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I’d read this piece by Gary Taubes last week about whether or not sugar is toxic, but it wasn’t until I watched Robert Lustig’s speech on Youtube (which Taubes’ piece responds to) that the point was really driven home:
Lustig is a fantastic speaker, and the content has some pretty frightening implications for each of us.
There’s a great piece at Capital New York that probably has the best forecast for what will become of this AOL/HuffPo marriage:
So, my final, gut prediction, which I would be very pleased to see falsified: Arianna Huffington will create a vital and interesting news desk that in the short term garners AOL praise as a remarkably ambitious and high-quality web-native news operation. It will gain traction against other web operations and will even look, for a while, like it’s making a little bit of a run at the big guys, like cnn.com and nytimes.com.
Traffic will increase—slightly. There will be reports of budget overruns and creative disputes. […] Within a year, several of the most high-profile editorial hires will leak out to a variety of other news organizations, some old and some new. Before long you will be wondering what happened to all those names. And finally, the fast-and-cheap view of “journalism” will return to AOL-Huffpo, amid reports of mild success after a rocky start, all judged on pageviews and profit margins; the “quality” and “journalism” buzzwords will be forgotten parts of the corporate lexicon. Because, to borrow a phrase from Buch, journalism and the “content” strategy of AOL are misaligned.
If I was a betting man, that’s where I’d put my money.
John E. McIntyre, writing about why the Civil War WAS IN FACT about slavery:
If we are going to celebrate our past, and we should, let’s acknowledge all of it. We sacrificed the lives of more than half a million young men, maimed tens of thousands others, and devastated an entire region because we could not resolve our political and economic differences peacefully and allowed hotheads to call the tune.
We reviewed Hanna this week on the podcast. My colleagues loved it, while I sorta disliked it. But Gabe Delahaye at Videogum gets it! His review of Hanna sums up my thoughts perfectly:
Well, so, that happened. (Excuse me: that hannappened. LOL!) That is the thing about getting your hopes up: don’t! It’s like that old Holden Caufield quotation: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” Except, instead of telling people anything, it’s get your hopes up for movies, and instead of you start missing everybody, it’s you are always mildly disappointed. Hanna had its moments to be sure, but it did not live up to the hype that I had created on my own in my brain for whatever reason. It looked kind of amazing, right? Was it just me? I don’t think it was just me. I know, for example, that it was also some of the people that I went to see it with this weekend. A child assassin! Snow! Eric Bana’s magical face! Some kind of mystery! Did I mention child assassin? Hanna promised us the world. What it delivered was a half-hearted, surprisingly dull action movie with way too much running and a garbage twist. Harumph.
I don’t see eye-to-eye with James Rocchi on everything, but I wholeheartedly endorse his viewpoint on internet comments:
[I]t’s because internet commenters are either lazy, cowardly or stupid that I find myself relying on Twitter more and more. I disagree with lots of people in my Twitter feed — @jenyamato didn’t want to vomit from the Justin Bieber film, @mtgilchrist actually liked Tron: Legacy, @MarkReardonKMOX has a political sensibility so opposite to mine I’m amazed we don’t explode when we shake hands — but they are polite, and articulate and, please note, saying what they do under their real names. I think I’ve given up on internet comments about the things I write — reading them or caring about them — unless they’re from people who use their real names. Otherwise, it’s just opening up your life and brain to too much negativity and stupidity.
Tracy Clark-Flory, on a new scientific study that may or may not change how you treat your significant other in common social situations:
It turns out that trying to punish a significant other when his or her eyes wander might actually backfire and encourage infidelity, according to a study published in this month’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Researchers subjected a bunch of undergrad guinea pigs to a computer game involving photos of strangers, followed by a questionnaire. When their attention to photos of attractive members of the opposite sex was “subtly limited” in the game, it “reduced relationship satisfaction and commitment and increased positive attitudes toward infidelity.” The study explains, “Being told simply not to look is probably not an effective strategy for boosting satisfaction and commitment or reducing interest in alternatives” — and it’s for the same reason that telling a kid to keep his hands off the cookie jar doesn’t reduce his interest in sweets.
A good writer can wring insight out of a terrible situation. A great writer can do it with biting humor. Eric D. Snider is a great writer. His column summarizing the entire Moviefone/Cinematical disaster is an absolute must-read, even if you’re totally unfamiliar with the situation. It will educate you and make you laugh.
Film critic James Rocchi has written one of my favorite blog posts of the year:
We write because we have to; we write because we want to. It’s an act of insecurity, in its initial impulse – I matter! Hey! Over here! — but you have to discard that and know that what you’re saying is of interest not because it’s loud or frenetic or an expression of yourself but rather because it contains something ultimately worth saying, and something that would be worth saying even if someone other than you were saying it…Yes, there’s ego involved — suggesting you are without vanity is the most vain thing a person can say –and I think every day of at least 20 people in the field where I covet everything from individual clauses to entire reviews to positions and publishing outlets — but you have to, have to, put that aside and simply do the work when it is there to be done.