media strainer

so i’ve been MIA for the last four-ish months as i relocated to tennessee to take a job as a staff writer/blogger/photographer at metro pulse, knoxville’s alternative weekly.

i write there almost daily on our staff blog, the daily post, and this is my latest (and best, i think) excuse for once again letting this site fall by the wayside.however, in my semi-obsessive surveillance of news and media, i do still come across some great content that’s not right for our focus on mostly local/state issues, so i’ll be making a better (as in, existing) effort to place those gems here.

thanks to anyone who’s still got me in their RSS feed! i don’t deserve it.

i recently came across children’s hospital, a 2008 WB series written by, directed by and starring rob corddry of the daily show, arrested development and harold and kumar II fame. the episodes are short at five or so minutes each, but each one contains many great moments that parody shows like grey’s anatomy, ER, chicago hope, etc. i love corddry’s work and these ten episodes are infused with his particular style of humor: a parody of people who are overdramatic, underinformed and typically in positions of authority.

i found this through jesse thorn’s the sound of young america, which i’ve been podcasting lately. it’s been around for a few years, and thorn is a likeable interviewer. he finds great guests, some i’ve heard of and others not, and he’s got an extensive backlog of interviews that are still relevant and worth listening to.

this is definitely worth a watch.

i saw it a couple of weeks ago and since then have gone back to it a couple of times. frum just seems to make a lot of sense, and his crticism of rush limbaugh, mark levin and other hysterical reactionaries is spot on.

david brooks may be getting a run for his money as the conservative independents and liberals alike love to listen to.

there’s this short documentary from bill moyers, and this one from  frontline, which as always, comes through.

part of the beauty of politics is that it offers the potential to reduce the very personal into cold, reasoned calculations, which usually revolve around money. perhaps this doesn’t strike everyone as something beautiful, but it allows decisions to be made in an objective, rational way to maximize benefits across groups, much like economics.  unfortunately, too often distortions in politics, which also typically revolve around money, prevent this from happening, and that is when the politician becomes an epithet.

but in this cold, calculating machine, there is the opportunity, even the inevitability, that the original motive for acting will be forgotten.  with health care this is particularly true, for why personal, anecdotal accounts are very moving, the language used to describe them is anything but.

consider the phrase “pre-existing condition.”  that could mean a thousand things, from a heart palpitation to diabetes to kidney disease, any one of which would infect every minute of every day of someone’s life, particularly if they were forced to pay out of pocket for treatment.  through the powerful medium of television, and perhaps radio and photography, the heart-wrenching ramifications of this problem resurface.

also, my two cents on the political negotiations

russ roberts over at econtalk has a great conversation with time columnist justin fox about his new book, the myth of the rational market.

listen to the whole hour, it’s worth it because it complicates any easy answers on what to do about the great crash of 2007-08.

chris anderson, editor of Wired magazine, has put his money where his mouth is and released his new book for free on itunes.

anderson’s work is about how a small percentage of users paying for content will subsidize the rest of us, who will get the content we want for free. an example is the current wsj.com model, but there are others (as i will find out on my next road trip when i dig in to his audiobook).

anderson has been pushing his new book by making the rounds on charlie rose, fresh air and the colbert report – the three pillars of interview journalism today. his argument is compelling, and he derives credibilty for outlining the success of organizations like Netflix and itunes in his book, The Long Tail.

As the country picks itself up from its latest financial spill, it’s vital to consider the assumptions that led people to act the way they did, and to update those assumptions as we move  forward.

Here Yale professor Robert Shiller examines the idea that markets “know,” like some omnipotent being, and therefore can never be wrong. Markets are the product of humans, and humans fail.This is not, however, to say government-imposed regulation is the answer, because that, too, is a human endeavor.

At any rate,  it’s fascinating to hear an economist wrestle with human psychology, and to speak in a way that incorporates what daily experience often tells us: that people can be very, very stupid.

In this piece from NPR’s On The Media, Nate Silver (of 538) discusses the framing of the health care reform debate by both sides. It’s worth a listen but not entirely compelling radio (if Bob Garfield or Brooke Gladstone had been there, maybe the story’d be different).

There was, however, an idea towards the end that is worth a good mulling over. See, people over 65 don’t show great support for passing health care reform in the polls. And why? Because they already have great government health care in the form of Medicare. What’s more, it’s no secret that senior citizens turn out for votes, so many of their elected representatives presumably don’t feel as much pressure to pass health care reform as they otherwise would if seniors cared more.  So.  Why not kill Medicare? If Republicans don’t like government control of health care, let’s get rid of it altogether.  And if seniors don’t care about extending their plan to others, let’s take it from them.

This is absurd, of course, but it points out the hypocrisy of the GOP’s position and also illustrates how Medicare is a victim of its own success.

From a piece on the Online Newshour:

It’s just after closing on a Friday night at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. In the darkened auditorium, a jazz quintet is building a rhythmic floor on a soft, steady percussion line and lilting piano chords. Composer-conductor Jacob Varmus steps in on trumpet, twirling a feverish melody above the beat — establishing a pattern between notes and time, then moving on to a variation of that idea.

Meanwhile, on a large projection screen above, a looped animation shows a double helix of DNA being ripped apart, the bonds between base pairs broken, copied and then aligned with their opposites, rapidly producing new double helices to be replicated. The pace is frenzied but constant, while the calming voice of Dr. Harold Varmus notes how important it is that errors occur.

“Mutation is essential to species diversity just as stylistic variation is essential to the arts,” he declares as the music slows to a background drip. “Without genetic error, there would be no evolution. Without variety, there would be no development in art, literature or music. Variety is essential to progress.”

(more at the Online Newshour)