“Almost 2,500 years before the current vogue for behavioural economics, Plato was identifying and seeking to understand the predictable irrationalities of the human mind. He did not verify them with the techniques of modern experimental psychology, but many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky. Seminal papers in behavioural economics are highly cited everywhere from business and medical schools to the social sciences and the corporate world. But the earlier explorations of the same phenomenon by Greek philosophy are rarely appreciated.”
TV Ratings Are Way Down. But Does Anyone Care?
This is not the same thing as saying, “Ratings don’t matter anymore.” We’re not in a post-ratings world — at least not yet. As long as revenue from advertisers remains part of the network TV business model, ratings will matter. Broadcasters aren’t Netflix or HBO. They still want to live up to their name and find shows with a broad appeal, like This Is Us or The Big Bang Theory. But after a decade of audience erosion, including double-digit declines for the vast majority of shows this season, networks have finally accepted reality: People aren’t watching the TV the way they used to, and selling commercials isn’t enough to pay the bills (and make a big profit).
In A Challenge To Hollywood, The World’s Largest Movie Studio Is Being Built In China For $8.2 Billion
Projected to open officially in August next year, it will contain the world’s largest production facility: 400 acres, 45 sound stages, one a record-breaking 10,000 sq metres. It’s an attempt by Wang Jianlin – China’s richest man and the founder of the overarching Dalian Wanda group – to steal some of Hollywood’s thunder.
Hamburg’s New Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall Is A Sensation. Why?
Why this building? What about its design, its location and the implicit social messages embedded in its architecture have made it so successful? Carsten Brosda, a senator in Hamburg’s state government and head of its cultural authority, says location is a primary factor in its success. “I was never a fan of iconic buildings because so many of them are rather generic,” he says. But Elbphilharmonie is exceptional, located in the geographical heart of the city, on a site that demanded some exceptional public use. “There were architects saying this is on the verge of being unbuildable, but that is what makes it unique.”
Ravi Shankar’s Opera, Composed From His Deathbed, Is All About Myth, And Love
Ravi’s daughter Anushka Shankar: “Here he was aged 90, not yet content to rest on his laurels but still wanting to push the boundaries to further horizons. It was simply another area in which my father was able to imagine something that hadn’t been done yet – an Indian opera. Such a thing had incredible scope for creating bridges between two wonderful traditions from the east and west.”
You’re Keeping At Least Five Secrets You’ve Never Told Anyone Else, And That’s Cool, If You Don’t Think About Them
Having a secret is mostly about thinking about the secret, alone (which makes sense, really). “The actual act of hiding — the moment a person makes up a lie, or changes the subject, or simply omits certain information from a conversation — proved to be only a minor part of the experience of having a secret. Instead, what seems to affect people much more is how often they think about the secret.”
‘Twin Peaks’ Made Peak TV Possible (And Now It’s Coming Back, For Reasons We Might Not Question Too Closely)
Here’s the thing, and why the sequel won’t matter so much: “Without Twin Peaks, and its big-bang expansion of the possibilities of television, half your favorite shows wouldn’t exist. The absorptive, all-in serial, sonically and visually entire, novelistically cantilevered with deep structure and extending backwards into the viewer’s brain, was simply not a thing before Lynch and Frost. With Twin Peaks they effectively renegotiated TV’s contract with its audience.”
The Evolution Of “Black English”
“Don’t say less books, say fewer books,” and “Say Billy and I went to the store, not Billy and me went to the store.” This narrow notion of grammar has amounted to a peculiar snobbery: the more obscure and seemingly complex the grammatical rule, the more we tend to assert its importance and to esteem those who have managed to master it.