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Yglesias

Actor of the Decade

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:48 pm

The actor of the decade is George Clooney. He’s got five great movies—Fantastic Mr Fox, Up in the Air, Michael Clayton, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Ocean’s 11—plus a number of others (O Brother, Burn After Reading, Ocean’s 12, Good Night and Good Luck) that have merit. And the others aren’t necessarily unwatchable either. We’re a long way from the time he saved that kid trapped in a sewer.

Update

It occurs to me that Robert Farley actually tweeted this yesterday, planting the idea in my mind.

Climate Progress

Climate activists jailed for saying “Coals killing West Virginias communities”

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:32 pm

Yes, Coal's Killing West Virginia CommunitiesWonk Room‘s Brad Johnson has the story:

Four climate activists are being held in a West Virginia jail for protesting how coal mining is killing the people and land of their state. On Tuesday, December 29, four activists with Climate Ground Zero “” a grassroots campaign of non-violent civil disobedience in southern West Virginia to address mountaintop removal coal mining “” were arrested for trespass at their homes in Rock Creek, West Virginia:

Read more

Yglesias

TV Show of the Decade

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:22 pm

Obviously the TV show of the decade is The Wire. I’ve already seen seasons one and two thrice, season three four times, and season four twice (just once for season five) and the fact of the matter is that you could spend a lot of time rewatching this stuff. The Sopranos is also extremely good, but has a bunch of weak patches. TV produced some other shining moments this decade, but they tended to be somewhat fleeting, like season one of Veronica Mars.

Alyssa

Joy to the World

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:13 pm

I know that things I sometimes complain or express doubt about include people’s willingness to make fools of themselves on camera, and overreliance on technology.  I want to carve out an exception on an issue where I suspend all doubt: flashmobs that involve dancing.  The specific flashmob that inspired that exception was this one, done to Glee covers, in Rome, forwarded to me by my sister (who also got me old-school Archie comics for Christmas.  My sister rules.):

Given the high-quality footage FOX put up of the event, and the relatively high quality of the dancing, I’m pretty sure it was a promotional stunt.  I’m not sure I care.  The folks who are watching look incredibly happy and surprised, a quality I think is both undervalued and underexperienced in popular culture today.

Yglesias

Band of the Decade

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:01 pm

Suppose I wasn’t trapped on a desert island at all, but for some reason I would never again be allowed to listen to an album released between 2000 and 2009. Except for one band! So who do I make the exception for?

File-Yeah_Yeah_Yeahs

By that standard, I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are my band of the oughts. Three albums and two EPs, all excellent, and a sound that evolves all the time while staying somehow essentially Yeah Yeah Yeahish.

Politics

Argentina hosts Latin America’s first gay marriage.

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Dec 31, 2009 at 12:00 pm

argentinamarriageEarlier this week, two Argentinian men wed and became Latin America’s first legally recognized same-sex married couple. Jose Maria Di Bello and Alex Freyre’s wedding was initially thwarted by a national judge who overturned a city court decision to issue them a marriage license in Buenos Aires. However, Governor of Tierra del Fuego, Fabiana Rios, issued a special decree allowing the two to marry in Argentina’s southern province. Freyre told the Associated Foreign Press:

Now we’ll be able to share Social Security, we’ll have all the rights as other couples — because we’re worth it…It’s a personal celebration, but also a public and political one. We have to sacrifice our intimacy so the world can see that Latin America and Argentina is opening up to judicial equality.

The milestone marriage took place the same year that Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that gay couples must be afforded full equal rights and a week after Mexico City became the first Latin American capital to pass a law legalizing gay marriage. An Argentinian Supreme Court justice indicated that the high court would likely rule on issues of same-sex marriage sometime in 2010 as a bill that would legalize gay marriage has been stalled in Argentina’s Congress since October.

Meanwhile, starting in 2010, gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia. While reporter David Knowles points out that gay marriage opponents have far from accepted defeat in the U.S., recent data which shows that younger Americans are much more supportive of gay marriage than older people suggests these opponents will be facing an uphill battle in the years to come.

Yglesias

Russia vs the Asteroids

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 31, 2009 at 11:28 am

Here’s a weird story. Russia says it needs to save the world from an asteroid collision:

Anatoly Perminov told Golos Rossii radio the space agency would hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis. He said his agency might eventually invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project.

But Western sources say they’ve checked this out and there’s nothing to worry about:

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

NASA said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

I certainly hope to see more cooperation between major countries on this sort of issue in the future. Nations seeking to demonstrate their greatness through robust space programs is much better for the world than nations seeking to demonstrate their greatness by building large nuclear arsenals. And working on monitoring asteroids and other possible collisions is a much better use of space budgets than a manned mission to Mars or space-based weapons.

