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James Surowiecki: Why Are the Super-Rich So Angry?

Illustration by Christoph Niemann The past few years have been very good to Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, the giant private-equity firm. His industry, which relies on borrowed money, has benefitted from low interest rates, and the stock-market boom has given…

Jul 1, 2014

Interviews: Jonathan Glazer and Mica Levi | Features | Pitchfork

pitchfork.com

Jonathan Glazer and Mica Levi Director Jonathan Glazer and scorer Mica Levi on their unsettling alien art film. by Contributor Interview Experimental Electronic Pop/R&B March 31 2014 After building a reputation for retina-rattling music videos including Radiohead's "Karma Police" and UNKLE's "Rabbit…

Jul 1, 2014

GO AEROSMITH: How "Head First" Became the First Digitally Downloadable Song 20 Years Ago Today | NOISEY

noisey.vice.com

Pretty much everything about this story will seem old. Maybe laughably so. Let’s get that out of the way. Technology is in a perpetual state of relentless, preposterous forward motion, and we’re constantly reminded that we’re already somehow living in the future, today. But I'm talking about an…

Jul 1, 2014

Banned beans: can Keurig kill coffee pirates with DRM?

theverge.com

No company has done more to change the way Americans drink coffee in the last several years than Keurig Green Mountain. Its method of brewing coffee by injecting hot water into prepackaged plastic pods has quickly grown to rival drip coffee as the preferred means of getting a quick hit of caffeine.…

Jul 1, 2014

The Making of Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' | Music News | Rolling Stone

rollingstone.com

“We needed an anthem,” Spike Lee said. “When I wrote the script for Do the Right Thing , every time when the Radio Raheem character showed up, he had music blasting. I wanted Public Enemy.” The director may have asked for an anthem for his 1989 chronicle of big-city racial tensions, but what he got…

Jun 30, 2014

Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science

forbes.com

June 29: Updated with statement from Facebook, from the author of the study, and from the editor of the academic journal that published the study. Facebook is the best human research lab ever. There’s no need to get experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms as they’ve already agreed to the…

Jun 30, 2014

Hannibal gave Silence Of The Lambs fans a sequel crazier than they expected

thedissolve.com

Ridley Scott’s lush 2001 adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal was both a beneficiary and a victim of its predecessor’s success. The triumph of Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-festooned 1991 adaptation of Harris’ Silence Of The Lambs— and the public’s enduring fascination with its flesh-eating psychiatrist…

Jun 30, 2014

If nothing else, the cyber-thriller relic Disclosure is better than its source

thedissolve.com

In the early 1990s, Michael Crichton accomplished the writer/creator equivalent of an EGOT, an acronym for winning the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards, coined by Philip Michael Thomas and made famous by 30 Rock . Crichton scored a No. 1 movie ( Jurassic Park ), a top-rated television show ( ER…

Jun 29, 2014

The Virtual Sun Is Finally Setting

motherboard.vice.com

In 2006, I switched from PC to Mac in the midst of an aesthetic sea change called Web 2.0. Overnight, all my buttons and toggles became aqueous, squishy blobs. For my entire young life as a computer user, that place had been populated with beige file folders and gray boxes; now it had metamorphosed…

Jun 29, 2014

How Congo tried, and failed, to walk in Indiana Jones’ footsteps

thedissolve.com

In an interview I conducted in connection with Doubt a few years back, John Patrick Shanley described how he—a Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director—came to write Congo, an action-adventure movie about super-intelligent apes and laser guns. He offered the following…

Jun 28, 2014

Stallone + Russell + four directors = the truly strange Tango & Cash

thedissolve.com

Sylvester Stallone’s career is a triumph of feverish determination. The tale of how he came to star in Rocky became Hollywood legend precisely because it’s so implausible. According to the story, which has been embellished through the years, Stallone was a struggling actor, a mere sandwich away from…

Jun 28, 2014

Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop’s Newest Old-School Star

nytimes.com

‘Everybody just wants to have fun, be with the scene,” Kendrick Lamar said when we met in his cramped quarters inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last fall. “Certain people get backstage, people that you would never expect. . . . You ain’t with the media! You ain’t into music! You ain’t into…

Jun 28, 2014

The hard-bitten cynicism of Billy Wilder’s Ace In The Hole

thedissolve.com

Billy Wilder Noel: Chronologically, Ace In The Hole falls between Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17 in Billy Wilder’s filmography, but even though the other two films sport a thick streak of cynicism when it comes to what motivates people, Ace In The Hole is so bleak that I’m always surprised by how early…

