Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Ike Turner died last December. Besides being famous as a Rock ‘n’ roll musician, Turner also was notorious for the physical abuse of his ex-wife Tina.
So what kind of headline does the New York Post go for? The headline in the worst possible taste, of course:
The bar for tabloids is set at a subterranean level anyhow, but the New York Post dug right under it with ease.
On Tuesday, I posted a selection of my posts from 2007, encompassing the categories Education, Management/Leadership/Business, and Markets/International Trade. Here are the other categories, which are Policy/Politics, Media/Blogging, History, Thought Processes & Fallacies, and Books/Photography/Recordings.
Not only is the photography everything we expect it to be, but unlike other magazines and TV which have gotten stupider with time to suit their markets, National Geographic is still largely educational. I learn a lot in each issue. I worked in TV for decades, but haven’t watched it at home since the 1970s since it’s mostly for dummies. I do read. (Funny thing when I would mention “People who watch TV are idiots” when I worked in TV. My colleagues agreed; they never watched whatever garbage it was they were getting paid to make, in fact, they would be surprised when friends would chide them for whatever garbage their network broadcast, and their response would be “We did what??”!)
The above quote is from Ken Rockwell, who is extremely knowledgeable about photography and seems to be generally clear-headed. What does his statement, assuming it is accurate, say about the broadcast-TV industry? Maybe Rockwell is referring to engineers rather than writers or producers, but still. To me it’s like saying that assembly-line workers at GM avoid driving GM cars. What kind of industry is run by people who won’t use their own products?
Perhaps I am reading too much into his quote, since it confirms my biases about TV.
UPDATE: John Jay adds thoughtful comments.
Last month, Marc Andreessen suggested that the Hollywood writers’ strike…and the response of the studios to that strike…will accelerate a structural shift in the industry–specifically, a move toward a Silicon-Valley-like model in which the creators of the product–the talent–have strong ownership interests in the companies. (Link via Newmark’s Door.)
A couple of days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran this headline:
Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups
Dozens are turning to venture capitalists, seeking to bypass Hollywood and reach viewers directly online
My post today is inspired by In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson, a strange little book that will probably be found in the “computers” section of your local bookstore. While the book does deal with human interfaces to computer systems, its deeper subject is the impact of media and metaphors on thought processes and on work.
Stephenson contrasts the explicit word-based interface with the graphical or sensorial interface. The first (which I’ll call the textual interface) can be found in a basic UNIX system or in an old-style PC DOS system or timesharing terminal. The second (the sensorial interface) can be found in Windows and Mac systems and in their respective application programs.
As a very different example of a sensorial interface, Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.