Thomas Frank, One Market Under God
From John Perry Barlow to Virginia Postrel, from Liberation Management to Who Moved My Cheese?, from dot-com millionaires to cult studs, Thomas Frank (What’s A Matter With Kansas?) summarizes, contextualizes, and debunks a decade’s worth of pro-business propaganda. The major theme, he argues, was the concept of “market populism”, the notion that The Market was far more democratic than actual democracies, doing whatever their copious focus groups had determined the people wanted. Frank, a serious support of actual democracy, skewers their absurd myths and provides some insight into the harm they did to working people.
Robert Krulwich, NOVA scienceNOW
Robert Krulwich has long tried to explain science with humorous analogies and demonstrations. His new outlet, a one-hour newsmagazine for PBS, could have been an opportunity to do something intense special. Instead, Krulwich spends his fancy graphics and elegant production design on relatively shallow reporting, repeating the same simple ideas with new graphics each time. On the plus side, I did learn why other people like watching sports.
Downhill Battle, Eyes on the Screen
Eyes on the Prize has been hailed as “the most important documentary ever made about the Civil Rights Movement” and yet it’s been thrown down the memory hole, not by overt censorship, but by copyright. Join music industry activists Downhill Battle in protesting this sorry state of affairs by downloading the film (via BitTorrent, naturally) and screening it February 8th at 8pm. Cory Doctorow notes it “could be a seminal moment in technology liberty” — celebrating civil struggles with a little struggle of our own.
posted January 27, 2005 08:45 PM (Others) (0 comments) #