A Web and a Prayer
Profile of Julie Taymor and the $70 million “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Much has transpired in the eight and a half years since Tony Adams, the original producer, having struck what some insiders say was a crippling deal with Marvel for the stage rights for Spider-Man, approached Bono and the Edge, of the rock group U2, about writing the songs. They in turn approached Taymor, then finishing her movie “Frida,” to direct. (“We were only going to do it if we could do it with Julie,” says Bono, who had loved Taymor’s “The Lion King.”) After reading through the original comic books and realizing that they offered “a mythology as authentic as any other,” she agreed. “Every age has its own myth that becomes more potent than others,” she says. “And this is ours.”
Can Technology End Poverty?
The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.
Who Killed Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri?
A months-long CBC investigation into the February 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri. “Relying on interviews with multiple sources from inside the UN inquiry and some of the commission’s own records, [the CBC] found examples of timidity, bureaucratic inertia and incompetence bordering on gross negligence.”
A Year at War: Between Firefights, Jokes, Sweat and Tedium
They tell stories about girlfriends, wives, drinking and sex. They wrestle and play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. They share music on iPods and check football scores on BlackBerrys. They debate evolution and chase chickens. They argue over comic-book heroes and then tell more stories about sex. During a six-day mission in Afghanistan with Delta Company, First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, both sides of frontline life were on display. Firefights, truck-flipping mine explosions and earth-shaking mortar exchanges. And the pauses in between, when life in their encampment felt like a guys-only slumber party.
The Answer Is No
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is no longer just a popular governor; he has become a national Republican star. His focus on fiscal issues and his reluctance to wade into the culture wars—during his gubernatorial campaign, he declined Sarah Palin’s offer to stump for him—have endeared him to members of the GOP’s sane wing. “The breakthrough he’s scoring in New Jersey is hugely promising,” says David Frum, a conservative writer who fears that the Republican Party is being swallowed by the tea party.
Dancing Near the Stars
Profile of “Jersey Shore”‘s Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. “Sure, they all got shithouse drunk and screamed bleeped curse words in one another’s faces and flashed their thongs and referred to girls who didn’t meet their rigorous physical-attractiveness standards as ‘grenades’ and generally embodied every negative stereotype associated with Italian-American culture you can embody without murdering someone for control of a gambling syndicate. But they never seemed less than totally genuine, something you can’t say about the last ten years of ‘Real World’ fuckbots, and they lived, for the most part, by a bro code, and they kept each other in line, and they always said grace at dinner. They were less like the Sopranos and more like the Simpsons—irascible cartoons with skin tones not found in nature, accused of contributing to the decline of family values while actually reaffirming those values. And over the course of two seasons, they’ve grown into the most charismatic characters on TV.”
What Good Is Wall Street?
Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell my labor for as much as I can until nobody wants to buy it.’ But you, I asked, what do you think? ‘I tend to think we do create value,’ he said. ‘It’s not a productive value in a very visible sense, like finding a cure for cancer. We’re middlemen. We bring together two sides of a deal. That’s not a very elevated thing, but I can’t think of any elevated economy that doesn’t need middlemen.'”
The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z
GROSS: You know how a lot of hip-hop artists, when they’re on stage they kind of like grab their crotch?
JAY-Z: Yeah. I have a great explanation for that. … When you get up there [on stage] you feel naked, right? So when you feel naked what’s the first thing you do? You cover yourself. So that bravado is an act of I am so nervous right now and I’m scared to death. I’m going to act so tough that I’m going to hide it. And I have to grab, you know, my crotch. That’s just what happens.
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for students’ struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over whether embracing computers is the right solution. “It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology. “When rock ‘n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology.”
The Splintering of the Fourth Estate
It’s developing so fast, we forget how new it all is. It’s totally understandable that those of us with at least one leg in traditional media should be impatient to understand the business model that will enable us magically to transform ourselves into digital businesses and continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web, never mind the bewildering disruption of web 2.0.
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