Tuesday, October 28, 2014

All You Need Is Love and Money (Guns & Germs)

All You Need Is Love and Money How romantic comedies shifted from the tux-wearing 1%, to the Meg-Ryan yuppie, to the hipster poverty line.
Economics in Hollywood romantic comedies, a history (secret revelations of what makes world tick & over history ....)


I agree with David Denby, *Fury* is one of the best war movies ever made, see it on the big screen.

Why won’t we watch Australian films?

David Denby, *Fury* is one of the best war movies ever made, see it on the big screen.


Most people would be overjoyed to receive one of the MacArthur Foundation’s annual “genius grants” – around half a million dollars, no strings attached – but when Jared Diamond won his, in 1985, it plunged him into a depression. At 47, he was an accomplished scholar, but in two almost comically obscure niches: the movement of sodium in the gallbladder and the birdlife of New Guinea. “What the MacArthur call said to me was, ‘Jared, people think highly of you, and they expect important things of you, and look what you’ve actually done with your career’,” Diamond says today. It was a painful thought for someone who recalled being told, by an admiring teacher at his Massachusetts school, that one day he would “unify the sciences and humanities”. Clearly, he needed a larger canvas. Even so, few could have predicted how large a canvas he would choose.

Atul Gawande has very good taste:
The author, most recently, of “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” is a great fan of Dr. Watson: “He is intelligent, observant and faithful, the way we want all doctors to be.”