Microsoft today announced it has completed moving its Hotmail.com users over to Outlook.com, roughly nine months after first taking the wraps off its revamped email service at the end of July 2012. According to the company, there are currently 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, noting that the growing organic excitement… … Read More
“The Woman Upstairs”: Rage of a frustrated artist
As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage. “The Woman Upstairs” purports to be the story of one of the ragers, although Nora both does and doesn’t wish to be identified with the archetypal figure in the novel’s title. The counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, the Woman Upstairs, in Nora’s formulation, is a recessive, barely noticed neighbor, “whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” Her “day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog.” She strives not to cause any inconvenience and is resigned to always coming second (or third) in other people’s lives,A ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration, “The Woman Upstairs” begins by linking Nora’s fury to her gender, a connection reinforced by the name she shares with the heroine of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone,” she explains, “but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don’t all women feel the same?”Continue Reading… … Read More
Meet the grad student who upended the GOP
The world of economics has just changed, and somebody has some ‘splaining to do! Please savor the following twisted tale of bad math, academic folly and pundit hubris. Since 2010, the names of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous in political and economic circles. These two Harvard economists wrote a paper, “Growth in the Time of Debt” that has been used by everyone from Paul Ryan to Olli Rehn of the European Commission to justify harmful austerity policies. The authors purported to show that once a country’s gross debt to GDP ratio crosses the threshold of 90 percent, economic growth slows dramatically. Debt, in other words, seemed very scary and bad.Their historical data appeared impressive, as did their credentials. Policymakers and journalists cited the paper to convince the public that instead of focusing on the jobs crisis that was hampering recovery, we should instead focus on deficits. The deficit hawks jumped up and down with excitement.But something didn’t smell right.Continue Reading… … Read More
Officials see possible suspect in bombing
BOSTON (AP) — Investigators poring over photos and video from the Boston Marathon have an image of a potential suspect in the deadly bombing but do not know his name and have not questioned him, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.The news came with Boston in a state of high excitement over a possible breakthrough in the case and conflicting information over whether a suspect was in custody. Police and reporters converged on the federal courthouse in the afternoon.Several news organizations reported earlier in the day that a suspect had been identified from surveillance video taken at a department store midway between the sites of Monday’s two bomb blasts, which killed three people and wounded more than 170.A law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity and was not authorized to discuss the case publicly confirmed only that investigators had an image of a potential suspect and had not established his identity.Also Wednesday, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told the AP that a suspect was in custody. The official, who was not authorized to divulge details of the investigation, said the suspect was expected in federal court.Continue Reading… … Read More
Data Science Careers Take Off
In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates. … Read More
In Memoriam: Roger Ebert
The
late Roger Ebert’s writing would have left a mark if he had never
gone on television in his life, but it was his TV show with Gene
Siskel that made him a celebrity. You wouldn’t have expected that
from their
first show together: two writers droning on, not always sure
where exactly they should be looking, with no excitement beyond the
possibility that Siskel’s ‘stache will start eating his face. But
it wasn’t long before they perfected the bickering-brothers dynamic
that made their show more entertaining than at least 60% of the
movies they reviewed. Instead of suppressing their offscreen
rivalry, which is on display in various outtakes
floating around the Web, they channeled it into arguments about
movies; and made those arguments meaningful by actually giving a
damn about the pictures they were rating. They also had a healthy
sense of self-aware humor about their personas, as their inevitably
entertaining ;guest spots on
Letterman and other shows proved. The act could be
imitated but it could never be equaled, as countless other programs
– including, eventually, Ebert & Roeper — would
learn.
But if the TV show ensured that Roger Ebert was
famous while he was alive, it’s his writing for newspapers and the
Web that should ensure he’ll be remembered long after he’s dead.
