Bezos, Cats, 9/11, Trick, Simpsons
Jeff Bezos: Genius Billionaire Or Evil Monopolist?
The Everything Nerd | YouTube | 8th April 2021
Machiavellian look at how Bezos became Bezos and how Amazon became Amazon. For instance, his recent "move towards openness is a deliberate business strategy, offering something for onlookers to latch onto in lieu of hard facts and figures from Amazon." The rare even-handed portrait of this glowing human ball of controversy (8m 15s)
Cats & The Weird Mind Of T.S. Eliot
Maggie Mae Fish | YouTube | 24th March 2020
On the ultra-conservative fascist sympathizer T.S. Eliot, unlikely originator of the strange homoerotic fantasia that is Cats. But its glossy surface is deceptive; Cats is actually "royalist propaganda," laying out a stratified, hierarchical view of the world. "None of these cats ask, Who am I? or What does this mean?" – they're all certain of their telos. Fascinating deep dive (58m 50s)
9/11 & The Availability Bias
Ideas Sleep Furiously | YouTube | 4th April 2020
What was the 9/11 death toll? For example, plane travel decreased in the years afterward, and given that cars are far more dangerous, overall deaths increased. The availability bias helps explain the psychology of this phenomenon: when calculating risk, "if people can easily think of relevant examples, they are far more likely to be frightened and concerned" (5m 12s)
The Apartment - Billy Wilder's Trick Room
Luca Grazioli | YouTube | 6th January 2021
Deconstructing The Apartment, a comedy about adultery, classism, capitalism, suicide and depression (and incidentally, my favorite movie of all time). The widescreen format, unusual for a black-and-white romcom, "underlines the social and emotive distance between the characters," isolating them in their cocoons of loneliness. Just be warned—spoilers ahoy (10m 16s)
Funny Video Of The Week
What if The Simpsons was British?
Browser Video: Diana Fleischman On The Cost Of Sex
Diana Fleischman, evolutionary psychologist, on the different costs and consequences of sex. Economically, the rich "invest less as a percentage of their money keeping themselves fed and clothed and housed;" similarly "with women and men there's always this underlying differential investment. If you think of women as simply the sex that has the bigger gametes, and invests more in reproduction, everything follows from that first principle" (2m 14s)
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