Browser Newsletter 1127
Best of the Moment
Money Makes The World Go Round
Erica Grieder | Texas Monthly | 1st October 2013
Profile of Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Terrific quotes: “I’d rather see the Texification of the United States than the Californification ... The reality is, people come here to work. Why else would they come here? We have crappy social services. Yes, there are drawbacks. We have more teenage pregnancies, et cetera. But again, I believe that jobs are the route to dignity”
Some Takeaways From The Pew Study Of American Jewish Life
David Bernstein | Volokh Conspiracy | 3rd October 2013
"Modern Orthodoxy, Conservative Judaism, Reform Judaism, and Orthodox outreach are, all things considered, overall failures, which implies that American Judaism is a failure. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. American Jews were always rather irreligious, the pious Jews generally stayed in Europe". But some good news too: The birthrate is up — to 2.2 per couple, among Jews who identify as Jews by religion
The Laws Of Gravity
Bryan Abrams | The Credits | 3rd October 2013
Interview with Emmanuel Lubezki, arguably the greatest cinematographer alive, about his work on Gravity, with George Clooney. "We invented this LED box, this very large LED monitor that is folded into a cube. So you can input all of the scenes that were pre-visualized to create the movie — all the environments that we had created — and you can input them into this large cube so space itself is moving around the actors"
A Girl And A Gun
Jenny Turner | London Review Of Books | 3rd October 2013
Review of Virginie Despentes's new novel, Apocalypse Baby, which develops into a profile of Despentes herself, and of the filming of her novel Baise-Moi. "Baise-Moi is not a porn film, but the conditions of its production were similar, and both its stars were porn actresses and one of its co-directors too. Whether for this reason or for others, there’s a frankness to the way things are said in the documentary that is beautiful, and extremely rare" (Adult language)
The Snowden Files
John Lanchester | Guardian | 3rd October 2013
John Lanchester reads the files, and renders a citizen's verdict: "We are on the verge of being an entirely new kind of human society, one involving unprecedented penetration by the state into areas which have always been regarded as private. Do we agree to that? If we don't, this is the last chance to stop it. Our rulers will say what all rulers everywhere have always said: that their intentions are good, and we can trust them"
Video of the day: Vaccines
Thought for the day:
"The best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening" — James Altucher