For one thing, he was an exceptionally stylist. I might disagree
strenuously with Ebert’s opinion about a movie; I might bristle at
a factual flub or two about the plot; but I was almost always awed
at his prose, which was thoughtful, graceful, funny, and
accessible. He didn’t just write about movies: He had been a
sportswriter early on, and an interview he did for his college
paper with the left-libertarian author Paul Goodman was good enough
to get reprinted in
one of Goodman’s books. (He invoked Goodman in at least one of
his reviews too — a thumbs-up
take on Paul Schrader’s underappreciated Blue Collar
– and there was a time when I had hopes that underneath it all
Ebert was some sort of anarchist. Alas, when he unleashed his
political-pundit side late in life he turned out to be a
standard-issue liberal.) In the last few years he wrote many
wonderful memoirs for his website, and then a much-admired
autobiography. But of course it was his movie writing that
defined him, and it was here that he made his other great
contribution to American culture.
Ebert, you see, didn’t care about those old
highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow distinctions that occupied so many
debates about criticism in the middle of the 20th century. If you
were interested in learning about cinema as a high art, he could be
your gateway to the greats, writing capably about Bergman and
Welles and Kurosawa and other filmmaking giants. (I’m pretty sure I
first heard of Fassbinder in a Roger Ebert essay. Or, at least,
that essay was the first time I wanted to run out and rent a
Fassbinder movie right away.) On the other hand, if you wanted
to know if the latest spy flick was exciting or if the new Mel
Brooks movie was likely to make you laugh, Ebert was perfectly
capable of waxing enthusiastic about those kinds of films too. It’s
not that he liked everything, you understand. (Check out his
evisceration of Priest.) It’s that he was
capable of liking everything, or at least everything that
was done well. Even when he joined in the chorus denouncing the
slasher genre in the ’80s, ;– he had to confess that yes, he
was the guy who gave three and a half stars to
Last House on the Left.
And that
leads us to what may be my all-time favorite Roger Ebert review: a
joyful little essay about the pleasures to be found in even the
most indefensibly trashy pictures. The subject is a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it release called Rapa Nui. I’ve
never seen it, and I don’t think I even would have heard of it if I
hadn’t read Ebert’s review. He gives it just two stars, and much of
the piece consists of a litany of everything ridiculous about the
picture. But then he says this at the end:
Concern for my reputation prevents me from recommending
this movie. I wish I had more nerve. I wish I could simply write,
“Look, of course it’s one of the worst movies ever made. But it has
hilarious dialogue, a weirdo action climax, a bizarre explanation
for the faces of Easter Island, and dozens if not hundreds of
wonderful bare breasts.” I am however a responsible film critic and
must conclude that “Rapa Nui” is a bad film. If you want to see it
anyway, of course, that’s strictly your concern. I think I may
check it out again myself.
My head can’t bring itself to believe in an afterlife. But my
heart hopes that Ebert gets another chance to see it. … Read More
Sunday shows haven’t learned
Happy tenth anniversary, Iraq War! To celebrate, America’s Sunday Shows got you a Nearly Complete Absence of Any Sense of Responsibility or Indication That Any Lessons Were Learned. Here’s what we got instead, today: Scaremongering about North Korea and Iran, great excitement about our new pope, and terribly unenlightening endless fact-free arguments about dueling federal budget proposals.The big three Sunday Shows were all very budget-focused today, and on each of them everyone competed to be the most Serious about Balancing the Budget, which is obviously a self-evidently Good goal and not a totally unnecessary one. Not a single moderator came close to articulating the mainstream (in terms of economics, not politics) view that the government doesn’t have to balance its budget. (It was not that long ago that the government was running a surplus and conservatives and economists kept saying on the TV that that was a bad thing, right?) Instead, they pressed their guests (usually one Democrat elected official and one Republican elected official) on how “serious” their party’s proposals were, with “seriousness” measured in terms of how likely it was that a proposal would get passed by Congress and signed by the president. Alas, neither the Senate Democratic Budget nor the Ryan Budget came close to meeting the Seriousness standard. (Fun fact: The House Progressive Caucus budget does not exist. No one mentioned it on any of the three shows.)Continue Reading… … Read More
