Watch this amazing video: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846&play=1 Nothing captures better the disconnect between actual economists and the idiot talking heads in the media, whose sycophantish Wall-Streetism keeps them asking two people who are predicting the total collapse of the economy for stock tips. As though that’s what the issue is.

The Paper of Record for Brie-eaters (man, I wish I had some Brie! breakfast was coffee, an overripe banana and some petrifying bread) has come close to flip-flopping on social media, from a frustrated early-adopter mom's tale of Twitter in February to the full-on Big Brother mind-meld head-in-hands rumination in September. The core theme is generational, to quote the second Times article: For many people — particularly anyone over the age of ...

Daniel Gordon’s A State of Mind (2004) takes viewers inside North Korea through portraits of two young girls, Hyon Sun and Song Yon, as they train for the national Mass Games. All the publicity for and reviews of the film speak of the unprecedented access Gordon was given, enabled by the success of his previous film, The Game of Their Lives (2002), about the North Korean team that made it to the 1966 World Cup quarterfinals.

I was talking the other day with a scholar whose work changed the face of American feminism in the 1980s, and who was part, more generally, of the wave of feminist theory and criticism that swept through the academy, the courts, and society in general in that era. “What ever happened to feminism?” I asked her. I meant the question, though of course at some level I know very well what happened to it: much of its energy went into gen...

I’m not sure if “thanks” are in order, but a tip of the imaginary hat atop my dizzied noggin to E Hayot for passing along the link to the series of NY Times posts generated in response to Stanley Fish’s, well, let’s call it a review, of François Cusset’s French Theory. The postings were both utterly predictable and utterly horrifying: bile-filled rants, smug dismissals, friends-worse-than-enemies endorsements (it’s a harmless game!), Zen parab...

I’ve been struck –as if by a bundle of wire cables— by the number of recent television commercials in which very young children speak for global capital. In the realm of finance there are specifically the terrible, awful, very bad (or, in the words of their web site “humorous and endearing”) AIG commercials, but there are plenty of others as well. Since at least the hell-spawn “zoom zoom” kid to the soul-shredding “it’s the mirrors” girl, ther...

On the train the other day, I picked up a neighbor's crumpled Washington Post, and read this warm-hearted response by the advice columnist: You've been more honest with us than most of us are with ourselves. Maybe everyone needs to write a letter like this. And then shred it. Cross-cut. Thank you. (WaPo, 3/24/08, p. C8) What, I wondered, could have provoked this squirm reaction (acknowledgment, suppression, mashing extra hard on the shredder b...

Alain Robbe-Grillet died about a month ago at the age of 86. Sadly, I learned of the event only by reading an embarrassing piece by novelist Stephen Marche on salon.com. Once again the American press has seized on the occasion of a French writer’s death to shake up that peculiar cocktail of smugness and injury that all things French seem, these days, to permit and even require. The upshot: Robbe-Grillet “was a disaster for innovative novels.” ...

In the grand printculture tradition of contemplating the structure of a “war on X,” today a few factoids on a 1924 book, War on War.

I had been planning, this week, to play advocate for my homeboy John Ashbery, but instead I’ve decided to pass along some musings about something I’m even less qualified to spout off about: race and gender in American politics, specifically the complicated and perhaps unexpected things the current race for the Democratic presidential nomination seem to reveal.)

I'm off to a conference in Washington DC and C Bush and I swapped days. Speaking of Washington, Project Vote Smart is a site that gathers information about candidates running for public office. For those candidates who have taken the “Political Courage Test,” you can see how they stand, or say they stand, on a whole series of issues. You can also see which interest groups have endorsed which candidates or which of a candidate's vo...

Once upon a time I wanted to be a journalist. The love affair didn’t last that long, but it certainly seemed like a big deal at the time –a typical college romance. In retrospect it seems only a transition from an amorphous collection of enthusiasms (politics, dabbling in various arts, a desire to travel) to something like a feasible career choice in academia.Still, initially it was the enticement of reading French journalism –not Racine or Pr...

