“
The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
“
I have read your fantastical book "Mirror Mirror" with awe and applause!
Working with you on my regional TV show for a year was a godsend...you are an inspiration. All success.
”
”
Christina Crawford (Mommie Dearest)
“
The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops.
”
”
Jon Ronson (The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry)
“
An essential difference between British and American punk bands can be found in their respective views of rock & roll history. The British bands took a deliberately anti-intellectual stance, refuting any awareness of, or influence from, previous exponents of the form. The New York and Cleveland bands saw themselves as self-consciously drawing on and extending an existing tradition in American rock & roll.
(...)
A second difference between the British and American punk scenes was their relative gestation periods. The British weekly music press was reviewing Sex Pistols shows less than three months after their cacophonous debut. Within a year of the Pistols' first performance they had a record deal, with the 'major' label EMI. Within six months of their first gigs the Damned and the Clash also secured contracts, the latter with CBS. The CBGBs scene went largely ignored by the American music industry until 1976 -- two years after the debuts of Television, the Ramones and Blondie. Even then only Television signed to an established label.
”
”
Clinton Heylin (From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World)
“
Apparently, boredom was not even a concept before the word was invented around 1760, along with the word “interesting.”20 The tide of boredom that has risen ever since coincides with the progress of the Industrial Revolution, hinting at a reason why it has, until recently, been an exclusively Western phenomenon. The reality that the factory system created was a mass-produced reality, a generic reality of standardized products, standardized roles, standardized tasks, and standardized lives. The more we came to live in that artificial reality, the more separate we became from the inherently fascinating realm of nature and community. Today, in a familiar pattern, we apply further technology to relieve the boredom that results from our immersion in a world of technology. We call it entertainment. Have you ever thought about that word? To entertain a guest means to bring him into your house; to entertain a thought means to bring it into your mind. To be entertained means to be brought into the television, the game, the movie. It means to be removed from your self and the real world. When a television show does this successfully, we applaud it as entertaining. Our craving for entertainment points to the impoverishment of our reality.
”
”
Charles Eisenstein (The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self)
“
The only private sector industry where employees work with their lives on stake for the interest of common people is media industry.
”
”
Amit Kalantri
“
Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.
”
”
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
“
Most often, a haloed moon means nothing more than that reflective volcanic ash has made its way into the stratosphere, and a two-headed goat is only a genetic curiosity. The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture’s sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
“
If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress ...
”
”
Gary Webb (Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion)
“
It's weird not being in our subculture of two any more. There was Jen's culture, her little habits and ways of doing things; the collection of stuff she'd already learnt she loved before we met me. Chorizo and Jonathan Franken and long walks and the Eagles (her dad). Seeing the Christmas lights. Taylor Swift, frying pans in the dishwasher, the works absolutely, arsewipe, heaven. Tracy Chapman and prawn jalfrezi and Muriel Spark and HP sauce in bacon sandwiches.
And then there was my culture. Steve Martin and Aston Villa and New York and E.T. Chicken bhuna, strange-looking cats and always having squash or cans of soft drinks in the house. The Cure. Pink Floyd. Kanye West, friend eggs, ten hours' sleep, ketchup in bacon sandwiches. Never missing dental check-ups. Sister Sledge (my mum). Watching TV even if the weather is nice. Cadbury's Caramel. John and Paul and George and Ringo.
And then we met and fell in love and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favourite toys. The instinct never goes - look at my fire engine, look at my vinyl collection. Look at all these things I've chosen to represent who I am. It was fun to find out about each other's self-made cultures and make our own hybrid in the years of eating, watching, reading, listening, sleeping and living together. Our culture was tea drink from very large mugs. And looking forward to the Glastonbury ticket day and the new season of Game of Thrones and taking the piss out of ourselves for being just like everyone else. Our culture was over-tipping in restaurants because we both used to work in the service industry, salty popcorn at the cinema and afternoon naps. Side-by-side morning sex. Home-made Manhattans. Barmade Manhattans (much better). Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee" (our song). Discovering a new song we both loved and listening to it over and over again until we couldn't listen to it any more. Period dramas on a Sunday night. That one perfect vibrator that finished her off in seconds when we were in a rush. Gravy. David Hockney. Truffle crisps. Can you believe it? I still can't believe it. A smell indisputably reminiscent of bums. On a crisp. And yet we couldn't get enough of them together - stuffing them in our gobs, her hand on my chest, me trying not to get crumbs in her hair as we watched Sense and Sensibility (1995).
