Hitchcock analysis is not wanting for contributions. But here’s one anyways. Hitchcock made crime thrillers. He was the master of the form, working out crime and suspense stories with precision and an impeccable logic. A logic that, it’s been noted, included the audience for the first time, making him also a new kind of film-maker. Think of the scene in…

Things that have become muddled in the reasoning of our leaders, in their lexica, phraseology, in their presidential idioms, in the press, the media, and ultimately in our heads. To wit, I’m having a hard time this week distinguishing between the following. Are they clear to you? An act of warA terrorist actAn act of (self) defensePre-emptive strikePreventive strikeAn InsurgencyA…

I watched a bit too much news last night, eager to keep in tune (stay tuned in?) with the unravelling of the Middle East. Bush’s open mike cursing was on every channel, the word sh*t always bleeped out (one commentator requested that the White House not appoint FCC chairmen who would fine them for playing the word on television that…

The conditions for social change. I remember dodging Autonomen, clad in black balaklavas and German army (West Germany, that is) sweaters, Doc Martins, and coddling small cubes of brick pried from the sedentary and well socialized-sidewalks of Berlin as they upset peace protests to smash Kaufhaus windows and loot in opposition to Pres. Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Wall. Well…

Long ago when Condi was younger than I am now, than I was several years ago, I wrote an honors thesis while a student of international relations at Stanford arguing that trust in the international system could be accrued, in theory, as well through a regime of information transparency and communication. It was a critique of real politik, whose military…

I recently posted this attempt at defining “agonistic giving” on the P2PFoundation‘s site. As Yochai Benkler describes it, “I give because I am great.” I post this again here for reasons of simple synchronicity. Buffet and Gates popped to mind (though ironically, they might be counter-examples, their wealth in fact having been established and earning them already great power, giving…

For those of you who want “the voices in your head to be marketing voices” (willfully subversive signoff at the tail end of Jennifer Jones’ podtech podcasts), a less schizophrenic and more organized view of user-generated content is covered by the director of global marketing communications for Coke in this podcast. It’s interesting in a German kind of way. You…

Well India’s latest missile launch wobbled its way wayward and was as off course and harmless as so many shots on goal fired this weekend by the four teams remaining in the World’s Cup, a sporting analog for power, nationhood, and respect, won by Italians and wasted by our man Zizou, the striker who’s gone back into the cold. I…

I’ve long admired the hyperbolic and parabolic arc that is the narrative of both Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the line of flight traced across the sky, screamingly (famously), from Peenemunde in Prussian Germany, across the Channel’s choppy waters, the whiteness of Dover, to land, long after Brenn-schluss and with a smack that arrives only later, in London, east side.…