Precious samples or excess inventory?

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Gilt Group is on track for $500MM in revenue in 2010. What's interesting is that the CEO is positioning Gilt as a way for designers to try out risky designs and offload them if they don't sell, but I don't know if Gilt can avoid lowering the perceived value of the designer brands they're working with. But that's clearly an issue CEO Susan Lyne is cognizant of. She's positioning Gilt as a way for designers to earn new customers, not a way for existing customers to get the goods at a lower price.



The day a particular label is on Gilt, traffic to that brand's site increases, across the board. Anecdotally, so many people have told me, "Oh my god, my new favorite designer is ..." because they were able to try a new one at a price that felt comfortable. If I'm going to drop $3,000 on a jacket, I'm probably going to do it on one of my old favorites, a smaller universe of brands that I know and I'm comfortable with. Starting this year, we're going to be selling exclusive items and capsule collections from emerging labels such as Trovata and Yigal Azrouël.



This is always the challenge for luxury brands who work with discounters. If you see a Prada suit on discount for 50% of retail price over and over, will you ever pay full price for a Prada suit again, even if your move up the socioeconomic ladder? Perhaps, but it's always a risk. The one thing Gilt has going for it is that the supplies of their goods are so limited that their argument that they're offering limited opportunities to sample designers is more credible than sample sales and other luxury discount websites that seem like endless bounties of luxury goods that were duds at their original price (I went with my sister-in-law to the Barney's Warehouse Sale in NYC a few years back, and because there were no dressing rooms, I saw people stripping down in aisles in a sterile, fluorescent-lit basement to try on samples grabbed from numerous bins that contained designer clothing that had been hand tossed into a sort of fabric salad, hardly the most flattering light in which to present those luxury brands).


When will someone make a Gilt Group for typefaces? That's something I'd appreciate when wearing my individual and not corporate budget hat.


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The intentional fallacy

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This profile of Quentin Tarantino in the LATimes is notable for revealing the director's desire to reign in the deep mining of his movies' for key source material.



But as it turns out, after all these years of happily giving it up for his favorite filmmakers, Tarantino has become deeply conflicted about discussing the sources of his influences, in large part because Tarantino's honesty has often been used against him by critics and bloggers when they want to belittle his films or blame the filmmaker's endless parade of movie references for the swarm of mindless Harry Knowles-style fanboys who now dominate the online movie scene. In the course of a long conversation the other day, Tarantino managed to go--in a matter of minutes--from saying he "loved having influences" to saying that he was "unbelievably annoyed" with critics who used his reliance on influences as a way of trashing his movies.


After checking out some of the critical feedback to Tarantino's films, I began to feel his pain. In the course of an otherwise admiring review of "Basterds," Roger Ebert argued that judging from the way Tarantino photographed Melanie Laurent near the end of the film, focusing on her shoes, lips, dress and facial veil, "you can't tell me [that] he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano." (Cackling with laughter, Tarantino's response was a resounding: "No.")


But the critic that really got under his skin was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, who in the course of reviewing "Kill Bill" said the movie felt as if Tarantino "were holding us captive on a moldy postgraduate couch somewhere, subjecting us to 90 minutes worth of his favorite movie clips strung together, accompanied by an exhausting running commentary along the lines of 'Isn't this great?' "


To say that Tarantino finds this aggravating would be an understatement. "Here's my problem with this whole influence thing," he told me. "Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making. It feels like the critics are IMDB-ing everything I do. It just rubs me the wrong way because they end up using it as a stick to beat me down with."



This is a classic critical analysis dilemma: can we, should we, guess the artist's intent? I side with the thesis of W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that argues that interpreting a piece of art based on knowledge of the artist's life or factors external to the work itself should not be the primary type of criticism. That type of criticism is not replicable, and as is clear from the article above, is often fallible. Many movie critics are taking wild guesses, often wrong ones, about what Tarantino's influences are.


A closely related problem is one that is hinted at in a line near the end of A.O. Scott's review of Shutter Island, and that is whether critics bring too much historical appreciation of director to their later works. Maybe we can label this the "auteur delusion"?



Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.


There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt.



This has been a common addendum to many critical reviews of the movie, which I have not seen. Those who don't like the movie imply that many who do are Scorsese fanboys who see art in even his weakest movies.


