Brad DeLong is a Berkeley economist and a member of the blogging elite. He’s a living (blogging) reminder that sometimes brevity sucks. One of these days I’m going to have to read the twenty yards or so of content here and here and figure out just what kind of economist he really is.
In the meantime I’ll be satisfied with some very entertaining writing, titles like chapter heads from a Victorian textbook and about 200 entry categories. I’m inspired by all those categories – he’s practically got one for every entry – and why not? Bowblog just showed up in Brad’s blogroll which is cool.
Choosing an architect to replace the twin towers was always going to be a pretty high stakes game. The fact that it was happening in New York City, one of the most politically and culturally charged places on earth, could only make the whole thing more intense. Hal Foster (architecture critic and generally cool postmodernist) communicates the drama in this excellent review of the selection process in the LRB (the full story is only available to paying LRB subscribers).
“The presentations in December made for terrific theatre: two parts The Fountainhead, one part Gangs of New York. On the one hand, the willingness of prestigious architects to collaborate was impressive, especially in the case of the ‘Dream Team’ of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated ?ber-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group went up, while stock in Daniel Libeskind and others fell. But also, implicitly, one should be an echt New Yorker, and here Foster went down (maybe out), Libeskind up a bit, while the Dream Team, SOM and the ‘Think’ group led by Rafael Vi?oly, a veteran of big buildings who works out of downtown Manhattan, held even.”
“The Creative Class is not just distinguished by its members’ professions, but by their lifestyles. Florida paints a picture of a group of people whose creativity permeates every aspect of their lives, who thrive on diversity and change, who collect experiences rather than possessions, and for whom the ability to express individuality and find an outlet for creativity is more important than any material gain.”
I’m sure there’s some reality to the trends tracked by books like this one but I’m also sure that there’s a decent book to be written about the ‘fantasy social classes’ industry itself. There seems to be a quite profound human need to imagine a better, brighter, more engaged – generally more funky &ndash: class of people. And then, of course, to imagine oneself a member of it.
2023 UPDATE: I’d forgotten that the invasion of Iraq, which, when it began, had been so well-telegraphed, filled us all with such dread. I mean we all knew the exact day and time it would happen, weeks in advance. And London – other cities too – was in a state of alert (maybe not so weird, we were all still basically hysterical about 9/11). The bleak irony of the fact that we Londoners were all freaking out about the risk to our own lives as the invasion that produced almost two decades of chaos and suffering in Iraq was about to begin is, well, bleak. Anyway, what did I do that night? The night the coalition forces were gathering at the Iraqi border and getting ready to deliver what we would learn was called ‘shock and awe’ on the people of that other city? I went to the fucking opera.Original post follows:
Yesterday was my 40th birthday. Juliet and I went to the Coliseum to sob through the ENO‘s Tosca (a City in turmoil, gripped by fear – torture, love, war and betrayal). We stayed at a hotel practically next door in St Martin’s Lane. The hotel was half empty and there were plenty of empty seats at the Opera (Americans staying at home, apparently).
Our cab driver this morning made a cheeky u-turn by Trafalgar Square and jumpy, armed police practically arrested him (British police don’t usually carry guns). The streets of the West End are Sunday Morning quiet (and it’s not just the congestion charging).
No panic, no bulk buying, no drama at all really – just the barely tangible signs of a City’s building anxiety. It’s this kind of tiny shift in mood that slows an economy, trips up a recovery. Watching the rolling news in our hotel room, the empty streets of Baghdad echo and amplify London’s barely noticable slow-down.
As the bombing begins, Azeem reminds me to revisit Where’s Raed, a blog kept, apparently, by a young Iraqi from within Iraq – from Baghdad itself, in fact.
This feature about digital cinema is mostly about the production end (George Lucas has made his last non-digital film and so on) but I think it supports my thesis that the economics of running a High Street cinema are about to change completely. Whether I’m right in thinking that this will produce a new wave of independent cinemas is another matter…
Thanks to Neil McIntosh for linking to this piece about Mosaic’s tenth birthday. It is my fervent ambition that one day I will be required, like Jim Clark, to say something like this:
“The economic appetite is gone,” he says. Netscape “changed my life so incredibly, it’s hard to comprehend. I made more than a billion dollars from a couple of years work.”
In 1995 I booked Clark to speak at a conference in London’s lovely Wembley Conference Centre. I don’t remember his speech, which everyone said was very boring, but I do remember the fact that he came to Wembley by helicopter from Heathrow, stayed twenty minutes and then choppered back to the airport for an onward flight. Clark had already made his first billion from Silicon Graphics and was well on the way to his second.
This week, in my column for The Guardian’s web site, I finally caved in and wrote about the war. We can’t take it for granted that our increasing interconnectedness and access to information will give us any new insights or improve our identification with those on whom we inflict war…
A great rift has opened up between the BBC and Sky and more than a decade of servitude is over. The BBC will, from the end of May, broadcast its channels unencrypted on a new Astra Satellite with a smaller, UK-only, footprint.
Most people, including me, don’t really understand what this means (do I have to get a new dish? Will I continue to get the BBC channels with my Sky subscription? Will my Sky subscription be cheaper?) so there hasn’t been much dancing in the street yet but the BBC is now essentially free to build its own multichannel, free-to-air digital TV service with close to 100% UK reach (instead of the approximately 70% provided by Freeview’s compromised terrestrial network). Emily Bell in The Guardian and Richard Tait in The FT both focus on Greg Dyke’s audacity and on Sky’s limited room for manoeuvre in constructing a response. Tait goes into more detail on the new arrangements but you may need an FT.com subscription to see his article.
Dave Birch, who should know, on the coming collision of wireless networks, GPS and RFID tags in The Guardian. Dave’s pretty level headed about the implications but I’m sure that this has the potential for a major technology panic.
As I’ve pointed out here a dozen times before, though, every new technology is born into a complex human context that almost invariably diverts it from its manifest destiny – in this case to close off individual freedom once and for all.
This is why, for instance, we’re still here after 60 years of nuclear proliferation, why the record industry is still here five years after people started swapping MP3s and why we’ll never be replaced by a race of robotic clones. Despite our fears to the contrary and the occasional nihilistic counter-example (Stalin, say), human beings universally and collectively tend to neutralise apocalyptic change before it can do too much damage. I predict that most RFID implementations will ship with only a fraction of the Big Brother features they’re capable of.
Wars, real and virtual