Peter Krupa

Rule Number One of tech journalism: Always find the iPhone angle.

Up in the Air is the Benjamin Button of this Oscar season. That is, it sucks – hard – but for some reason everyone loves it and it will win all sorts of awards. Basically, it’s a buddy movie, which prejudiced me against it from the get-go. I hate buddy movies almost as much as I hate wearing pants.

More than that, though, Up in the Air is nefarious. Ironically, it tries to do exactly what its main character does for a living, which is distract us from the fact that we’re all getting fired. Don’t worry about losing your job: The guy who canned you is miserable, and anyway you’ll get to spend more time with your family and indulge your love of French cooking, and isn’t that what life’s really about? Hmmm? Now run along.

It’s disappointing because this would have been a perfect moment for a poignant movie about the Great Recession. People are hurting. People believed in America, they believed that if they worked hard, saved for retirement, and paid their taxes, they would be rewarded. They were wrong. Now they have been fucked, and the people who fucked them continue to have all the money. You can almost taste the outrage. What a great time to make a movie, right?

But Up in the Air is not that movie. It almost entirely punts, even ending with a 23-year-old getting a job, as if that were happening somewhere in America. The fact that so many Americans love Up in the Air says a lot about the lack of respect we have for ourselves. Frankly, I doubt the French would ever put up with a movie like this.

In case you missed it, the New York Times has announced it will begin charging for content next year. From the press release:

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.

This might work. On the other hand, I continue to insist that the reason online paywalls like those used by The Economist and the Wall Street Journal work is because they are protecting niche content that someone really, really needs. (Also: corporate subscriptions.) Do you really, really need another trend story about kids and the Internet?

Me neither.

With now only 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats may not be able to pass health care reform. Tonight’s Senate vote in Massachusetts is a ridiculous coda to an absurdly difficult battle, and frankly, I don’t think we learned anything.

Americans still haven’t fully grasped the fact that their health care system is an international punchline. A majority of them cling to worn-out Reagan-era orthodoxy about tax cuts and Big Government. Meantime, the last decade – arguably the climax of that orthodoxy – saw negative private sector job growth and no increase in middle class wages.

Nobody seems to get it. You can present as many facts as you want. It doesn’t matter. The talking heads and their mouth-breathing minions continue to shout the same talking points, like the more you repeat something – anything – the truer it gets.

This vote was sad for me personally because it means I might not ever be able to afford living in the United States again. Since I do mainly freelance and contract work, I have to pay for my own health care. This is doable when one is young and single, but not so much when one is married with a kid.

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but I’m not feeling it right now.

Recently, I thought I had spotted the worst campaign ad ever. Rarely am I proven so wrong so quickly:

A pregnant gospel choir teams up with a mentally handicapped piano player and a man dressed as a baby to inform us in song that “the least bad is the best,” and now my head has exploded.

UPDATE: Fishman deleted this video from his campaign’s YouTube account after an uncomfortable interview about it with La Nación. Nice try, bub. The Internet doesn’t allow take-backs.

From the New Yorker:

The enemy had gathered in a small copse upstream from our location. The decision was made to engage them in force. The assault would require a direct approach along the river, the only significant obstacle to attack being a small hillock approximately a hundred metres from our location. Sergeant Chandler led the way. Ames, Elder, Leonard, and Tracker followed, with Parker and me bringing up the heavy machine gun at the rear. The day was dry and clear.

Immediately upon leaving our position, we came under heavy enemy fire. Almost at once, Private Ames grew red in the face. Private Elder took Ames’s pack. But the pack was heavy, and Elder soon reported that his back was spasming. Also, his calves were burning. Elder joined Ames behind a small boulder, where the two men shared a Diet Coke.

A Serious Man is an amazing movie. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, it’s not an action movie, it doesn’t even have any particular plot, in the Hollywood understanding of that word. It is simply an amazing movie. Its symmetry is breathtaking. Its degree of subtly and polish places it in at least the top three of the Cohen brothers’ repertoire.

Basically, in the very best sense of the word, it is literature.

This is a relief. I worried for a bit that the Cohen brothers had lost their magic. The best part of Burn After Reading was the trailer. The Ladykillers starred Tom Hanks. Intolerable Cruelty… well, I don’t remember  anything about Intolerable Cruelty. No Country For Old Men was great, but it was written by Cormac McCarthy, so of course it was great.

A Serious Man, however, is the kind of movie that makes you sit back and say, “I could never, ever do that.” In fact, I’m still not entirely sure what it is they did. Superficially, the story echoes a classic from the English 101 Western Literature canon. In that respect, it is reminiscent of The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

But as in The Big Lebowski, there is such a richness of imagery, characters, language, and dark humor that I could never say with confidence what A Serious Man is about. Suffice it to say that if a movie is good, I find myself thinking about it hours, days, even weeks after seeing it.

By this measure, A Serious Man is very, very good.

It is said that Joseph Kennedy got out of the stock market in 1929 – right before the crash – after getting a stock tip from a shoe-shine boy. The theory was that once a bull market sucks in people who have no business being there, some sort of collapse is imminent.

On the heels of the recent financial debacle, I’m sure we all have our hindsight glasses on. I remember a pair of encounters in 2004 with very wealthy, very unpleasant, very stupid dudes (yes, that’s the word) my own age who were making a killing brokering mortgages. In retrospect, a system that rewarded piggishness so lavishly should have been instantly suspect.

Likewise, I remember getting offers from a relation, out of the blue, to take out some sort of really great mortgage on a house with no money down. A good investment, this person urged. Also, the thousands of pink-scrubbed, grinning, crazy-eyed real estate Stepford folk waddling into Costa Rica from California and Florida between 2005 and 2008 should have sounded a fucking klaxon.

Post-bubble, it’s easy to spot the warning signs. The eternal question is if next time, we will spot them before the bubble pops.

I was musing on this very question when CNN broadcast a gee-whiz, woman-on-the-street bit on China, how it’s unstoppable, how they’ve got it all figured out, how look at all these freaking shiny-ass skyscrapers. And I thought to myself two things:

1. What kind of an idiot gets market analysis from CNN?
2. ZOMG, SELL!

This guy is apparently thinking the same thing.

Interesting bit in the New Yorker on covering earthquakes:

Upon repetition, covering earthquakes gradually became less pure. The reason is that as a newspaper correspondent, at least, one became schooled in the editor-feeding subgenres of earthquake coverage. These subgenre stories passed like months on a calendar across the twelve days that generally constitutes the entire attention span of editors, broadcast producers, and their audiences. Subgenre pearls which one can anticipate from Haiti but about which one should perhaps not be overly cynical include: The Late Miracle, approximately on day five, in which an improbable survivor is dug out by heroic search teams from a foreign country; The Interpretation of Meaning, a story to be filed on Sundays in Christian cultures and Fridays in Muslim ones, chronicling the efforts of religious leaders to explain God’s will in this instance (I recall sitting, riveted, on a press platform in Tehran, listening to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani deliver a remarkable Friday sermon about science and Allah); and Heading to the Exits, in which the laundry-less journalist forecasts a slow recovery complicated by political fallout and imperfect relief efforts, while implying that he/she will return over the ensuing months to chronicle the full course of the recovery.

Newspapers reduce most of the news to a series of formulas. They turn it into a commodity that can be easily refined, shipped and stored: The disaster, the holiday travel, the underdog, the heinous criminal, the little-guy victim, the trend, the weather. Maybe it makes their readers feel safer. Eyes glaze over, turn the page, just another disaster.