It's hard to argue with the idea that each movie should be approached on its own merits. For me, the tendency I must combat is the reverse, and that is my attraction to contrarian opinions. People whose opinions offer differ with me and who seem like bright thinkers intrigue me. It's the Sherlock Holmes mystique, the idea that there's a thinker out there so logical and unemotional that his thinking clarifies your own.


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What to learn from customers

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Is El Bulli closing permanently after 2011, or reopening after two years as an institute, or has Chef Ferran Adrià even planned that far in advance? Stories are all over the place, including speculation over how such a coveted reservation (estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million for how many people apply for one of the 8,000 annual seats) could lead to a restaurant losing half a million euros a year (a fact reported in a handful of articles).


In this synposis of an HBS case on El Bulli, Adrià offers a hint as to his restaurant's financial situation when he says, "I should charge 600 euros [for a meal at elBulli] but I do not cook for millionaires. I cook for sensitive people."


The article ends with HBS professor Michael Norton noting, "Adrià says he doesn't listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That's an interesting riddle to consider."


That's not actually puzzling. At Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos used to say that you can't build a product just by listening to customers. They're good at telling you what they don't like, but not so good at telling you what they want. As an entrepreneur you have to innovate on their behalf. We knew at Amazon that perhaps the most significant barrier to buying online was shipping charges. Customers would tell you again and again that they hated to pay shipping fees, even when they were offset by not having to pay sales tax. But they couldn't tell us what solution we could offer since shipping is not free.


That's where Amazon innovated on behalf of the consumer, first in the form of Super Saver Shipping, then in the form of Amazon Prime. We traded in some of the gross margin efficiencies of the business model to subsidize shipping and offset it with revenue volume from the increased orders that resulted from removing the massive psychological hurdle of shipping costs.


The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. "Adrià's idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know," Norton observes. "If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I'll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can't listen to the customer."

A Hulu success story

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I'm fairly certain this is the most successfully named movie in Hulu's catalog. Not that you need to make a movie with "sex" in the title to hit it big, but given the powerful bloc of young males voting with their mouse clicks and search queries, it was a built-in advantage. You still need to make something people want to watch; attracting that first click doesn't get you the full check, but with each ad break you keep a viewer through earns you additional revenue.


Still, the naming shouldn't be discounted here. The filmmaker Stevie Long didn't know his movie would end up on Hulu so it may just be chance, but knowing your distribution medium and tailoring something to break through on that medium is something more independent artists looking to break through should consider. When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, he specifically wanted a name for the company that began with the letter A because so many directories for the web were organized alphabetically back then. Being on page 1 was a big deal.


Strictly Sexual is also a testament to the power of free, or in this case, semi-free. There are many sites that will charge you $5 for an online rental of indie films, but if you're an independent filmmaker who thinks someone will drop $5 on a movie they've never heard of, you're likely overvaluing monetary payback and undervaluing exposure. But Long's example shows you don't always have to trade off between the two. Per CNN, he's reinvesting his profits into his next film, "Porn Star: The Ugly Life of a Beautiful Girl," which he'll release directly on the internet.


Why mess with the formula?


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Stereotypes of non-profits versus for-profits

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This may seem self-evident, but a research study reveals that consumers think of non-profits as "warm, generous and caring organizations, but lacking the competence to produce high-quality goods or services and run financially sound businesses" while stereotyping for-profit companies as "more competent from a balance sheet perspective, but are not necessarily socially aware."


This has significant implications for non-profits who are looking to increase donations. It's tough to expect people to open their pockets to you if you're seen as financially incompetent. It's the equivalent of the image problem homeless people must overcome when asking for change; some people think they'll spend the money frivolously, for example on alcohol.


How do non-profits and for-profits combat the problems with their respective stereotypes? More for-profit companies seem to have succeeded in this effort: companies that make green products or contribute revenue consistently to green causes are obvious examples.


One issue for non-profits may be that individuals who volunteer for non-profits often experience the chaotic processes that result when a group of people who've never worked before are thrown together to organize an impromptu charity event. My experience is that the successful operation of such events often depends on the leadership of one or two charismatic people rather than the process or institution itself, and others who feel the same will be biased to suspect that most events run by that charity are not as fortunate.


I suspect one reason DonorsChoose.org has been so successful is that it feels like your money is just being routed directly to the end recipient, with DonorsChoose being just a simple lightweight software marketplace in the middle. You don't imagine a somewhat chaotic and overwhelmed group of human volunteers sitting in the middle writing checks and licking stamps to mail your payments, so it feels efficient.