But I'm not a member of that club anymore. No one is. It's been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where so I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I'm no longer a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?
”
”
Dolly Alderton (Good Material)
“
Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead.
Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo.
“Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?”
Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.”
He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did.
But what I wanted to do was burst into tears.
“Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before.
“Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?”
My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up.
“One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.”
This was all so very, very bad.
“One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“
Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort.
“You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.17
”
”
David E. Hoffman (The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy)
“
Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don't all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither.
”
”
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
“
Software developers come mainly from engineering and don’t see how similar their industry has become to the one that produces magazines, newspapers, books, TV shows, and movies. Most software developers haven’t yet learned to develop and follow strict standards for layout and graphic design and to pay as much attention to detail as traditional publishers and media studios do. As a result, graphic design and layout bloopers often get a “Who cares? It looks OK to me!” reaction from developers.
”
”
Jeff Johnson (GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and DOS)
“
The Martin and Lewis Show was developed by NBC in the wake of the stinging CBS talent raids that lured Jack Benny and others to the younger network. NBC announced a talent hunt: the network was searching for rising young performers for radio and television. Soon thereafter a network executive caught the nightclub act of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who had been performing together for several years and had developed some name recognition within the industry while remaining largely unknown to the general public.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.
”
”
Matt Taibbi (Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus)
“
By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.
Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.
Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep?
Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint?
Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.
Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.
”
”
Karen Thompson Walker (The Dreamers)
“
RANSOM
When the freighters inch past in the distance
The men load their small boats. They motor out,
Buzzing like mosquitoes, aimed at the iron
Side of the blind ship as it creeps closer.
They have guns. They know the sea like it
Is their mother, and she is not well. Her fish
Are gone. She heaves barrels leaking disease
Onto the shores. When she goes into a fit,
She throws a curse upon the land, dragging
Houses, people to their deaths. She glows
In a way she should not. She tastes of industry.
No one is fighting for her, and so they fight.
By night, they load their boats and motor out,
And by day, they aim their guns at the ships,
Climbing aboard. It is clear what they want.
The white men scramble. Some fight back.
When one is taken, the whole world sits up
To watch. When the pirates fall, the world
Smiles to itself, thanking goodness. They
Show the black faces and the dead black bodies
On TV. When the pirates win, after the great
White ships return to their own shores,
There is a party that lasts for days.
”
”
Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars: Poems)
“
New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news!
Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face.
It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.
Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow."
The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen.
I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole.
Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy.
And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.
”
”
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
“
It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers.
At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served.
Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.
”
”
Stanisław Lem (Summa technologiae)
“
Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.” And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches. Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country—and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
”
”
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics)
“
Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is “a giver,” a rarity in an industry full of takers. No good TV show or film is made by one person, but whereas Hollywood bigshots are known for being credit-hogs, J. J. Abrams is a fantastic collaborator. Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he presents rigorous research showing that a disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous. From medical students to engineers to salespeople, his studies find givers at the top of the ladder. “Being a giver doesn’t require extraordinary acts of sacrifice,” Grant writes in Give and Take. “It just involves a focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.” Abrams is known, acquaintances tell me, for his kindness and lack of ego, in addition to his penchant for mystery. That’s how he attracts the best people to his staff. And that’s how he’s managed to climb so far so fast.* Staffers with whom I e-mailed and met at the “typewriter shop” were eager to keep Abrams away from me because, according to his reputation, he’d probably spend way too much time helping this shaggy-haired writer out when he ought to be, you know, filming Star Wars. Initially, Abrams helped out better-connected people than himself, and doing so helped him superconnect. But once he was the superconnector, he still helped people. That’s how to tell if someone is a giver, or a taker in giver’s clothing. “If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.
