Category Archives: Random Links

To continue my rant from last night:

In his video on The Big Think, Clayton Christensen says America has retained its innovator’s status through our immigration policies, by stealing the best minds from Asia. (This is hard to refute.) But conditions will soon be favorable enough in India and China that those math/science/engineering geniuses will just stay put, and then we’ll be a nation of humanities grads.

That’s what I was wondering as a I read Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair article. We can reform and improve our education system, but my question is, can we do it in a way that emphasizes the hard sciences? That’s a cultural shift more than a funding shift; and if it doesn’t happen, we’re improving the education system just so we can make more humanities grads.

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For all those who say Keynes is finally and completely dead, and we need to get on with paying down the national debt, go read Joseph Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair piece. The Columbia econ professor and Nobel Prize winner draws some interesting parallels between the Depression-Era United States and our predicament right now.

His conclusion: It’s going to be a long, long time before our economy gets better.

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There’s something funny thing about those Dr. Pepper 10 commercials (besides the fact that they should incite us all to boycott the brand forever). My hypothesis: The gender-diet-divide that Dr. Pepper confirmed in its research exists largely BECAUSE of bad advertising that tells the genders what they’re allowed to eat. It was marketers who convinced us that it’s manly to eat a bunch of crap. Now it’s marketers who are giving us a way to drink diet soda.

I could name many, many examples of how this gender-diet-divide is established, but here are a few. Have you ever seen a man in a yogurt commercial? Then there are those awful Miller ads, which tell us to “man up” and drink the correct cheap beer, or else our friends will think we’re gay and laugh at us (that’s actually the message of these ads). And then there have been years of terrible fast food ads, aimed solely at men. The BK ads by Crispin, the Carl’s Jr. ads; even Wendy’s was moving in that direction by “doubling the bacon.” McDonalds was one of the few exceptions, probably because they prefer to segment by race instead of gender. (That’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Anyway, those commercials for Double Decker Bacon Atomic Greasebombs gave men permission to be disgusting and obese. Thanks! But of course, no such permission was extended to cut down on our caloric intake–and we certainly couldn’t drink the same sodas GIRLS drink. What a dilemma!

Good thing we now have Coke Zero (with the tag line “duh duh, da-duh duh duh“) and Dr. Pepper 10 (tagline: “It’s not for women!“).

I’ve blogged about the advertising race to the bottom before–it’s kind of a pet issue of mine–but even I was amazed by this Ad Age article about the Dr. Pepper 10 campaign. It’s like everything that’s wrong with marketing and business, all wrapped up into one short article.

This is an incredible blog post–Derek K. Miller died of cancer on May 3rd, and his family posted his final farewell blog post the next day. It’s poignant, heart-wrenching, and beautiful. I hope the outpouring of love and support from the web community is of some comfort to his family; it must be tough to share such a private thing with a group of strangers.

The saddest thing about the post is that he uses his last two paragraphs telling his family to enjoy life’s uncertainties (“It turns out that no one can imagine what’s really coming in our lives”), but reserves his certitude for what comes next for him: nothing.

This is jarring to me, perhaps because I’m used to Mormon funerals, which tend to be more optimistic. For instance, Miller’s use of the past tense to describe his feelings is tragic. He closes his blog post with a message to his wife: “I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.” For his sake, and hers, and mine and yours, I hope he still does.

Bill James is a smart man. But I couldn’t disagree more strongly with his column in Slate today. He says there is untapped talent all around us:

I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in lit­erature. That’s my opinion.

Counter-argument: There have never been more opportunities for good writers, or more demand. We have hundreds of TV channels with hundreds of shows, and almost all of them need good writers and don’t have them. Magazines are desperate for writing talent (whether they know it or not…have you picked up Wired lately?). Our culture is producing more movies than ever, more books than ever.

If there really was an inexhaustible supply of talent, we’d be surrounded by the fruits of that talent. Instead, I think we see that the talent pool is smaller than we might have believed. There just aren’t lots of Nora Ephrons and Tina Feys out there. David Foster Wallace’s talent might not be replicable. There are enough writers in the NYC talent pool to churn out a funny episode of The Daily Show every day, but there aren’t enough left over to produce a funny SNL each week, sorry.

By some stupid coincidence, I’ve been reading/thinking a lot lately about social upheavals in otherwise relatively peaceful societies. I’m plowing my way through Ron Chernow’s excellent George Washington biography, and on the plane to Las Vegas I read an article on the role of self-interested merchants in the funding/inciting of the American revolution, and another on the possibility of social upheaval in Belgium, of all places!

I’m reading all this stuff, considering the current state of our country, and thinking of the huge leap that would be required for tough talk and political rage to turn to violence on American soil (or Belgium soil, for that matter).

And then on Friday, I’m riding in a cab in Vegas, and decide to strike up a conversation with the driver, who turns around and SCREAMS at me for interrupting Rush Limbaugh. Whoa there, buddy.

Anyway, the next day I’m sitting in the food court at the Las Vegas Convention Center,  eating some terrible chinese food and reading Twitter, and all of a sudden CNN switches to live coverage of the Arizona shooting, and within seconds my Twitter stream fills up with the horrified responses, which would continue through the weekend.

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I was talking with a friend at work today about Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign, which includes lots of big, flashy photos of attractive young people being recklessly impulsive in very expensive jeans. There was some disagreement over the tastefulness of the ads, not because of the hyper-sexualized content, but because of the tagline–and I think our different opinions may be partly informed by our genders.

To my female friend, “Be Stupid” works great with the humorous photos and the big brash copy (like “Smart may have the brains, but stupid has the balls”). But for me, as a male, “Be Stupid” is the amalgamation of literally every single ad campaign that targets my demographic, and it’s getting old.

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I wish I could go to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday. My politics are not Jon’s politics (as far as I can tell, my politics aren’t anyone’s politics–which party is for the social libertarians who are also fiscal conservatives but are still in favor of health care? Oh yeah, NONE OF THEM) but the message of his rally is spot-on, and I really, really want the cable news reporters who show up to cover the rally to see millions of people who think cable news outlets are doing a terrible job.

Of course, that isn’t going to happen. But it should. That’s why I want to go. That and the fact that Jon Stewart is the funniest guy and the best interviewer on TV.

Best Rally Cry Ever:

“Ours is a rally for the people who’ve been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence… we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.”