Jun 27, 2014

Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and the rise and fall of Hollywood’s happiest couple

thedissolve.com

On April 18, 1948, the New York Times ran a short article about Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett under the headline “ The Happy Union Of Brackett And Wilder .” Part of a series of Hollywood profiles by Phil Koury, it paints a glowing portrait of one of the most successful filmmaking teams in cinema…

Jun 27, 2014

Billy Wilder never got darker than Ace In The Hole

thedissolve.com

“Now go on home, all of you! The circus is over.” —Kirk Douglas, Ace In The Hole In Cameron Crowe’s excellent Hitchcock/Truffaut -style book Conversations With Wilder , Billy Wilder, still sharp and cantankerous in his early 90s, generally remembers his hits fondly and his flops bitterly. As caustic…

Jun 26, 2014

Vinyl is cool again. That doesn't mean record collectors have to get all hipster

theguardian.com

Jack White sold 40,000 vinyl copies of his new album, Lazaretto – the biggest one-week hard-copy record sales since ... forever . Photograph: PictureGroup / Rex Features I freaking loathe Jack White on a deeply visceral level. I feel like he's an arrogant, appropriating prick and no matter how…

Jun 26, 2014

No Country for Old Pervs: The Fall of the Houses of Terry Richardson and Dov Charney

grantland.com

“Isn’t this fun?” That’s how model Anna del Gaizo paraphrased Terry Richardson’s assistant Leslie Lessin’s words as Richardson suddenly attempted to stick his dick in del Gaizo’s mouth while Lessin photographed it happening at Richardson’s studio. Del Gaizo wrote about her 2008 encounter with Terry…

Jun 26, 2014

Do The Right Thing | Movie Reviews | Rolling Stone

rollingstone.com

When a black man sends a garbage can crashing through his white employer’s plate-glass window during the galvanizing climax of Do the Right Thing, all howling hell breaks loose. And maybe not just onscreen. Producer-writer-director-actor Spike Lee thinks that his movie, which culminates in a race…

Jun 21, 2014

Reasons Why Washington, DC, Is the Worst Place Ever | VICE United States

vice.com

The United States capital really never had a chance. On July 16, 1790, President George Washington signed the Residence Act , which created a special district to serve as the seat of government for the former colonies of England. Creating a city with the explicit purpose of bottling up all of the…

Jun 21, 2014

Yes, America, we have returned to debtor's prisons

latimes.com

When people are convicted of crimes, we know that they are sentenced to time in jail or prison, to perform community service, and sometimes to undertake drug or alcohol treatment. But they are also routinely sentenced to legal debt. Beyond just fines or restitution, defendants in some jurisdictions…

Jun 21, 2014

How Plan 9 From Outer Space earned, and lost, the title of worst movie of all time

thedissolve.com

After the publication of 1978’s The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time , 393 readers tore out a suggestion page provided in the back of the book and mailed it to authors Harry and Michael Medved to inform them of an egregious oversight: Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space . “People really took us to task…

Jun 21, 2014

Shenmue and the rise of lonelycore games

killscreendaily.com

Shenmue debuted on the Dreamcast in 1999. Its sequel, the aptly titled Shenmue II , dropped in 2001. Like most videogames, their narratives ain’t Shakespeare. The first game focuses on Ryo Hazuki avenging his father’s death and investigating a bizarre mirror. Spoiler alert: Shenmue II has Ryo…

Jun 20, 2014

Aphex Twin's Caustic Window and the Mythos of Lost Media

motherboard.vice.com

Image: the actual record/Kickstarter/James E. Thomas It was never easy to "lose" an album, not really. Rock lore is nonetheless full of tales of artists trying to "trash the tapes" of this or that recording, and those artists, from Brian Wilson to Brian Eno, might've buried those records for a good…

Jun 19, 2014

We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome

thedissolve.com

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2 considerably expands the world introduced in the first film, and that expansion includes a significant new presence: Valka, the long-lost mother of dragon-riding protagonist Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. The film devotes much of its sweet, sensitive middle…

Jun 17, 2014

How Ashley Madison Pulled Back the Curtain on Japan’s 'Infidelity Economy'

motherboard.vice.com

Sex in Japan has made a splash in the media recently, this time via the explosion of Ashley Madison , the world's largest "affair dating" website. Ashley Madison's success in Japan has pulled back the curtain on the widespread adultery in the country, where the approach to marriage seems to…

Jun 17, 2014