Blog Roll
Granta: The Suit. North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there — he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects: a slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself. But, as Thoreau wrote, ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.’ Cary may cut quite a figure but as a person he is meaningless, so far. We find him in the Suit, but certainly he has not found himself, or ‘what to do’.
Creative Capitalism: What Makes Creative Capitalism Hard? Bill Gates’ speech at Davos calls for a greater involvement of capitalists in the fight against poverty, and is rightly concerned about the need to create a structure that can give would-be creative capitalists the proper incentives to apply their energies to the fight. The main driving force he identifies, and many of the subsequent posts discuss, is public recognition. Consumers, employees, and shareholders may all derive utility from the warm glow of being associated with a company that does good things for the world, and they may therefore be willing to pay for it in the form of slightly higher prices, lower wages, and lower dividends. And in many cases no sacrifice is required. Firms spend large amounts of money to sponsor things like car races so as to gain brand recognition, presumably because it makes economic sense. One might imagine that being associated with a sufficiently sexy philanthropic cause could be a just as effective way to advertise. I once heard the CEO of TNT, a Dutch transport and logistics company, make this argument very cogently. He explained why he had decided to stop sponsoring Formula One rallies and instead spend the money helping the World Food Program. His argument was that helping the WFP transport food in TNT trucks would do more to build his brand as one capable of rising to the most complex challenges than would a banner on a racing track. This example also underscores another important point, implicit in Gates’s speech and explicit in Abhijit Banerjee’s post: One reason we want to lure the successful entrepreneurs to the development business is that they will bring their business acumen, technical expertise, and creativity to the problem at hand, all of which are badly needed.
How It Turned Out For The Peanuts Gang. SHE became a lawyer, which surprised no one but herself. Except for a brief flirtation with psychology (which she abandoned when she realized it involved med school) she had simply been drawn to, as she put it, “The power, the money, and the love of a good argument.” She never ruled out marriage, but her romances always seemed to end with flying vases and cab rides across town in an overcoat and nightgown to sleep at Frieda’s or Violet’s. She realized that she’d made as many enemies as friends at the firm, which was no way to make partner, but she was really proud of the fact that even her enemies couldn’t deny she was aces in the courtroom.
Debris. At some point, we just started throwing shit in. So many sites these days are filled with what can only be called “debris”. Useless remnants of other sites: things of no real use, yet there anyway. The right-hand columns and after-article white-space has turned into a free-for-all of features that may as well be advertising banners. Blogrolls and ISBN numbers; Scrobbler feeds and Twitters; Share This or Rate This. It’s like we saw a feature in one place, where it was appropriate and useful, and decided it’d be so handy to have every where. “Man, rating things on Amazon is so great, I should let people rate my posts!”
Escaping the Amish - Part 1 (Tim Ferriss) I hadn’t gotten beaten by my mom that day, and we hadn’t had any significant arguments over anything. I thought that if I died, I wanted to die without being mad at my mom. So I thought, I might as well take the opportunity to do so before I got back to the house—at which point who knows whether there would be another fight or a beating.
Microsoft does a Folgers Coffee on XP users (Ars). Is this their new marketing plan?
Counterfeit Chic: Knockoff News. A periodic collection of news about counterfeits, fakes, knockoffs, replicas, imitations, and the culture of copying in general around the globe