”
”
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
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Let's imagine... if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to... the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won't challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if... what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone's head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn't be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn't fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint! In every moment there's the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up!
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Hugh Laurie playing Governor Nix in Tommorowland
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Then I realized that the history of the world is largely a history of sustainable systems. Every so often a system comes along that completely changes the world. People never notice these systems until they're right there in their faces and all the alarm bells are going off. Agriculture. Christianity. Guns. The Industrial Age economy. P2P networks. Take any major event in history and I'll show you a system behind it. “Consider Bitcoin. Monetary revolution. A chance to break out of a rigged system. P2P and the pirate sites? Copyright, theft, yes, but they also moved American culture around the world without bottleneck of price or service availability. American movies, American TV shows now projected American dreams and nightmares onto the rest of the world. Every great system had a far more powerful effect hidden beneath this obvious layer of icing. “Just like agriculture for humans, all of these systems have repercussions far beyond the first few decades of their existence. The trick is that these systems have to be sustainable. There has to be enough incentive, on a human level, to keep them running. If there is - well, there you go: that's your history-maker right there.
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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
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The space monsters aren't about to let us get away with this masturbatory industrialization much longer, they watch our TV shows, they even play our god damned video games, they know all about us and can snuff our already disarrayed civilization with but a whisper to their ultimate computer brain, MWOWM, the brooding computer of the Xists which we will have soon too, the computer so complex it is not a machine, it is a moss-like independent growth of circuits which it prints itself, sprawling through our homes in the form of nondescript white stones laying here and there, talking, very quietly overwhelming our every thought, word, and deed, YES the Xists will “give” it to us, we floundering human beings will fight nuclear wars with each other trying to decide whether to turn this unwholesome ‘mouth of a Trojan gift-horse’ ON or OFF, in the end we will leave it ON, and then by God we won't be able to do WITHOUT it.
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Ivan Stang (The Book of the SubGenius)
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To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today?
The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature.
Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.
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Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
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Ever since the Industrial Revolution, [Thomas Hylland Eriksen] said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea - economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy - and each individual company in it - should get bigger and bigger. That's how we now define success. If a country's economy grows, its politicians are likely to get reelected. ...If a country or a company's share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organising principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world.
Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets - by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn't have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth. Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more in the same amount of time.
As I read Thomas' work more deeply, I realised this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going - and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. If fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about - our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
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The CES is the world's largest annual trade show for consumer technology, with more than 140,000 attendees. Many innovative products have debuted at the CES, including the videocassette recorder in 1970, the camcorder in 1981, digital satellite TV in 1994, HDTV in 1998, Microsoft Xbox in 2001, and Blu-ray in 2003. The show is the epicenter of electronics launches in the world.
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Nancy Tennant Snyder (Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry)
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There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to abolish them (as in the case of the Federal Reserve) or to open up their internal deliberations to television and public scrutiny. Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of approval precisely for those institutions—the military, NASA, the CDC—that are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is that they actually get things done. By contrast, the institution most directly accountable to the people, the U.S. Congress, receives disastrously low levels of approval (see Figure 24). Congress is typically regarded as a talking shop where only lobbyist influence produces results and partisanship prevents commonsense solutions.
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Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
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When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted.
There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.”
It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed.
And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.”
Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . .
[C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . .
Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . .
She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.”
And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language?
According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . .
By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . .
That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit.
“The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . .
Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live."
