This NY Times Blog reports some interesting facts. How do we explain the decline in study time? Perhaps the new generation of students are smarter and have a higher productivity per minute of studying? Or, do professors now hand out less homework? These averages may mask a composition shift. As the number of undergraduate slots has increased over time, the marginal college student may be less hard working? Or, is this evidence that the new generation is soft and simply seeking the good life.
Alfred Hitchcock had a successful directing career in Britain that preceded his American super-stardom. Hitchcock fans rightfully consider the 1935 comedy-romance-thriller “The 39 Steps” among the very best works of the Master’s “British period”.
Robert Donat cuts a dash as Mr. Hannay, the hero of the film, who tries to save England from the threat of nefarious and crafty foreign agents. As in other Hitchcock films (e.g., The Wrong Man, The Man Who Knew Too Much), the central character is an innocent who is pulled into a web of intrigue and danger which he doesn’t understand. But unlike in those darker films, it doesn’t seem to bother him a jot.
“Did this beautiful woman just fire a gun in a crowded theater to evade her pursuers and then tell me that she is an international spy for hire? Well then, let’s go back to my flat for a large whiskey and soda and I’ll cook her up some haddock while she tells me all about it.”
“I seem to have walked into a political rally focused on I know not what and I have been mistaken for the distinguished guest speaker. Well then, jolly good, I’ll give it a go.”
“Am I really handcuffed to yet another beautiful woman as I run through the Scotland Highlands with people trying to shoot me? Well then, I wonder if she’s married or at least broad-minded.”
Madeleine Carroll, she of the other half of the handcuffs, is a perfect match for Donat in scene after scene of witty banter and growing affection. The sequence in which she goes from thinking that Hannay is a villain from whom she must escape to realizing that he is telling her the truth about the danger they both face is a clinic in how to convey emotion and character on screen with no dialogue at all.
Hitchcock has been imitated so often that when viewers see his films today they sometimes say “What a cliché! It’s been a done a million times before!”. Done a million times yes, but before, no. You may have that reaction to some elements of this movie. If so, be merciful: Hitchcock got their first, and no one who copied him later was as good as the original.
If you want to enjoy this exciting and delightful movie, you can do so for free here.
p.s. The opening scenes with Donat and the mysterious “Miss Smith” (Lucie Mannheim) was later parodied hilariously and affectionately by Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn in “High Anxiety“.
Michael Hirsch’s obit on the Perry campaign is headed “Requiem for a Lightweight.”
This picture is a treasury of symbolism and metaphor. 
Helpless on its side, with an enormous hole torn in its hull, this disaster has already killed more than a dozen people who only wanted to have fun for a few days, ruined the career of the captain and possibly headed him for time in the slam, dented the balance sheet of some insurance companies, and dinged confidence in the whole cruise industry. The bleeding isn’t over. See the pathetic little line of boom strung out along the shore? The ship is liable at any moment to slide off its rock and go underwater, and it’s full of bunker oil ready to foul beaches for miles.
What does it stand for…better, what in today’s news doesn‘t it remind us of! The world economy, run aground by expert leadership who just wanted to show off how rich they could get? The American political process, set up for disaster by the Supreme Court and mismanaged by ideologues who think the only reality is what they can see above the surface of things (charts? we don’t need no stinkin’ charts!), with more pain and damage looming? The Perry campaign, vacuous glitter and rhinestone bling dead in the water?
This picture is a non-rival good, and serves any of those purposes, feel free. But my first association was with something that, if possible, is even more completely broken and more threatening than any of these: the economy of digital content. The wonderful structure of copyright, distribution, royalties, law, conventions, and contracts that brought us stuff to read, see and listen to for so long has sailed right into the very well-charted rock of virtual embodiment. Some pieces of it are still above the waterline, but they don’t work. And everything – everything – we are contemplating to do about it has about as much hope of success as that pathetic boom.
No, I didn’t steal the picture; it’s a public domain Italian government satellite photo. But all the other pictures floating around the web are also non-rival goods, just like the songs and video files Megaupload is being taken down for circulating, and just like this blog post. The right price to consumers for all this stuff is zero. Most of it, especially with some attention from kids in Finland and Bulgaria and who knows where else, is also non-excludible in fact (I could have posted any of hundreds of copyrighted pictures of the Costa C. here and not been punished for it, nor you for looking at them). That battle is over and the technological facts have won, though there’s plenty of pointless damage yet to be inflicted as the content industries try to make gravity point up.
