My media week 08/11/09

In The Times Ben Macintyre  argues that narratives are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information: The internet is killing storytelling.

Thinking Allowed has a programme about white–collar crime and the cultural factors that are behind it.

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall there have beem a spate of articles. This article by Paul Hollander is called Murderous Idealism. It should be obvious but it is very easy to forget the lessons of the last hundred years:

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn’t mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.

My media week 01/11/09

Lingist John McWhorter asks would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages, but only one? And what if it happened to be English? The piece is called The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English.

The Daily Mash has a spoof advertising feature for a a Nick Griffin racially pure fat-reducing grilling machine. Griffin is the chairman of the far-right, whites-only British National Party.There is a quote from Griffin: “This thing just loves pork – unlike you know who…” Other stories include:

ORDINARY EUROPEANS DENIED CHANCE TO HATE TONY BLAIR

SEX WITH OBAMA ‘BETTER THAN SEX’, CLAIMS FIRST LADY

BBC World Service’s World Football asks whether homosexuality is the biggest taboo in football. And there is an interview with Raddy Antic, who’s managed both sides about the problems at Real and Atletico Madrid.

My media week 25/10/09

Boston.com has an article Let us now praise… the cliché – It’s concise, time-tested, and instantly familiar. What’s not to love?

 

In this Guardian piece Consistency is overrated Julian Baggini asks should there be freedom to mislead?

 

The Onion has this article: Television, Processed Foods Couldn’t Be More Proud Of Child They Raised

 

ABC All in the Mind looks at how the brain sciences are changing our understanding of addiction, and the powerful consequences for notions of free will, responsibility and culpability: Addiction, free will and self control

My media week 18/10/09

Better regulation is not the panacea for all our problems as John Kay shows in How the skies proved the limits of regulation.

 

The Telegraph had a piece about the 50 most annoying things about the internet.

 

I am always interested in the world of books so I was interested to listen to NPR’s Talk of the Nation on the changes in book publishing -The Book Industry Turns A Page.

 

I did a piece last year about the Oxbridge interview and this week The Telegraph invited seven Oxbridge alumni to answer a typical interview question. Would their replies pass the test? Are you clever enough to get into Oxbridge?

My media week 11/10/09

Gary Stern, former President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Stern’s book, Too Big To Fail (co-authored with Ron Feldman), a prescient warning of the moral hazard created when government rescues creditors of financial institutions from the consequences of bankruptcy. Stern traces the origins of “too big to fail” to the rescue of Continental Illinois in 1984 and then follows more recent rescues including those of the current crisis. The conversation explores the incentive effects of such rescues on the decision-making by executives in large financial institutions. The discussion concludes with Stern’s ideas for alternative ways to deal with large, troubled financial institutions.

 

Café Hayek has a nice piece explaining How moral hazard works.

 

The Guardian reproduced a New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker about Amazon’s reading device the Kindle – Amazon Kindle 2: Centuries of evolved beauty rinsed away.

 

The BBC World Service’s Business Weekly looks at the power of the mind. What’s the psychology behind the layout of a supermarket? What are the pressures and mental stresses of middle management? And what are the best mind games to play in job interviews? Plus, the head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, tells us how the software giant is faring in these uncertain times. And fathering a genius – William Gates Snr recalls his memories of the adolescent Bill Gates Jnr.

My media week 04/10/09

A while back I did a piece about metaphors. This article deals with many of the same themes: Thinking literally  The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world

 

The Crash – The Age of Risk. This two-part series from the BBC on the global crash examines the boom years before the bust of 2008.