[DN, Apr. 13, 2014]
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Mark A. Kellner
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If TiVo had interviewed customers about how they program their VCRs, they might have gotten feedback that drove them to simplify the programming controls and missed the boat on creating the digital video recording industry. In fact, that’s exactly what the first attempts at improving the VCR looked like.[30] Compare that to asking customers about the time they missed the last 10 minutes of the final episode of Twin Peaks or the game-winning play in the Super Bowl — it’s easy to imagine how quickly (and emphatically) customers would’ve told you about the problems that inspired pausing live TV, recording by show name instead of time slot, and fast-forwarding through commercials.
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Cindy Alvarez (Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy)
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In the Bible, the word hypocrite shows up 33 times. Interestingly, hypocrite was a common Greek term for an actor who worked behind a mask. Stage players in antiquity wore masks to hide their true identity as they played the part of their characters. We live in a society today where people are paid millions of dollars to be hypocrites. A friend of mine, before he passed away, built movie sets for a living. Many movies are filmed on studio lots, but these designed sets are not the reality you might think they are when watching a movie. Actors and actresses play the part of someone they really are not. The better they are at pretending or lying, the more convincing they will be as an actor, and typically, the more money they make. I rarely darken the door of a movie theatre because I don’t want to give those liars my money, and I don’t want to support the totally ungodly world of Hollywood. This is also why I don’t own a television. I don’t want my cable or satellite fees funding that wicked industry. In the time of the Greeks, it was easy to figure out the real identity of the actors. You could walk up to them, take off their masks, and see their faces. Jesus is doing the same here. He is unmasking the Pharisees. He is showing us their real character. He is revealing their true colors. Don’t live a lie. Don’t be a hypocrite. It is not a healthy way to go through life, and you will have regrets when the time of unmasking comes.
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Mark Cahill (Ten Questions from the King)
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So while our ever-evolving opposition movement made some progress in drawing attention to the undemocratic reality of Putin’s Russia, we were in a losing position from the start. The Kremlin’s domination of the mass media and ruthless persecution of all opposition in civil society made it impossible to build any lasting momentum. Our mission was also sabotaged by democratic leaders embracing Putin on the world stage, providing him with the leadership credentials he so badly needed in the absence of valid elections in Russia. It is difficult to promote democratic reform when every television channel and every newspaper shows image after image of the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies accepting a dictator as part of their family. It sends the message that either he isn’t really a dictator at all or that democracy and individual freedom are nothing more than the bargaining chips Putin and his ilk always say they are. In the end, it took the invasion of Ukraine to finally get the G7 (I always refused to call it the G8) to expel Putin’s Russia from the elite club of industrial democracies.
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Garry Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped)
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She'd wanted to be a chef that little girls could look up to--- a role model. Empowering other women was where she wanted to be, because she'd never seen a woman with the career she now had when she was coming up in the industry. And after landing a spot on the show, she thought she could be that person for aspiring chefs.
And, maybe more importantly, her brand was different from other female chefs who flourished on TV. She wasn't like Giada or the Barefoot Contessa, with slick, oceanfront homes that made wealthy people feel seen. Or Rachael Ray, who made meals in fifteen minutes using canned ingredients. Nina wanted to show that food could be an experience. The same way that she and her mom used to cook together. All her childhood memories were tied in to their tiny kitchen. Nina could just as easily pull up the smell of her mother blending flour and rosemary in the mixer as she could breathe.
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Erin La Rosa (For Butter or Worse (The Hollywood Series #1))
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Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.
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Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
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That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.