[The other advantage of DonorsChoose.org is the direct connection created between you and the recipient(s). I received a personal thank-you note from the last group I donated money to. This isn't a new idea for non-profits, but with the Internet it should be simpler and lower cost to facilitate. This is, unfortunately, an area that huge charities like The Red Cross of The American Cancer Society may continue to struggle with considering they don't always know where your money is going to go, towards what research, etc. But technology makes it possible to trace your donation if that's the goal they set for themselves. Knowing exactly where your money goes would be a huge upgrade of the donation experience.]


Another option, of course, is to not rely on donations for your funds but to instead launch an immensely successful company and make a fortune that way, then spend the rest of your life distributing that fortune to causes that move you. Not recommended for most.


A related point here is the value of brand. Because it's so hard to directly measure the value of brand, most companies discount it heavily. It's easy to focus on those parts of your brand that you have functional areas focused on anyhow, like the product, but when your brand may be impacted by external forces, or by something that isn't directly the result of one group or person's work inside the company, it's easy to let it slip by unaddressed.


I have every person on my team answer user e-mails because it's the one way I know of to ground them in real conversation with our end users who we're focused on serving. Brand exists somewhere in between our work and our users reception of that work. The tricky part is finding the right moments to shift between a creator's conviction and sympathy.


Have athletes peaked?

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Some scientists and researchers who've studied the history of athletic achievement and biomechanics say yes. In today's environment, it's not surprising that the article wonders if this will lead to a rise in human enhancements, technological or chemical, legal or illegal.


The Olympics may seem particularly vulnerable to waning interest if records stop being broken given the omnipresent WR bogeys posted prominently next to on-screen timers, but it may not be the end of the world. If we think of sports as primarily an entertainment product, with user interest as the end goal, some strategies suggest themselves.


1. Sports that pit athletes against each other on the same course at the same time are inherently more interesting than those where athletes are by themselves. Short track speed skating is more interesting to me than long-distance speed skating because of this. Snowboard cross and it's new cousin ski cross are a lot of fun to watch for the same reason.


2. Almost any world-class level athlete is impressive, but it's not always easy to appreciate their talent on TV, so I suggest a revolution in helping people appreciate professional athleticism. The NIke commercial "The Michael Vick Experience" was obviously fictional (insert your animal brutality joke here), but the principle is sound. Why don't we have more camera angles to watch sports with as in videogames? Why can't you put a small lightweight camera on Drew Brees' helmet (and every other player's helmet) so you can see what it's like to play quarterback in the NFL? Why can't we broadcast baseball in 3-D with a special catcher helmet cam to help us appreciate what it's like to try and hit a Justin Verlander fastball? Why not more microphones at field level so we can get an enhanced audio experience during live broadcasts instead of being forced to listen to an often uninspiring play-by-play announcer? Hockey is so much more exciting to see live than on TV, but what if you could toggle into any player's helmet and hear 5.1 surround audio of what he's experiencing? What if, when you were at the gym, you could watch cycling on a TV but also dial in the pro's wattage and speed output to see if you could keep up? What if you could sprint on the treadmill as fast as you could go and see an avatar of your body on screen next to Usain Bolt, just to get a sense for how fast he really is? The Olympics showcased innovations like the dive cam at the last Summer Olympics, and they have cameras that move along side sprinters. I'm confident they can continue to innovate on this axis.


3. More human interest context. Some scoff at the edited puff pieces introducing athlete life stories during the Olympics, but a personal connection always helps to give you more rooting interests. What if more of these aired, not just during the Olympics, but during regular sporting events? It doesn't even have to be a tearjerker of a story. Would knowing what NYC night club Derek Jeter was out at the night before, and with whom, enhance your appreciation of his performance in that day's game? I'm being somewhat facetious, but the bland canned sports interview responses are doing no one any favors. I'll cap this point by saying that Tiger Woods just got a whole lot more interesting as a person given the events of the past few months, and that first appearance of his back on the golf course is going to do great ratings (if his exploits continued, the lift might not last, but for now it's big news). Back story and character development isn't any less effective in the sports world.


