Category: Television
*Seven Worlds, One Planet*
That is the new David Attenborough BBC nature show, available on streaming or buy the discs from the UK. Believe it or not it has better footage than the earlier BBC nature shows, while remaining inside the basic template of what such shows attempt to accomplish. Here is a very good Guardian review. Here is a somewhat snotty NYT review, bemoaning Attenborough’s tone of “polite optimism.” Strongly recommended.
Dracula on Gratitude
I enjoyed the Dracula mini-series on Netflix–it’s smart, stylish and a fresh take. Also, at just three episodes, it’s satisfying without requiring a huge time investment.
Dracula has some pointed commentary on contemporary mores, including economics. After sleeping for a hundred years he finds himself in an ordinary home and speaks to the owner, Kathleen:
D: You’re clearly very wealthy.
K: Wealthy?
D: Yes. Well, look at all this stuff. All this food. The moving picture box. And that thing outside, Bob calls it um, a car. And this treasure trove is your house!
K: It’s a dump.
D: Kathleen, I’ve been a nobleman for 400 years. I’ve lived in castes and palaces among the richest people of any age. Never….never! Have I stood in greater luxury than surrounds me now. This is a chamber of marvels. There isn’t a king, or queen or emperor that I have ever known or eaten who would step into this room and ever agree to leave it again.
I knew the future would bring wonders. I did not know it would make them ordinary.
Who were the two most powerful and effective orators of the decade?
My picks and Trump and Greta Thunberg, in that order, as explained in my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
My choice for second place is Greta Thunberg. In little more than a year, Thunberg has moved from being an unheard-of 16-year-old Swedish girl to Time’s Person of the Year. While she is now a social media phenomenon, her initial ascent was driven by her public speaking. Communication is quite simply what she does.
As a public speaker, Thunberg is memorable. The unusual prosody of autistic voices is sometimes considered a disadvantage, but she has turned her voice and her extreme directness into an unforgettably bracing style. She communicates urgency and moral seriousness on climate change at a time when the world is not taking decisive action. She mixes anger and condemnation with the look of a quite innocent young girl. Her Swedish version of a British accent is immediately recognizable. There is usually no one else in the room who looks or acts like her.
Her core speech she can give in about five minutes, perfect for an age of limited attention spans. She speaks in short, clipped phrases, each one perfect word-for-word. It is easy to excerpt discrete sentences on social media or on television.
As for memorable phrases, how about these: “I don’t want your hope.” “Did you hear what I just said?” “I want you to panic.” And of course: “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
These days, you can simply say the name “Greta” in many parts of the world, and people will know who you are referring to.
You will note that under the formal DSM definition of autism, deficits in communication are a fundamental feature of the condition — perhaps that should be changed? Greta uses the term “selective mutism” in describing herself, but clearly the actual reality is more than just a simple deficit, rather an uneven pattern with very high peaks. As I wrote in the column, communicating is what she does.
One other point — I frequently hear or read people charge that Greta is being manipulated by her parents. I have no real knowledge of the Thunberg family, but in the research literature on prodigies it is clear that virtually all of those who have achieved something early had quite extreme self-motivation, a common feature of autism I might add.
Tuvalu fact of the day
Nearly 25 years later, the internet’s full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the island, but its evolution has made Tuvalu’s .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu’s contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher…
As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu’s domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.
Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation’s Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment.
Here is the full story, there are about 11,000 Tuvaluns. For the pointer I thank Shaffin.
My look back at the last decade
Via Bloomberg, here is one bit:
Consider the 10 best-selling books of the decade. All have female protagonists, and the top seven are authored by women. (“Fifty Shades of Grey” and its sequels take the top three spots, with three others having the word “Girl” in the title.)
The feminization of our culture is for me trend number one. Next in line is screens:
They simply convey more interesting narratives than most of the other spaces in our lives.
There is much more at the link.
Not your grandpa’s talent show
Hosted by Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma, the four-hour entrepreneurial talent show had all the production values of The Apprentice.