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Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
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Brady did find one trusted source for news and education that was recommended to her by many friends and fellow patriots. She began to watch the television show of a commentator named Glenn Beck. “I kind of got an education. My start of my education was Glenn Beck, I guess. Because that’s the only person that was talking about the issues that I agreed with.” Glenn Beck was the most prominent voice in the American Tea Party movement, and understanding Beck’s political philosophy was critical to understanding the Tea Party and the relationship of the Tea Party to Charles Koch’s political efforts. Glenn Beck’s television show on Fox News drew close to three million viewers in 2009, beating the combined ratings of all his competitors’ shows. Beck spent many years honing his skills as a political entertainer on talk radio, where provocation was the currency of the realm. Debate was better than discussion. Suspense was better than satisfaction. Outrage was better than understanding. Glenn Beck elevated this genre to the level of high art. The narratives he spun on his show were terrifying and purported to reveal the broad contours of chilling global conspiracies. He affected the persona of a high school teacher, wearing a cheap, ill-fitting coat and tie. He stood in front of a chalkboard. During one show, the chalkboard displayed three logos: The United Nations symbol, the Islamic crescent, and the iconic Communist hammer and sickle. Beck explained that these three logos represented the three global movements that were currently hard at work to enslave and control his viewers.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
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Israel became a content powerhouse, often without anyone around the world knowing that their favorite TV show actually came from that controversial tiny sliver of land somewhere in the Middle East. A new industry was born. I don’t have enough space to credit each and every creator, writer, producer, network, and actor who’s been a part of this revolution, but I’ll mention just a few shows you may know and love. There are the shows adapted from Hebrew to English, such as the hit HBO show Euphoria; the reality TV music competition The Four: Battle for Stardom; and the comedy Beauty and the Baker. And the shows streaming in their original Hebrew, such as Shtisel, Srugim, Teheran, and
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Noa Tishby (Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth)
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Vast expenditures of state capacity, from police expansion to school militarization, and the multiplication of state-formed popular cultural productions (from the virtual universalization of the “tough on crime” electoral campaign message to the explosion of pro-police discourses in Hollywood film, television dramas, and popular “reality” shows) have conveyed several overlapping political messages, which have accomplished several mutually reinforcing tasks of the White Reconstructionist agenda that are relevant to our discussion here:
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Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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Netflix is creating content. A lot of content. In 2017, they spent $6.2 billion on original movies and TV shows, outspending major studios such as CBS ($4 billion) or HBO ($2.5 billion), and just shy of the $8–10 billion-a-year range of heavyweight contenders like TimeWarner and Fox.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
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I'd remained the subject of a TV boycott by the executives in the industry, though why they felt I was to be shrouded from the general public is still unclear. No doubt they felt that all sexual realities (other than exaggerated bust lines), should remain concealed, though they seem to have had no such hesitation about showing violence, murder, dope addiction, and infidelity on the home screens.
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Christine Jorgensen (Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography)
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I didn't belong to his world anymore. We called them the Nine-to-Fivers. They lived in accordance with nature, waking and sleeping with the cycle of the sun. Mealtimes, business hours, the world conformed to their schedule. The best markets, the A-list concerts, the street fairs, the banner festivities were on Saturdays and Sundays. They sold out movies, art openings, ceramics classes. They watched television shows in real time. They had evenings to waste. They watched the Super Bowl, they watched the Oscars, they made reservations for dinner because they ate dinner at the normal time. They brunched, ruthlessly, and read the Sunday Times on Sundays. They moved in crowds that reinforced their citizenship: crowded museums, crowded subways, crowded bars, the city teeming with extras for the movie they starred in. They were dining, shopping, consuming, unwinding, expanding while we were working, diminishing, being absorbed into their scenery. That is why we—the Industry People—got so greedy when the Nine-to-Fivers when to bed.
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Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter)
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Most interesting of all, unlike the vast majority of firms that fail when the industry shifts, Netflix had responded successfully to four massive transitions in the entertainment and business environment in just fifteen years: From DVD by mail to streaming old TV series and movies over the internet. From streaming old content to launching new original content (such as House of Cards) produced by external studios. From licensing content provided by external studios to building their own in-house studio that creates award-winning TV shows and movies (such as Stranger Things, La Casa De Papel, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). From a USA-only company to a global company entertaining people in 190 countries. Netflix’s success is beyond unusual. It’s incredible. Clearly, something singular is happening, which wasn’t happening at Blockbuster when they declared bankruptcy in 2010.
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Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
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My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication—the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority. A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.
