American Madness

The next time you forget a face at a party, the new boss’s name or your wife’s birthday, you may want to consider sleeping more, Swiss research suggests.

Union Square Ventures (via Marco):

Two things will need to happen if the recent pace of innovation on the web is going to be sustained over the next few years. The next generation of services will need to have an impact on the real world and the real economy, not just an attention economy driven by self expression and discovery online. These new services will also need to reach real people, many of who use few if any web services today.

We can post and comment and tweet and tag and follow all we want in cyberspace; but if it ultimately doesn’t change anything in real space, we haven’t really accomplished anything.

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of avoiding the throngs of DC Comics faithful who waited in seemingly interminable lines to see The Dark Knight. Instead, my wife and I took in WALL•E. At first, I was skeptical; the main character is a robot that doesn’t speak…how is this movie going to be any good? I was completely uninterested and surprised at my apathy, having loved every prior Pixar offering. Upon seeing the final trailer, and reading a few early reviews, however, I decided to check it out.

The movie is cute, and heartwarming, and the beginning almost has a 2001 quality to it, with nearly no dialogue for the first 30 minutes of the movie. You’re not left feeling lost or bored, as the action is enough to move the story along. Once you get to the second half of the movie, however, there is plenty of dialogue and a message that hits you over the head with a tack hammer.

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An awesome article by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi (thanks to Eric Baum for fowarding).
Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents? economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to “tell me what was going on in their lives economically.” He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I’ll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don’t have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.

Why we’re in trouble (after the jump:) (more…)

Yes that’s right, your favorite psycho/superhero Christian Bale is under arrest in London for beating up the family prior to the premiere of Batman: The Dark Knight.

When contacted by American Madness, Scotland Yard would not name Christian Bale, only confirming: “We have a 34-year-old man in custody at a central London police station. He was arrested after attending the police station by appointment. The arrest is in connection with an allegation of assault.”

If you want to get the skinny on this international man of mystery, try taking a look at his wiki page or IMDB listing. We hope all our female and gay readers enjoy this image from American Psycho.

Is The Bad Economy Killing The Business Meme? is a (rare) great analysis by Gawker of something substantive.

One of Malcolm Gladwell’s main theses in The Tipping Point was that there are people with vast social networks who influence trends and introduce creative people to each other. It was built, to some extent, on the six degrees of separation chestnut.

But in 2001, Watts made use of the Internet and vastly expanded the messenger group, enlisting around 61,000 people to forward emails to 18 targets around the globe. True, it did take on average six people to complete the chain of information, however, the “hubs” weren’t important after all. Only 5% of the emails, Watts found, ever passed through them; almost all reached their targets through a conduit of nobodies.

Apparently, being a “connector” means less than Gladwell would have us believe. But I forgive him. The Tipping Point was a fun book and Gladwell eats at Dell’Anima, which makes him a swell guy in my estimation. But I won’t forgive him for Blink, that mess of contradictions, which I slogged through on the strength of The Tipping Point, and which Steve Sailer gleefully demolished.

I can’t say I’ll be sad to see the end of the celebrity business book. Even Moneyball, which is a very good book, has a basic point for business leaders: look at the data and challenge conventional wisdom when making decisions. There. I just saved you hours of reading.

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Minever mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Minever loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

- E.A. Robinson

We have a new writer today who we are testing out,. We’ve got his first piece here for all to see, don’t be afraid to write in and tell us what you think, but just know these were the terms we set out for new writers:

We let them write a few posts and if we like them we let them continue writing. If we don’t like them we kill them.

We like to let them know right off the bat that the stakes are high, so you might want not want to be too critical of him on his first start out the gate. With out further ado, Scott McCue’s first try for AM:

In Orange County Florida, it seems that reality has slipped into a wormhole and is now lost to the ages.

This billboard has been put up by a Florida-area conservative group. Let me give you a moment to fully internalize the stupid that is this blatant display of wrongness. (more…)

It never seems to end in China. Just a few days ago the government arrested another blogger who stood for human rights.

As Jake Hooker reported in the NYTimes:

A human rights activist who was an advocate for parents whose children were killed in collapsed schools, Huang Qi, was formally arrested on charges of illegally possessing state secrets, his lawyer said. Mr. Huang previously spent five years in prison for posting articles on politically delicate subjects on his Web site, 64tianwang.com. After the May 12 earthquake hit, Mr. Huang met with mourning parents and, on his site, posted articles about structural problems with the schools that had collapsed. Police officers detained him in Chengdu on June 10.

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