Malcolm Gladwell, successful author.
Ever wonder why you’re not rich and/or famous? If you’re an American, of course you have.
Or, if you happen to be one of the lucky few who’ve actually gotten rich and/or famous, your reaction when it happened was probably “It’s about fucking time my intrinsic greatness was recognized and rewarded.” Just recall Joe the Plumber’s easy acceptance of reporters on his lawn, cheering crowds, recording deals, etc. Like most Americans, he’d been vaguely wondering what took the public so long to appreciate his brilliance, and he was consequently more than ready for his bald-headed close-ups and smug sound-bites.
Anyway, there’s this new book out by former New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell that’s trying to explain to us why we’re not as rich and/or famous as we expected to be. It’s called Outliers: The Story of Success, but really it’s the Story of Why We’re Not Successful.
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The problem with Twilight isn’t that it’s an embarrassing fantasy for teenage girls—hell, I was a teenage girl myself once, so whatever celluloid dreams get the poor addled kids through seventh grade are okay by me. No, the problem is that Twilight has already made so much money it’s now considered bigger than that. It’s a phenomenon. Movie industry types are making fatuous pronouncements about its significance, as in this CNN report quotiing Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers:
Teen girls rule the earth. If you look back at the ‘Hannah Montana’ movie, how well that did, and now this movie, the teen girl audience will never be ignored again or underestimated. It was always teen boys who were the coveted ones, but someone finally caught on to the idea that girls love movies, too, and if you create something that they’re into, that they’re passionate about, they will come out in big numbers and drive the box office.
This chilling statement tells us we’re in for Twilight sequels and retreads till we beg for mercy.
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Six Apart, the company behind the popular TypePad blogging platform, just went Marie Antoinette on us all. With all the jobs being cut in the paper industry and increasing numbers of reporters stuck with nothing to do but moan, the company decided to help out. Introducing the “TypePad Journalist Bailout Program”: a free TypePad Pro blog account for every unemployed professional journalist! A media famine is afoot, journalists don’t have papers to work for. So…”Let them blog!” For free, of course. All of which helps Six Apart’s bottom line…
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Daniel Craig working on his stance.
The ultimate proof that movies these days are rotten: Quantum of Solace is breaking records at the box office. It’s not the public’s fault; people want to see something move onscreen and they’ll take what they can get. Right now Q of S is the only game in town.
It’s not absolutely terrible, Q of S, but you forget it as you cross the lobby to the theater exit. That’s par for the course with James Bond films, you might say; nobody really remembers Bond films with Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton or Roger Moore. It’s embarrassing to be still clinging to the vivid cultural recollection of the great Connery/ Bond films of the 1960s. But then Casino Royale and Daniel Craig cruelly raised our hopes again. He’s fantastic, we all agree, even with those ears. He spends almost all of Q of S looking as if he were hewn from the living rock. It’s hypnotic, and thank God for it, because the rest of the film’s pretty much a wash-out.
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Listen:
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We all know in the backs of our minds that Barack Obama’s incredible victory will eventually be followed by disappointment. But does it have to come so soon, and hit so hard? The answer will be yes, if Lawrence Summers is named treasury secretary in the president-elect’s cabinet, as many observers believe will be the case. Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis–hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then “terror” might be a more appropriate word than “disappointment.” (more…)
Last weekend, a Russian anarchist revolutionary art group called War pulled a fast one on Prime Minister Putin. Or at least they thought they did. Russian revolutionaries sure do fall far from the tree these days.
On the night of November 7, a group of them set up a laser on top of a building across the river from the Russian White House — that’s the place where the prime minister carries out daily his business — and projected a 150-ft. wide toxic green skull and bones on its facade. But the protest didn’t end there. (more…)
The first polls had just closed when the Republican Right’s “Agony of Defeat” moment arrived. It was just after 8 p.m. — right as Fox’s “America’s Election HQ” show returned from a commercial break, and Brit Hume welcomed viewers back to his “Fair and Balanced” network.
But something wasn’t right: There was a strange lack of background banter, none of the golf-buddy joshing that comes with overconfidence. There was just Bergman-esque silence between every one of Brit Hume’s dramatic pauses. The Fox cameras wandered over an incredible scene: the cream of right-wing/neocon punditry — William Kristol, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke — were caught slumped in their chairs during the commercial break, deep in a state of hopelessness and depression. They didn’t see the camera train on them, or maybe they were incapable of faking it, as if they’d been on a three-day Ecstasy roll at Burning Man, and now they were paying the horrible serotonin-deprived price. (more…)
Mass psychosis?
So by now you’ve probably heard something about this election that happened on Tuesday. There seemed to be a whole hoo-ha about it, people hugging and high-fiving in the streets, international rejoicing, everybody laughing and crying and gibbering. In an elated frenzy, a friend of mine e-mailed me marveling how great it is not to be living in Dumbfuckistan anymore.
That’s how I knew the whole thing must be phony, just the kind of tall tale a delusional nation might tell itself as it finally slipped over the edge into mass psychosis. So the story is we all got together, we the people, and elected the very best person running for president, did we? The one who didn’t look like an Orc? The apparently intelligent, seemingly decent one who talked in mellifluous complete sentences and appeared calm and reasonable? AND he’s black?
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