Climate Progress

Climate Activists Jailed For Saying ‘Coal’s Killing West Virginia’s Communities’

By Brad Johnson on Dec 31, 2009 at 10:54 am

Yes, Coal's Killing West Virginia CommunitiesFour climate activists are being held in a West Virginia jail for protesting how coal mining is killing the people and land of their state. On Tuesday, December 29, four activists with Climate Ground Zero — a grassroots campaign of non-violent civil disobedience in southern West Virginia to address mountaintop removal coal mining — were arrested for trespass at their homes in Rock Creek, West Virginia:

Mat Louis-Rosenberg, Jacqueline Quimby, Kimberly Ellis and James McGuinness were taken to the Kanawha County Courthouse by State Police by West Virginia State Trooper Lt. Bowers. The charges stem from a October 10 demonstration at Walker CAT’s headquarters, which challenged Walker’s misleading pro-coal advertising campaign at which Gabe Schwartzman, 19, and David German, 18, were arrested by City of Belle Police and cited for trespassing on a structure or conveyance. The two had unfurled a banner which read, “Yes, Coal is Killing West Virginia’s Communities.”

According to Climate Ground Zero, the four activists remain in police custody in the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver, WV. They have yet to see a magistrate and have not been informed of their charges, other than trespassing, which, if proven, would result in a maximum one-hundred-dollar fine.

“This is outrageous behavior on the part of the Kanawha County prosecutors.” said Climate Ground Zero campaign director Mike Roselle.

“These four people are guilty of nothing. They were simply present during a
demonstration last October and none of them were ever informed at any time that they were trespassing. Usually in this type of case they simply write you a ticket or mail you a summons. To drag them out of their homes and refuse to allow any bail violates their most basic constitutional right to due process.”

Climate Ground Zero is part of a growing international movement using nonviolent civil disobedience to protest the ravages of fossil fuel extraction and the global damages of climate change.

Alyssa

Metrosexuals, Maneaters, Menchildren

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 31, 2009 at 10:02 am

Over at The Sexist, blogfriend Amanda Hess is totally ripping it up with her long posts on masculinity and femininity in the aughts.  And damn is she bringing back the memories with her entries on everything from pop tarts to metrosexuality, along with the killer pop culture and gender analysis.  Remember this guy?

Carson Kressley by Save the Children.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Save The Children.



Probably the only triumphant fashion moment of my life is when Carson Kressley pronounced the outfit I’d put together of a rainbow bikini top, denim miniskirt, and bright red sneakers “absolutely fabulous” (his exact words, I swear).  Hey, it was 2003.  I had an excuse.


Or how about this particular piece of pop-cultural hilariousness?





Which raises all sorts of fascinating questions.  Such as, what happened to Mya anyway?  Why hasn’t someone sat down with Lil Kim and helped her figure out how to harness her enormous talent better in the second half of of the decade?  And why doesn’t Missy Elliot get more of the credit she deserves for generally ruling this decade (“Gossip Folks” for sure ranks high on my list of favorite songs of the decade, especially ones with lean production, and on my list of best Ludacris guest verses.  I would so go to a school where he was the principal.) musically?  One of the pieces I most want to write is a profile of Pink, the only one of the four blondes (her, Christina, Britney, and Jessica Simpson) to survive the decade with both her sanity and her artistic integrity intact without a single visible break.


But all of this is just random musing.  Some of Amanda’s commenters (on the whole they’re much less nice than y’all) have been complaining that she’s using pop culture tropes rather than so-called “real” people.  I think that’s sort of silly.  Pop culture is neither all-inclusive nor determinative of how we live our lives, of course.  But it’s an astonishingly powerful mirror of our aspirations and our desires, however lowly or lofty.  And because we spend so much time and money on it, it’s a strong indicator of what diverts us or encourages us.  Of course it makes sense to look to pop culture as part of our conversations about gender, as well as for our conversations about just about everything else.

Media

The News Business’ Crisis of Productivity

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 31, 2009 at 9:58 am

Two images both via Andrew Golis. First, plummeting employment in newspapers:

chart of the day, newspaper employment 1

Second, after a period in which TV-watching was cutting into people’s reading, words are back largely thanks to the Internet:

reading 1

A large-scale study by the University of California at San Diego and other research universities revealed what some of us have long suspected: We’re reading far more words than we used to as we adopt new technologies.

“Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet,” found a University of California at San Diego study (.pdf) published this month by Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short of the University of San Diego.

The second trend is why the outlook for producers of written words is so very bleak. You hear a lot of talk about different kinds of ideas to bolster revenue models or get people to read more. But the reality is that the web makes it easier than ever for someone inclined to read things to read them. With global distribution, the same quantity of readers can be supplied by many, many, many, many fewer writers and editors. America produces far more manufactured goods than it did 40 years ago, even as employment in the manufacturing sector has collapsed. News writing seems to be going the same way for similar reasons. The increased productivity is very bad for people counting on jobs in the sector.

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