show, the Politcal Gabfest sometimes makes me laugh out loud. There was one evening last summer where I was that strange person on the subway, giggling maniacally, unable to stop as I listened to the show. The conversation had turned to dogs and mimes. You had to be there.
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.
The Julian Assange Show
Is now the time for a forty-year-old cyber activist to sell out?
To sell out, Assange would of course have to violate his ideals. Maybe he has, but it would be wrong to confuse the romantic view that he holds of the world with a rigid commitment to ideology or unwavering idealism. He is a charismatic figure precisely because of the way his contradictions—manifest in WikiLeaks from the start—magically seem to hold together: his self-absorption tempered by his more abstract, but genuinely felt, pursuit of justice; his inexperience or naïveté often masked by his autodidact’s intellect; his utopianism hemmed in by a do-what-it-takes view of combat; his search for hidden truths shrouded by his own secrecy and willingness to equivocate, if not lie. “When you are much brighter than the people you are hanging around with, which I was as a teen-ager, two things happen,” Assange told me while I was reporting “No Secrets,” a profile of him and of WikiLeaks that ran in this magazine two years ago. “First of all, you develop an enormous ego. Secondly, you start to think that everything can be solved with just a bit of thinking—but ideology is too simple to address how things work.”
'Live by the bro, die by the bro.'
The King’s Comeuppance: How the hottest ad agency of the aughts fell from grace.
Kill Hollywood
That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
Larry David's Rough Night Out With The Aging Literary Lion
It had been thirty hard years since Yates had written what he considered his best book. At least Larry David still treated him as an imposing figure.
New York Magazine: 2012=1968?
In 2008, Barack Obama lit a fire among young activists. Next year, Occupy Wall Street could consume him.
Time Magazine Editions for the US, Europe, Asia and South Pacific for Dec 5, 2011
Do you suspect American media dumbs down if not outright ignores the news? Wonder why most Americans are so out of touch with history, politics, or world events? Ever get the feeling that American media is such a steady stream of narcissistic bullshit that the rest of the world must assume the same is true of Americans?
photo set from Time archives via (follow link for larger images)
