liquid hair

"I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see [Obama’s] first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started."

—

Andrew Sullivan’s latest, a couple paragraphs after he calls liberals “deluded.”

Yet I remain less interested in us finishing what we started, and more interested in Obama beginning what he has yet to start. Or better, still less interested. From the Nation, two years ago:

Yet a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed. Not because it is too conservative. Not because it is too liberal. But because it is too conventional. Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign—a campaign that promised to “challenge the broken system in Washington” and to “fundamentally change the way Washington works.” Indeed, “fundamental change” is no longer even a hint.

Any liberal (or sane moderate for that matter) would be crazy to say that we’re not better off today than we would have been had Obama not been elected. Of course we are. But that fact doesn’t negate the (still ignored by Sullivan et al.) criticism of the President: That he baited us with the reform rhetoric, and then switched to the administration promised by H. Clinton.

(via lessig)

Main point of my reposting is that Lessig is not only right but he manages to be right and not insulting whereas Sullivan accomplished the opposite on both.

1 week ago

lessig

23

futurejournalismproject:

Foxconn Employees Threaten Mass Suicide

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic component maker (think: Apple, Amazon, Nintendo, Dell, Panasonic… well, you get the point) is not a nice place to work. So rampant have the suicides been that last year the company made workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.

Via The Atlantic Wire:

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.

As The Atlantic Wire points out, this week’s This American Life features a trip to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China where approximately 350,000 to 450,000 people are employed.

You can listen to the episode here.

Image: Workers at Foxconn via China Southern Weekly

2 weeks ago

dagseoul

2701

kafka-on-the-shore:

Gerhard Richter Painting

A New Film Captures the German Impasto Master at Work with His Squeegee.

Nowness:

The notoriously secretive creative process of reclusive German artist Gerhard Richter is exposed in filmmaker Corinna Belz’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting. Belz spent three years as an observer in Richter’s Cologne studio capturing mesmerizing footage of the artist producing his radical abstract works. As we witness him mixing layer upon layer of bold primary colors, smearing the wet paint with a giant squeegee and scraping at the surfaces of the canvases, Richter’s masterpieces appear before our eyes. “You get the feeling the paintings are staring at you,” says Belz, who met the painter while filming his vibrant pixelated stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. “There’s a physicality to Richter’s paintings. I wanted the viewer to become immersed in the subtly suspenseful cycle of the process.” Belz’s poetic film coincides with Richter’s 80th birthday and a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern spanning five decades of his varied work.

Awesome. I love the sound the squeegee makes across the canvas. btw, the Richter exhibit @ The Tate Modern is phenomenal and it ends this Sunday. Go.