But the glitzy televised extravaganza, in which 10 contestants battled for $1m in prize money in front of a boisterous audience, took place neither in the US nor China. The action unfolded instead on a stage in Ghana, the first of what is set to be an Africa-wide annual contest as one of China’s best known businessmen scours the continent for younger versions of himself…
Mr Ma came up with the idea of the $1m prize — and the Africa Netpreneur television show to go with it — after meeting young Kenyan entrepreneurs on his first trip to the continent as a special adviser to the UN agency Unctad in 2017…
The Netpreneur show is due to be broadcast in mid-December on two channels with a pan-African presence, South Africa’s DStv and StarTimes, a Chinese media company. During the filming, Mr Ma sat on a raised dais next to three fellow judges: Strive Masiyiwa, the billionaire Zimbabwean founder of telecoms and media company Econet Wireless, Ibukun Awosika, chairman of First Bank of Nigeria, and Joe Tsai, executive vice-chairman of Alibaba.
Where are the Smothers Brothers? Here is the full David Pilling FT story.
Television facts of the day
There were 496 scripted TV shows made in the US last year, more than double the 216 series released in 2010. In the past eight years the number of shows grew by 129 per cent, while the US population rose only 6 per cent. The trend is set to deepen, as groups like AT&T’s WarnerMedia commission dozens of new series to convince people to sign up for their streaming services.
…In the span of about six months, Disney, Apple, AT&T and Comcast are launching new streaming services, asking people to pay nothing for some services or up to $15 a month to watch their libraries of films and shows.
Here is more from Anna Nicolaou and Alex Barker at the FT. Yes, you might be tempted to short this sector and perhaps I am too. Still, another possible part of the equilibrium adjustment is simply that the market swallows the content and factor prices fall, a’la music streaming. That would be one way to get all of those costly special effects out of so many movies.
My Conversation with Samantha Power
Samantha Power has a new and excellent book out, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, which I very much enjoyed. And so a Conversation with Tyler was in order, here is the audio and transcript, here is one bit:
COWEN: For a final closing segment, I just have some super simple questions about foreign policy again. Over the course of the last summer, Iran apparently seized two British tankers. There’ve been other incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in some way connected with Iran. From a game-theoretic point of view, why would they do this? Why does this make sense?
POWER: Well, the one thing that they would know that would give them some point of leverage is the extreme war fatigue within the United States, and really within the Western world. So, by upping the stakes, arguably — I mean, who knows why the hell they’re doing what they’re doing?
But by upping the stakes, they arguably could be sending a signal like, “You want to get in this game? It’s not as if we’re an island and you can just break the deal, penalize us gratuitously, penalize the people who are still trying to maintain the terms of the deal, and that there won’t be collateral consequences outside the nuclear space.”
Because the nuclear consequences, as they begin to enrich and violate the terms of the deal — having legitimately argued that we had violated the terms of the deal — the effects of those are not day-to-day effects in the news world. It’s a bit abstract for the public and even for policymakers. It’s an incremental abrogation.
But acts like this show that they have leverage, that they are active militarily in parts of the world where we have a vested interest in maintaining freedom of navigation. So I think they’re showing that they can hit in domains outside the nuclear domain. I think that is probably what they’re doing.
Here is another segment:
COWEN: In which ways do you feel your thought is in some manner still Irish in orientation in a way that would distinguish you from, say, American-born individuals?
POWER: It’s hard to know because I can’t run the counterfactual, so I don’t know what’s just because my mother is a physician and very empathetic toward her patients, and do I learn from that? Or am I moved by having come from a small country, at that time a poor country, that was sending —
COWEN: With a history of oppression, right?
POWER: With a history of oppression, with a history of the dignity of its people being trampled. Is that why I care so much about individual dignity? Again, I can’t run the history a different way.
And finally:
COWEN: Very simple — are baseball games too long? Why not make it 7 innings?
POWER: Why not make it 12?
COWEN: It’s boring, right?
POWER: For you and, as it turns out, for others.
COWEN: For me. So many games are over 3 hours. Shouldn’t the game be 2 hours, 17 minutes?
We also cover her first impressions of America, being a wartime correspondent, China and Iraq, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, van Morrison vs. Bob Dylan, robot empires vs. robot umpires, her favorite novel, how personal one should get in a memoir and why, and German defense spending, among other topics.
Definitely recommended.