The right price to creators and providers is not zero. Pretty simple design constraints, right: give content to consumers at a price of zero, and pay musicians, writers, and the like an efficient and just non-zero price to make it for us. Simple constraints don’t mean it will be simple to solve the problem, of course, but all the flailing about we’re doing with no good effect on this one is not a counsel of despair. Very similar problems have been solved quite nicely already, like the sidewalk I’m allowed to walk on for free and the park, whose gardener is not enslaved, but actually earns a nice civil service union wage. And all the clean air I can breathe at will that was quite expensive for the power plant and my car-driving neighbors to provide for me, and the complete absence of nasty foreign occupying armies provided by a military that pays its workers and ponies up for tanks and all the other gear.
One might think we would be figuring out how to sail our priceless, glorious social capital ship of art and knowledge safely past these technical rocks. But we aren’t; we spent two or three decades arguing in the wheelhouse about whether citizens who just want to get smart and hear some music are pirates, and whether the earth could be flat if we just shout “property” loud enough, and refusing to look at charts that might be useful, and now the ship is wrecked. It will probably be harder, not easier, to right and refloat the longer we wait, and while we yammer about property rights and assigning blame, a large ugly plume of yuck is going to keep spreading across our civic life, as the content that does get provided is bought for us by the people who can afford to put it out under our broken system.
Okay, cheap shot. But equating any discussion of inequality with Communism as Romney did is no more than crude red-baiting.
Nevertheless, I can’t agree with those who think that the exchange means that “the pressure may be getting to Romney.” Romney’s response was a perfectly-formed paragraph, almost designed for a South Carolina primary audience. More to the point, it succinctly distills the contemporary GOP position. Any discussion of inequality is completely off-limits and must be squashed. Romney wasn’t snapping at his questioner — he was coolly setting forth the ideology of the conservative elite, which has smoothly carried out its Revolution From Above over the last 30 years.
Anthropologist Kate Fox gives a master class on British behaviour in her funny and smart book “Watching the English“. Among her many astute observations is that most Britons are sceptical of radicalism, preferring instead incrementalist politics. She parodies the prototypical British protest rally call-and-response as follows:
Q: What do we want?!!
A: MODEST CHANGE!!!
Q: When do we want it?!!
A: IN DUE COURSE!!!
To laugh at the indignities of aging is unkind. To laugh at flatulence is puerile.
Now that I am done being high-minded, let me confess that Toby Young made me laugh at both.
The front page of this morning’s Financial Times describes the struggle between the Royal Bank of Scotland and PM David Cameron over executive pay. RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton’s salary of nearly $2 million is set to be supplemented with a bonus of at least that hefty size. Cameron is calling for executive pay restraint, but the RBS board is intransigent.
The FT quotes a “senior banker” as saying that if Sir Philip doesn’t get a bonus, it would demoralise staff members by signalling that they now effectively work for “an arm of the civil service or a utility rather than for a bank”.
Let’s review the facts for this unnamed champion of free enterprise.
The Royal Bank of Scotland exists today only because the UK taxpayer bailed it out three years ago. The government owns 83% of the bank’s shares. Rather than be grateful for this generous welfare programme, the wizard of private industry quoted in the article is outraged that he might have to accept some public sector style restraints on compensation.
Cry me a river.
(cross-posted at Blog of the Century)
The below glamorous picture appeared in the New York Times the other day, in its story “Online shoppers are rooting for the little guy.” Although I hate to be exploited as eye candy. it’s been fun. I’ve been getting calls and emails from old high school and college friends, and many other.
Photo by Peter Wynn Thompson
The Times noted my decision to go cold turkey on Amazon.com. Until September, I had been spending more than $1,000 annually at Amazon. After September, I have spent $0 there. One might think, reading that story, that I was a random person who abandoned Amazon out of my desire to support small businesses. In fact, the Times found me because I wrote this web column for the Nation on cyber Monday, which explained the main reason for my decision: Amazon’s shabby treatment of its workers.
I hope that you read this terrific story by Spencer Soper describing shabby labor practices at Amazon’s Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and other products are packed and shipped. We all have a responsibility to spend our consumer dollars to promote and reward responsible corporate behavior. In my view, Amazon’s behavior falls short of this standard.
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