I don’t have much new to add to the posts from last week, which all did a fine job of demonstrating the disingenuousness of Mallon’s questions. In his response to question #6, E Hayot notes the “rhetorical quality” of the question, the way it asserts what it claims to ask about. C Bush tackled the form of Mallon’s complaints and their false premises, looking closely at questions 1, 2, 7, and 6, and S Shirazi also began his response to question...

I'll just say it: questions 1, 3, 10 and especially 7 are the questions of either an idiot or an asshole. Which one Thomas Mallon is is a question we will leave in abeyance till the end of this week and maybe even beyond, humbly remembering all the while that any postulation of the great chain of being defined by assholes and idiots ought to be revised towards other, more geometric possibilities. That said, I'll be taking on question 6, which ...

Can one possibly greet news of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the Definitive 200 albums with anything but weary disdain? A disdain which quickly turns to despair and strained confusion on seeing the actual list?

About a month ago Salon featured a review, by Gary Kamiya, of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Accompanying the review --entitled “How Edward Said Took Intellectuals for a Ride” –was an image of Said on a magic carpet. Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s your headline: Secret of liberal bias in academia discovered: Many academics are foreign-born! I’m a bit hesitant to put that in the title, because the last thing I want to do is bring carrots to the hamsters who keep the “liberal bias in academe” wheel spinning. Nor do I want to stoke the flames of xenophobia. And imagine the sweet metaphorical music that would result from putting those flames and hamsters together! So I address these ...

On the New York Times’s website is a precious porthole onto another world, a world of constant, flowing change, of informational tentacles that rise and fall, of star-shaped objects that flicker in the dark and leave a brief retinal afterglow. No, I’m not talking about the headlines, not the Op-Eds, even less about the photos: it’s the box headlined “Most Popular,” in particular, the section “Most E-Mailed,” that gives me my peep at the peeps....

I should start with a confession: I originally wanted to call this piece “Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?” –and that was pretty much the whole idea. I typed up some initial notes and then went looking around the internets for an image of Ms. Dowd, whereupon I found not one but three existing articles with that title (a reprint of a New York piece in The Age, Slate, and one by Wonkette), along with “Yes, Maureen Dowd is Necessary” (oh snap!) on Salo...

With any luck in a matter of days the furor over John Kerry’s botched joke will be over and the political news will be dominated by something really important, like the discovery that a Democratic Congressman somewhere in Michigan is driving a French car, or something Sean Penn says about gay marriage, or the revelation that someone with a subscription to The New York Times once smoked pot, followed by the White House demand that the paper ret...

C Bush's piece last spring about the Duke lacrosse case captures my feelings about the whole thing pretty well. I particularly want to speak to one of the statements in C Bush's piece that I “felt” the most: I have no special insight into the facts of the case and make no predictions. But I can say with some confidence that not nearly enough white people will feel shamed by the case."

After a little prodding from our own S Shirazi, I broke down and checked out the new Tuesday evening network offering Friday Night Lights. For those who don’t know, it’s a t.v. show based on the true if mythologized story of a miracle high school football season in small Texas town. (The book was also the basis of a very solid movie a few years ago –more on that later). My initial reaction was ambivalent: as a spectator-fan of the game, I lov...

Like everyone I was frightened and stunned after the attacks. I was scared to say anything and told myself it might make sense to wait and see what unfolded before trying to come to any conclusions. I also didn't want to say anything until I felt I could say everything, until I could speak my mind fully. And like most I soon fell under the influence of those at the top who were not stunned for long and who seized the chance to wage a delibe...

The Artic Monkeys showed up in the news today in a place I didn't expect to see them. Again. I had just been talking to EH recently about how the search-and-sort practices of search-engine edited news sites (that I believe he's discussed on printculture before) landed the Artic Monkeys, after the release of their first single, under “Pet/Animal News” on the YahooScienceNews page that I skim most mornings. Today, it happened again.

In this second installment of E Hayot and my discussion of the Burger King “Wake up with the King” ad, watch as we try to think through current trends in advertising, struggle against the urge to screw a revamped 70s corporate icon, and continue an implicit but intense battle between GenY and GenX.