Lie to Me
From A Test of the Micro Expressions Training Tool:
The theory behind micro‐expressions posits that when people attempt to mask their true emotional state, expressions consistent with their actual state will appear briefly on their face. Thus, while people are generally good at hiding their emotions, some facial muscles are more difficult to control than others and automatic displays of emotion will produce briefly detectable emotional “leakage” or micro‐expressions (Ekman, 1985). When a person does not wish to display his or her true feelings s/he will quickly suppress these expressions. Yet, there will be an extremely short time between the automatic display of the emotion and the conscious attempt to conceal it, resulting in the micro‐expression(s) that can betray a true feeling and according to theory, aid in detecting deception.
…The METT Advanced programme, marketed by the Paul Ekman Group (2011), coined an “online training to increase emotional awareness and detect deception” and promoted with claims that it “… enables you to better spot lies” and “is meant for those whose work requires them to evaluate truthfulness and detect deception—such as police and security personnel” (Paul Ekman Group, METT Advanced‐Online only, para. 2). The idea that micro‐expression recognition improves lie detection has also been put forth in the scientific literature (Ekman, 2009; Ekman & Matsumoto, 2011; Kassin, Redlich, Alceste, & Luke, 2018) and promoted in the wider culture. One example of this is its use as a focal plot device in the crime drama television series Lie to Me, which ran for three seasons (Baum, 2009). Though a fictional show, Lie to Me was promoted as being based on the research of Ekman. Ekman himself had a blog for the show in which he discussed the science of each episode (Ekman, 2010). Micro‐expression recognition training is not only marketed for deception detection but, more problematically, is actually used for this purpose by the United States government. Training in recognising micro‐expressions is part of the behavioural screening programme, known as Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) used in airport security (Higginbotham, 2013; Smith, 2011; Weinberger, 2010). The SPOT programme deploys so‐called behaviour detection officers who receive various training in detecting deception from nonverbal behaviour, including training using the METT (the specific content of this programme is classified, Higginbotham, 2013). Evidently, preventing terrorists from entering the country’s borders and airports is an important mission. However, to our knowledge, there is no research on the effectiveness of METT in improving lie detection accuracy or security screening efficacy.
…Our findings do not support the use of METT as a lie detection tool. The METT did not improve accuracy any more than a bogus training protocol or even no training at all. The METT also did not improve accuracy beyond the level associated with guessing. This is problematic to say the least given that training in the recognition of micro‐expressions comprises a large part of a screening system that has become ever more pervasive in our aviation security (Higginbotham, 2013; Weinberger, 2010).
Note that the online training failed but micro-expressions are real and better, more intensive training or maybe an AI could do better though on that last I wouldn’t accept the hype.
Hat tip the excellent Rolf Degen on twitter.
Chernobyl model this
Now, in a strange turn more than three decades after the meltdown, the exclusion area around Chernobyl is gaining a following as a tourism destination, apparently propelled by the popularity of a TV mini-series about the blast that was broadcast in the United States and Britain last month.
The mini-series, HBO’s “Chernobyl,” fictionalizes the events in the aftermath of the explosion and fire at the plant’s Unit 4 nuclear reactor. It has been one of the highest-rated shows on the IMDB charts.
“The number of visitors increases every day, every week, by 30, 40, now almost 50 percent,” said Victor Korol, the head of SoloEast, a company that gives tours of the site. “People watch TV, and they want to go there and see the place, how it looks.”
Here is the full NYT story by Iliana Magra. Not long ago I predicted, half tongue in cheek, that the Chernobyl show could end up making nuclear power more rather than less popular…
Fleabag and Killing Eve
Fleabag (Amazon) and Killing Eve (BBC America) are two television shows written by the absolutely brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge who also stars in the former. I tweeted:
Fleabag 2nd Season even better than 1st. An indelible portrait of toxic femininity. No accident that the brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge also wrote Killing-Eve featuring a different female killer but in male style and fantasy form rather than the more mature & realistic Fleabag.
Not everyone understood the tweet and some were confused. How could Fleabag be about toxic femininity when Waller-Bridge is a feminist? Fleabag is misunderstood because people try to frame it in terms of victimhood and Waller-Bridge is having none of that. Her method for illustrating the equality of the sexes is to show that women can be just as evil as men. Fleabag is much darker and more religious and mystical than most people realize.
