Released last month, this Sundance 2008 selection speaks directly to American financial missteps:
I.O.U.S.A. — One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.
Pretty timely. Watch a short trailer here or a longer intro below, and get more on the film here.
The stock markets are bleeding red today. Lehman Brothers has gone BK, even though it never had a quarterly loss as a public company until this past June. The financial system is a complete mess.
How did we get into what Alan Greenspan has called a “once-in-a-century” financial crisis? Let me refer you back to an episode of This American Life (“The Giant Pool of Money”) which we featured earlier this year. (Listen here.) Step by step, the show traces in its trademark, entertaining way how this credit debacle took shape. Along the way, you’ll discover how 70 trillion dollars of global money needed to get parked somewhere, and it found the US housing market. As the money poured in, the American investment community cranked out as many mortgages as it could. And when there were no more qualified home buyers left, the banks started lowering lending standards until there were none left. In the end, even dead people were getting mortgages (sadly, a true story). Give the podcast a listen. The whole debacle gets pieced together in a way that you’ve probably never heard before.
The Wire — it has monopolized my DVD player since May. As many of you hopefully know, it’s a stunning production. And if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor. Get a Netflix subscription and devote your attention to it for the next few months.
David Simon (the show’s creator) has called his HBO series “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” In a piece published in the UK last week — “The Escalating Breakdown of Urban Society Across the US” — he writes more directly about the subtext that runs throughout The Wire. The op-ed gets down to this fundamental truth: “There are two Americas — separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings [read: Baltimore and other cities like it] no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.”
In other David Simon news, you can catch him in a wide-ranging interview recorded earlier this week in San Francisco. Catch it here. MP3 — iTunes — Feed.
Thomas Friedman’s new book has finally hit the stands. Initially, it was going to be titled “Green is the New Red, White and Blue.” But somehow it got released with the far less artful — though more descriptive — title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America. When Friedman came to Stanford last year, he previewed many of his arguments in a talk that you can catch on iTunes. But, to boil it down, his argument is that a “green revolution” makes for smart economic, national security and environmental policy, and it’s an argument that gets fleshed out in a fair amount of depth in the new work. Despite the unwieldy title, it’s virtually a given that millions of copies will be sold. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it brings about a real shift in the national debate — that is, if it helps define what a green revolution really means and demonstrates how it can make national strategic sense on multiple levels. That’s a gift that Friedman has. For more on this, check out Friedman’s talk today on NPR’s Fresh Air, where he goes into more depth and offers some candid thoughts on the presidential candidates and their environmental policies. You can listen here: iTunes — RSS Feed — Stream Here.
Here’s a quick quote from the interview: The opponents have called Green “liberal, tree hugging, girly man, sissy, unpatriotic, vaguely French, and basically what I’m out to do in this book is to rename Green — it’s geopolitical, geostrategic, geoeconomic, innovative, competitive, patriotic: Green is the new Red, White, and Blue.” …
Related Content:
The World is Flat: The #1 Free Podcast on iTunesU
Michael Moore is getting wise to the virtues of free/open culture. Starting September 23, you can download his new film — Slacker Uprising — via the web for free. The unfortunate rub is that this download will only be available to US and Canadian residents, and it will remain free via the web for three weeks. You can get more info and sign up to download the film here. Below, you can also preview the film, which (surprise, surprise) ties into the American election.
Here’s another good submission (many thanks) that came out of last week’s book giveaway…
It’s an animated film called The Story of Stuff, which offers “a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something .… and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.”
The film, narrated by Annie Leonard, an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, can be viewed on The Story of Stuff web site, or it can be downloaded here for free. Below, we have posted a quick teaser that will give you a feel for what this film is all about.
What if we disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow? All of us, just like that? What would happen? How would the remaining world survive or thrive without us? That’s the scenario that gets examined by science writer Alan Weisman (who we interviewed last year) in his non-fiction eco-thriller, The World Without Us.
Now out in paperback, the book, which spent 26 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, sees things playing out like this:
With no one left to run the pumps, New York’s subway tunnels would fill with water in two days. Within 20 years, Lexington Avenue would be a river. Fire- and wind-ravaged skyscrapers would eventually fall like giant trees. Within weeks of our disappearance, the world’s 441 nuclear plants would melt down into radioactive blobs, while our petrochemical plants, ‘ticking time bombs’ even on a normal day, would become flaming geysers spewing toxins for decades to come… After about 100,000 years, carbon dioxide would return to prehuman levels. Domesticated species from cattle to carrots would revert back to their wild ancestors. And on every dehabitated continent, forests and grasslands would reclaim our farms and parking lots as animals began a slow parade back to Eden.
The World Without Us is a great read. And now some of our readers can get their hands on a free copy. We have 10 copies to give away, and here’s how we propose doing it. We’ll give a copy to the first 10 readers (living in North America) who add a quality piece of “open culture” in the comments section of this post. That is, you will need to post a link to an enriching video, podcast or mp3 that fellow readers will enjoy, and tell us a little about why. When we get ten quality clips, we will then package them in a post and share them with the larger community. In short, think of it as you get as you give. How nice. Very Kumbaya. (Watch Joan Baez sing it). Now let’s see what you’ve got.
NOTE: We can only ship to readers in North America. And, yes, that includes Canada this time, and Mexico too. To our many international readers, I apologize for the geographical limitation. And we’ll try to make things up to you down the line. We do appreciate you.
Also please note that if you’re selected, I will also eventually need your name and mailing address.
Richard Muller teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents. You can watch it on YouTube (above). And now you can buy Muller’s new book. Just published by W.W. Norton, Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines gives citizens the scientific knowledge they need to understand critical issues facing our society — is “Iran’s nascent nuclear capability … a genuine threat to the West,” are there “viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government,” and should “nuclear power should be encouraged”? These issues (and more) get tackled here. For more info on the book, you can listen to a good interview conducted this morning (mp3) here in San Francisco.
Muller’s course, Physics for Future Presidents, has been added to our collection of Free Online Physics Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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