In a world of accelerating obsolescence, of plastic products and digital information, a few old-school craftsman are still hanging on. But they’re getting harder and harder to find. In this pair of short films we meet a few craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic who are stubbornly persisting while the world changes around them.

Earlier this month, we posted a pair of Wes Anderson-directed television commercials advertising the Hyundai Azera. While I understood that, at one time, a known auteur using his cinematic powers to pitch sensible sedans would have raised hackles, I didn’t realize that it could still spark a lively debate today.

You have to appreciate the paradox of Banksy: A commercially successful anti-capitalist. A vandal who adds value. It’s the sort of amusing contradiction that appears often in the artist’s own work.

Joseph Stiglitz teaches at the Columbia Business School and Columbia’s Department of Economics and, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.

Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing, Meltdown, a four part investigation into the great financial debacle of 2008.

In March 2000, Yale economist Robert Shiller published Irrational Exuberance, a book that warned that the long-running bull market was a bubble. Weeks later, the market cracked and Shiller was the new guru.

Al Jazeera forced many Westerns viewers to take their reporting seriously during the Egyptian uprising this spring, and now the Qatar-based news network has released a timely reportage (Aug. 2) on the fault lines in America — on the gap between rich and poor that only grew wider this week. Alexis de Tocqueville they’re not.

No light, no civilization. It’s pretty much that simple. And it’s this simple idea that m ss ng p eces, a Brooklyn-based creative company, explores ever so artfully in The Story of Light.

Last month, China hit another major milestone. It passed Japan and became the second largest economy in the world, leaving only the US in its way. Give China a decade, maybe a little more, and it will inevitably surge into the lead. That’s the accepted narrative.

In the late 1990s, Errol Morris, the acclaimed director, was hired to make a film for an “in house” conference of IBM employees. Eventually IBM canceled the conference, and the film was scrapped. (Watch a clip of it here.