how to stereo
Most of film culture has been built around monocular capture and reproduction. A single camera lens produces a flat image. The flatness of the image has l...
Category: business
a thousand authors
While writing about the 1979 movie Alien and what it can teach us about extractive capitalism, I noted that movies can be more nuanced, profound and comprehensi...
show me
i’ll believe all the pretty talk about diversity and inclusion when a pilot episode ends with The Cover Girl’s Show Me. either our history matters o...
more money in trolling
I made this video for Instagram [in 2019] just over two years ago. It should probably be hosted here as well. Transcript: “what happens when there’s...
Queens English
From my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Reprinted in full with a few grammatical corrections. “You don’t sound Cuban.” “Where’s your ...
Junk
I grew up when America was first discussing “junk food”: ready-to-eat foods that were filling, and tasty, but neither nutritious nor healthy. I feel like we’ve ...
quasi-public spaces
From my Facebook account, July 23, 2015: [note: I saw a man, apparently homeless, using a Starbucks cup to justify his occupying space in an outdoor seating are...
Facebook is made out of…
very good critics point out that Facebook is engineered to be addictive. but they seldom recognize that the pleasure being meted out is OTHER PEOPLE. for exampl...
Pleasure and power
Casamigos, Doritos marketing collateral, 2018 A consistent theme in the marketing of Mexico’s grastronomic culture is the erasure of Mexicans. When Mexica...
Motherhood and the workplace
The movie Arrival (2016) and the movie Alien (1979) are contrasting takes on motherhood and women in the workplace. In Arrival, a successful professional woman ...
Legal or illegal, capital or labor
“You’ll get beautiful coverage, believe me, and the Mexicans will pay for it.” – Jeet Heer This tweet is comedy because “and the Mexicans will...
Facebook users deserve all their feels.
Facebook is software for managing your feelings. It promises to be a tool for strengthening relationships – primarily, as a replacement for email – but it is en...
keeping the hamsters alive: clickbait and the information market
google just served me up the following “news” without knowing my full identity: this appears to be their default offering for an English speaker in ...
Werk
A contrast in labor relations: Stud Terkel: Stills from Magic Mike.
Insecurity
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato: Workers with less education are more likely to take jobs with more workplace stress, such as those involving shift work, experiencin...
Hollywood
From West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein, excerpted by Andrew O’Hagan: I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel without a Cause ...
Chronic Underemployment
Gabriel Thompson: Six years into the economic recovery, people continue to crisscross the state in search of gigs, putting in three hours of drive time for mayb...
robots and secrets
From an overview of consensus by John Cassidy: Why, then, are the markets so disturbed? One possible explanation has to do with trading algorithms, which encour...
The ebb and flow of public spaces
A slow yielding of public to private spaces led to a tremendous opportunity for Starbucks in the early 1990s: not to sell coffee but to rent public space. To re...
competition
An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world. HFT requires competitors to use cu...