I have written somewhat elliptically in what follows so as not to give much away but….mild spoiler warning. Herewith some observations.
Killing Eve features the serial killer, Villanelle. In one episode, she kills her lover using perfume. What could be a better metaphor for toxic femininity than that? Although they appear very different, Villanelle and Fleabag have much in common. Both of them, for example, are sociopaths.
Fleabag says as much herself, “I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman.” But even more telling is that the other characters tell us that Fleabag is a sociopath. “You know exactly what you are doing,” “You only do what you want,” “You know what you are going to do,” or words to that effect are said many times. To understand Fleabag the show, you need to take these words seriously and backcast them to the events that happened before Season One. Namely, in a fit of sexual jealousy, Fleabag decided that if she can’t have what she wants then no one will. She wills it. It happens.
In doubt? Consider the scene at the funeral of Fleabag’s mother. Is she upset? Distraught? In tears? No, she looks radiant. She is more beautiful, more composed, more at peace on the day of her mother’s funeral than any day before and everyone tells her so. “I have never seen you looks so good,” “You look glorious,” and my favorite, “Gosh, grief really agrees with you.” Her body tells the truth. It is a mistake to wish this away.
In Season One, Fleabag is only just realizing the power that her sociopathy and sexual charisma bestow upon her and at first she is frightened. By S2, however, she is in command and we see her using her intense sexual charisma to bend men to her will. Men worship her and she treats them like objects and playthings. In one case, she literally has her boyfriend on his hands and knees scrubbing the floors. It’s hilarious.
FB is not the only example of toxic femininity in the series. The stepmother is an older version of Fleabag who also uses her sexual charisma to get what she wants. She has Fleabag’s father by the balls and to prove it she hangs them on the wall (I am not making this up). Fleabag cannot defeat the passive-aggressive stepmother because her sexual powers work only over men (notice the Kristen Scott Thomas scene and recall that FB didn’t get what she really wanted pre Season One). The stepmother is in fact a kind of witch who uses words to destroy those around her even though the words themselves are pleasant sounding. The stepmother also fashions a voodoo doll, a statue of Fleabag’s mother–whom she has replaced–that is notably beheaded.
The real plot of Season Two is that Fleabag is bored by how easy it is to control men and so she goes after bigger game. Can she top her pre-Season One triumph? Can she steal a man from God? Priest and witch enter into a battle of wits and wills. The Priest thinks he is going to exorcise her demons. This is a feminist show. He doesn’t.
The priest is a very interesting character. He is specifically introduced as a new priest, i.e. a new church, and he is young and cool and sexy. He is also a complete failure. Is Waller-Bridge, who was schooled by nuns, saying the new church fails or the church in general? Either way, despite being celestially warned, the priest fails God, he fails the Church and, perhaps most of all, he fails Fleabag. To be saved, Fleabag needed to find an incorruptible man, one who truly believes that there are bigger things than sex and dominance and worship of self. Instead, she finds in the church nothing but hypocrisy. In choosing sex over God and devotion to others, the Priest violates a sacred trust just as the pedophile priests violated their sacred trust (and Waller-Bridge makes clear the family resemblance). It does not take much imagination to see that the Priest will soon meet his fate in an alcoholic stupor (many hints are given).
In the final scene Fleabag walks into the sunset contentedly, like a talented Mrs. Ripley. The priest leaves in the opposite direction pursued by a demon symbolizing his failure to guard his flock.
Addendum: By the way, we never learn Fleabag’s name. She is a temptress who kills. Thus, another good name for Fleabag would be Killing Eve.
Measurement for everything
One of the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood has a new tool to help with gender equality and inclusion.
In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.
It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.
Here is the full Melena Ryzik NYT story.
My Conversation with Margaret Atwood
She requires no introduction, this conversation involved a bit of slapstick, so unlike many of the others it is better heard than read. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the opening:
COWEN: Just to start with some basic questions about Canada, which you’ve written on for decades — what defines the Canadian sense of humor?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Wow. [laughs] What defines the Canadian sense of humor? I think it’s a bit Scottish.
COWEN: How so?
ATWOOD: Well, it’s kind of ironic. It depends on what part of Canada you’re in. I think the further west you go, the less of a sense of humor they have.