 

When Writers Speak. This NYT article looks at  why many acclaimed writers are terrible at giving speeches and interviews. Here is an extract featuring the ideas of Steven Pinker:

In an e-mail exchange, Pinker sensibly points out that thinking precedes writing and that the reason we sound smarter when writing is because we deliberately set out to be clear and precise, a luxury not usually afforded us in conversation. True, and especially true if one writes for magazines where nitpicking editors with expensive shoes are waiting to kick us around for every small mistake. When people who write for a living sit down to earn their pay they make demands on themselves that require a higher degree of skill than that summoned by conversation. Pinker likens this to mathematicians thinking differently when proving theorems than when counting change, or to quarterbacks throwing a pass during a game as opposed to tossing a ball around in their backyards. He does concede, however, that since writing allows time for reveries and ruminations, it probably engages larger swaths of the brain.

 

NPR’s Fresh Air features an interview with Nick Hornby talking about his new novel, Juliet, Naked and his screenplay for the film An Education, which will be released next month.

My media week 27/09/09

Salon.com has a piece, Is the Internet melting our brains?, about moral panics created over new communication technologies. It is an interview with Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois and author of A Better Pencil. Here is an extract:

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”

 

The Bottom Line came back on BBC Radio 4 this week. The business discussion programme dealt with managing expectations and why the dreaded business meeting is still very much on the agenda.

 

 John Kay has written this piece: The Reform of Banking Regulation. He sets out his vision for the future.

 

The Onion features this article: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.

 

John Crace’s digested read dealt with the new Dan Brown bestseller The Lost Symbol.

My media week 20/09/09

We have all heard of             Christian funamentalism but this week The New Humanist has a feature about Harun Yahy, a Muslim creationist who wants to demonstrate the superiority of “Koranic science” over “the evolution lie”. Sex, flies and videotape: the secret lives of Harun Yahya.

 

NPR has a feature about Google and its digitalisation of all the world’s books. Here is the introduction:

Before Gutenberg, books were precious commodities, literacy was equally rare, and the flow of ideas scarcely amounted to a trickle. Movable type made printing easy and cheap. All kinds of books became available to a much wider audience, and the world changed. We may be at such a moment right now. Millions of books are being scanned into digital libraries that should make enormous volumes of material available to anybody. And this time, the agent of change isn’t Gutenberg but Google. How all this will happen is important and the subject of argument among writers’ groups, publishers, libraries and privacy advocates, but that it will happen seems beyond dispute.

Who Should Control The Virtual Library? This audio comes with a transcript.

 

The Independent has a piece about the French attempt to aprovide an alternative to GDP: Sarkozy’s happiness index is worth taking seriously.

My media week 29/06/09

I have done a couple of posts about thought experiments and in this week’s Analysis Janet Radcliffe Richards looks at a fascinating range of new experiments shedding light on how humans make moral choices.

 

Edge has a piece entitled: How does our language shape the way we think? I am a bit sceptical aboutthis. Maybe I’ll do an article about it in my blog next year.

 

Andrew Calcutt argues that in staying childish and obsessing over his identity, Michael Jackson was actually normal by today’s standards: Jacko was a product of our Wacko culture.

 

Novelist Mark Helprin talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about copyright and the ideas in his book, Digital Barbarism. Helprin argues for an extension rather than a reduction in the length of time that authors have control over their work. He also argues that technology is often not attuned to human needs and physical constraints, claiming that tranquility is elusive in modern times. He sees the movement against copyright and intellectual property generally as part of an educational and social trend toward collective rather than individual work.

My media week 21/06/09

The Independent had a piece about the ten most ridiculous lawsuits of all time.

 

John Kay looks at regulatory capture, the situation in which regulators come to see their functions through the eyes of those they regulate: The slow drip of the ‘faster’ payments system.

 

In Spiked Duleep Allirajah looks at the dearth ofdecent films about football: Why aren’t there any decent football films?

 

In this week’s Forum on the BBC World Service, Australian writer and critic Clive James looks at what makes a film star iconic,   British mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy claims mathematics can flow from music, and music from mathsa and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues we’re all retreating into a new era that he calls ‘interpassivity’ in which we pass on our activity not just to others to do it for us but increasingly also to inanimate objects.