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Martin Gurri (The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium)
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At one point in this book, Clarke abruptly asked a rather existential question: “What is Daenerys?” One might ask the same of the show. What is Game of Thrones? There are many correct answers: an adaptation, a TV series, a fantasy story, a corporate enterprise, a snapshot of the entertainment world during seismic industry and cultural transitions. I saw the show as a seemingly impossible dream made real. Game of Thrones was the filmic equivalent of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile—proof that with enough determination and sacrifice, a creative human endeavor can portray even the most expansive outer reaches of our storytelling imagination and, in doing so, captivate the world.
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James Hibberd (Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series)
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As if they are a mountaineer climbing across the great slopes of Mount Everest, meth monkeys take quite the health risk. Their minds become mush due to sleep deprivation. Like pillows with way too many hours of sleep invested into them, these minds exhaust themselves and become overworked. Like that of old television shows, their minds become reruns on repeat.
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James Allen Firth
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He kept his eye open for other events that looked like the place to be and became drawn to them, looking for any opening to create news and enhance his value further. One such event was the Arnold Classic, held on March 2nd in Columbus, Ohio. The Arnold Classic was an annual bodybuilding event traditionally held at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It served as something of a melting pot, luring agents, pornstars, hustlers, fans and wannabe stars to one venue with its gravitational pull. “If you like fake tits that’s the place to go”, jokes Kim Wood. “It’s a cesspool, there’s drug dealers…you just wallow in the sleaze.” Pillman’s visit was dual-purpose – in addition to hanging out at the expo, he was filming a commercial to plug his hotline to air on Hardcore TV. ECW’s television crew Stonecutter Productions, headed by Steve Karel, put it together with Brian. In what would become an unfortunate, ironic twist of fate, it was Karel, the same man who told Kim Wood about the WCW-ECW connection which led to Pillman becoming the talk of the industry, that took Brian to the Arnold Classic. Of course, a lot of the attendees were wrestling fans and with Brian in character, he was getting almost as much attention as Arnold himself. Brian and Karel took the sleaze a step further, going back and forth between strip shows and nude woman contests, when Pillman came across a model that caught his eye. In this case, however, it wasn’t a female. One of the sponsors of the Arnold Classic was Hummer. Schwarzenegger fell in love seeing a fleet of military Humvees roll past the set of Kindergarten Cop in 1990 and wanted one of his own. Arnie finally convinced AM General to produce them, and it was Schwarzenegger himself who purchased the first Hummer off the assembly line. Since then he was linked with them and with the bodybuilding expo bearing his name, it was only natural to have a number of floor models on display. Pillman loved the look of one of the Hummers in particular and since the ones being showcased had to be gotten rid of, Karel, with his connections, was able to get Brian a pretty good deal if he wanted to purchase it there and then. Despite all his hard work being with the goal of cashing in and making it out on the other end financially better off, Pillman’s focus lapsed amidst the intoxicating vibe of working everybody and living his character. Against his prior instincts, he bought the vehicle.
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Liam O'Rourke (Crazy Like A Fox: The Definitive Chronicle of Brian Pillman 20 Years Later)
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Jana Ann Bridal Couture San Diego Wedding Dress Styles
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But, again, the real news is what they did with that money. In 2018, while the big six movie studios released a combined seventy-five films, Netflix’s war chest produced eighty new features and over seven hundred new TV shows.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
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a touching and unexpected moment, actor Robert Downey Jr. defended, helped, and restored fellow actor and friend, Mel Gibson. Mel has had his share of issues that led most in the Hollywood industry to block him and refuse him any kind of meeting. Robert not only decided to get Mel back on his feet, but he did so publicly on a televised award show. With humility, he sacrificially confessed his own struggle with controlled substances; with tenderness (out of genuine forgiveness and friendship) and with hope, he said:
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Michael Cheshire (Why We Eat Our Own)
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The archetypal exaggerated beauty of reality TV may hold currency on social media, in sex work and on shows such as Love Island but can often be a penalising factor in applications for blue-collar jobs in more ‘professional’ offline industries.
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Ellen Atlanta (Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women)