[laughter]
ATWOOD: But that’s just my own personal opinion. My family’s from Nova Scotia, so that’s as far east as you can get. And they go in for deadpan lying.
[laughter]
COWEN: In 1974, you wrote, “The Canadian sense of humor was often obsessed with the issue of being provincial versus being cosmopolitan.”
ATWOOD: Yeah.
COWEN: You think that’s still true?
ATWOOD: Depends again. You know, Canada’s really big. In fact, there’s a song called “Canada’s Really Big.” You can find it on the internet. It’s by a group called the Arrogant Worms. That kind of sums up Canada right there for you.
The burden of the song is that all of these other countries have got all of these other things, but what Canada has is, it’s really big. It is, in fact, very big. Therefore, it’s very hard to say what is particularly Canadian. It’s a bit like the US. Which part of the US is the US? What is the most US thing —
COWEN: Maybe it’s Knoxville, Tennessee, right now. Right? The Southeast.
ATWOOD: You think?
COWEN: But it used to be Cleveland, Ohio.
ATWOOD: Did it?
COWEN: Center of manufacturing.
ATWOOD: When was that? [laughs] When was that?
COWEN: If you look at where the baseball teams are, you see what the US —
And from her:
ATWOOD: Yeah, so what is the most Canadian thing about Canada? The most Canadian thing about Canada is that when they ran a contest that went “Finish this sentence. As American as apple pie. As Canadian as blank,” the winning answer was “As Canadian as plausible under the circumstances.”
And a question from me:
COWEN: But you’ve spoken out in favor of the cultural exception being part of the NAFTA treaty that protects Canadian cultural industries. Is it strange to think that having more than half the [Toronto] population being foreign born is not a threat to Canadian culture, but that being able to buy a copy of the New York Times in Canada is a threat?
In addition to Canada, we talk about the Bible, Shakespeare, ghosts, her work habits, Afghanistan, academia, Peter the Great, writing for the future, H.G. Wells, her heretical feminism, and much much more.
Cable TV really does matter for political outcomes
This is only one estimate, from Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu, but nonetheless it is backed by a plausible identification stragegy and this is very interesting research:
We find that in a hypothetical world without Fox News but with no other changes, the Republican vote share in the 2000 election would have been about half a percentage point lower. By 2008, the effect of there being no Fox News rises to more than six percentage points – a result of the channel’s increasing viewership and increasingly conservative slant over this period.
Unfortunately, that is followed by a real clunker of a paragraph:
All of these results suggest that citizens and regulators have reason to be concerned about media consolidation and the non-market objectives of media owners. A hypothetical monopolist controlling all three channels and interested in electoral influence would have enormous power over election outcomes.
How many things are wrong in those two sentences? How can a profession supposedly devoted to rigor allow such sloppy thought to continue? Here are a few of my objections:
1. The real story in this paper is about Fox News, and Fox — whether you like it or not — is very much an alternative to the mainstream media approach. If you don’t like Fox, you might have preferred the “bad old days” of three dominant and pretty similar networks.
2. Do the authors have any argument that “the non-market objectives of media owners” are bad? No. In fact, there is a longstanding literature that “the market objectives of media owners” are bad, whether you agree or not. Do they really just mean to say “I don’t like Fox News”? Just say it. Don’t worry, I don’t think most authors, especially of media studies, are objective to begin with.
3. Don’t the results suggest we should perhaps be worried about polarized news rather than consolidated news ownership?
4. Is it possible to consolidate news ownership in a world with so many cable channels and so many news alternatives to cable? I strongly doubt this, but in any case it is not something the authors have shown. Instead, they have shown that a renegade news channel can rise to a position of great political influence.
5. Might it have been better simply to have written?: “I am really worried that Rupert Murdoch, in the absence of regulation, could buy up all the news channels and implement political outcomes I do not like.” That is an entirely coherent argument, and I wonder if it isn’t what the authors were getting at but couldn’t bring themselves to write it and thus were forced into the most illogical two sentences I have read this week.
6. By the way, Murdoch owns a lot of media properties and most of them have political stances, and most of all tones, fairly different from that of Fox News. Worth a ponder.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.
a16z Podcast: Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture
I interview Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, not a Conversation but nonetheless a conversation, they were both in top form. Here is the link.