The outline of the new Omidyar-Greenwald media venture is taking shape. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is the latest to sign up and he gives some information about it, including the people who have joined so far. It is a good list. I am familiar with most of the names and the ones that are unfamiliar such as Liliana Segura and Eric Bates have biographies that look promising. [Read more…]
Matt Taibbi writes that coverage of the 2016 presidential election has already begun. He says that this is inevitable but what depresses him is the way it is covered. He explains how there has now evolved a standard lens through which all politicians are viewed and that results in a particular narrative form. He looks in particular at the way the senator Elizabeth Warren’s potential candidacy (which is not at all clear will happen but he favors if it does) is described. [Read more…]
I have written before of the weird fascination of the US media with covering the anniversaries of major events. I generally find them either utterly boring or they arouse a mild flashback, similar to hearing a song from one’s youth. This week is going to be one of the biggest nostalgia trips, since Friday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the killing of president Kennedy. [Read more…]
I grew up voraciously reading mystery novels, with Agatha Christie being my author of choice, with other mystery writers thrown in from time to time. She was a prolific writer and I suspect that I have read at least 90% of her output. Hence my ideas about the conventions of that genre have largely been shaped by her books. [Read more…]
Sri Lanka is a developing country where there is a class of people who are not only extremely wealthy but determined to flaunt their wealth in the most ridiculously extravagant ways. The latest example of this kind of disgusting ostentation is a wedding that had 126 bridesmaids, 25 best men, 20 page boys and 23 flowers girls. [Read more…]
The surprising discovery that the universe is not just expanding but that the rate of expansion is increasing is what led to the idea of dark energy as the cause of that acceleration. But explaining in non-mathematical terms to a lay audience why dark energy leads to an accelerating expansion is not easy and introducing the idea that dark energy creates a negative pressure does not help much either. [Read more…]
It looks like 2014 is going to be big year from religious mush in films. In addition to the Noah film I wrote about yesterday, Heaven Is For Real will be released around Easter, supposedly based on a true story about a little boy who had a near death experience and then gave a remarkably detailed and accurate account of all the people and things that he had seen in heaven, including things that he could not have known about. [Read more…]
Timothy Geithner has, during his entire time as governor of the New York Fed and then as Treasury Secretary, been a loyal servant of Wall Street and the big banks. Neil Barofksy, in his blistering expose and insider’s view of how the financial bailout played out, showed how Geithner and the other senior executives in Treasury seemed to see their role as serving the interests of the banks rather than the taxpayers who were paying their salaries. [Read more…]
The story of Noah in the Bible poses a serious challenge to religious believers. Taken literally and looked at without using a religious lens, this is a monstrous story of the worst genocide in the history of humankind, and committed by a supposedly loving god no less. Religions have for a long time managed to gloss over this story to obscure the most ghastly aspects of it. They spend time on quite a detailed description of all the preparation work on building and stocking the Ark, quickly go over the actual slaughter, and then spend time on what came afterwards, with rainbows and sunshine and birds and flowers heralding the dawn of a wonderful new world. [Read more…]
I took part in a panel discussion on religion on Wednesday. It was organized by the students living in the dorm of the Cleveland Institute of Music, so about twenty students of classical music attended. The panel consisted of professors of Christianity and Islam from another university, a professor of Judaic studies from my university, and me. I will refer to the others as C, M, and J respectively. [Read more…]