or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
May 21, 2010
Five Dollar Friday
Explanation of Five Dollar Friday here. Follow who else is giving on twitter.
Got to start getting this out earlier. Today's $5 goes to This American Life to begin repaying them for all the bandwidth of theirs I've used downloading podcasts. I actually am not a big fan of their big hour-long shows on the economy—in this one, for instance, they were appallingly credulous. That said, they've done great work on other topics for years, and in fact are getting much better economy-wise; their recent show on Magnetar was excellent.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at May 21, 2010 10:54 PMConcur! Some of those economics pieces were not just naive, but downright NPR-ish in their propaganda
Posted by: tooearly at May 22, 2010 04:23 AMThat and even the latest one had them working with rather apparently elitist liberal groups:
http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/42-media-spin/4706-investigating-the-investigators
part 2 and part 3:
http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/42-media-spin/4712-investigating-the-investigators
Posted by: Jenny at May 22, 2010 09:36 PMOT: what happened to Prof. Chazelle? miss his musical posts.
Posted by: ran at May 23, 2010 12:33 AMFrankly the hosts of that show make me want to throttle them. The casualness seems so forced, and frankly obnoxious. Worse than the NPR monotone, in my opinion. The only thing worse than NPR - NPR for my generation.
Still the piece on Magnetar was good. Better than the stuff on the spin-off economics show. They came to the party late & still buy neoliberalism. It's almost endearing.
Posted by: Erik at May 23, 2010 11:44 PM@ran
Yes, other commenters had also expressed the same sentiments some time ago. I hope, Prof Chazelle will return to ATR on Memorial Day for one of his usual unforgettable Memorial Day posts.
Posted by: Rupa Shah at May 24, 2010 03:53 PMUgh, they follow up magnetar with a piece on Haiti. Whatever is wrong with those Haitians? They sure are backward. Strange, despite all that help, they just get poorer and poorer...
Posted by: Erk at May 24, 2010 11:34 PMYes, I was just listening to that. One of their worst shows ever.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at May 25, 2010 03:23 AMWhen you let pass without comment that the deceased head of a missionary hospital was a big Columbus fan...wow.