4. I wouldn't be surprised to see alternative sports leagues spawned that compete with established leagues like MLB, NBA, and the NFL by allowing any and all performance-enhancing drugs. In addition, excessive endzone celebrations, Twittering during games, taunting, all that would be fair game. Much like the UFC overtook boxing by going where boxing wasn't, it's more fruitful to compete with the big monopoly sports in the US by going where they won't.


I confess to having no solutions for enhancing the appeal of curling, though. Maybe release a Good Will Hunting variant in which Matt Damon is still that janitor at MIT, but it's his amazing floor sweeping skills that lead to him being discovered and becoming a world class curler? Or introduce drinking in some way. That's all I've got.


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Taking the status quo for granted

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A short interview with Peter Thiel, who sounds like an interesting thinker just based on this read.



Thiel: People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional. If you had done the equivalent of investing in the stock market from, say, 1000 to 1100 AD, you would not have made 8 percent a year. During the fall of the Roman Empire, you’d have been lucky to get zero. We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets to computers to the Internet in a very short time. It’s not automatic that that continues.


Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?


Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.



As I get older, the thing I try to emphasize most in my thinking is to challenge all assumptions. We all tend to accept too many things as gospel because they've always been that way.


Education, for example, is important, but is our current global school system the best one for the job? Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk this year drilled in on that question. Here's an excerpt, with Robinson's full talk embedded below.



If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.


If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.


Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.


So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.


And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.











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RIP Alexander McQueen

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The real-time obituary of today comes not from the news or recollections from a person's friends or colleagues but via a trickle of lamentations on my Facebook Wall or in my Twitter feed, a small wave that grows in size and crests about a half day later before crashing on shore, the story passing then into the hands of old school media. It's clear from that part of my life that a lot of my friends were into Alexander McQueen.


I'm no high fashion expert, but his death did recall for me this gorgeous hologram of Kate Moss shown at one of his fashion shows. I wish a higher res copy were available, but this will at least give an idea. You had to be there (for the record, I wasn't).









American Psycho the musical

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It's on!? But is it an adaptation of the book or the movie? They are quite different in key ways. Most people I know who love it have only seen the movie. I saw the movie first but read the book later during my backpacking trip through South America in 2003. The book is much more graphic than the movie; I imagine the musical will be even more sanitized than the movie was but will still draw adoring crowds of bankers who fail to see the satire and clamor to look into the mirror it holds up to their lifestyle.


It has been too long since I've read the book, so I don't recall which scenes from the movie were lifted straight from the book, but I can't help but picture one of the musical numbers in this movie being a trio sung by Patrick Batemen and the two prostitutes he's paid to participate in a 3-way conference call.


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LA: the best place in the world to eat now?

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So says Jonathan Gold [hat tip to Alex].


Manhattan may boast the highest concentration of high-end restaurants in the world, and Singapore hawker centers may pack more joy into each square inch, but Los Angeles is the best place in the world to eat at the moment, a frieze of fine dining overlaying a huge patchwork of immigrant communities big enough and self-sustaining enough to produce exactly the food that they want to eat. The famous insularity of Angelenos, our attraction to the pleasures available in our own backyards, may be bad for the civic culture, but the anti–melting pot is excellent for cuisine.

The Curse of One-Party Government

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Jonathan Rauch, one of my favorite political journalists, has a theory about why Obama and the Democratic Party are flailing right now. It's not a new theory, but the current political climate is another piece of real world evidence to support what might seem at first to be a counterintuitive supposition.


Rauch believes that the fact that the Democrats control both the White House and Congress is hurting them. He believes it would be more productive if the Democrats lost control of Congress and divided control of government.



The question is, how could things have gone south so fast? The economy is clearly a factor, but the economy was even worse a year ago, when Obama was popular and hopes were high. He made mistakes, but politicians always do. This column, while not dismissing situational explanations, asks you to consider a further possibility: Unified government makes the country virtually ungovernable.


Like a lot of people, I have believed for quite some time that power-sharing (one party controls the White House, the other at least one chamber of Congress) works better. The voters prefer it, having split control in 23 of the past 30 years. The two most politically successful and popular recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, shared power for most or all of their terms; the most widely reviled of recent presidents, George W. Bush, saw his popularity collapse when Republicans won total control. Reforms win broader acceptance and are more durable when both parties' fingerprints are on them. The two great domestic reforms of their respective eras, tax reform in 1986 and welfare reform in 1996, were products of divided control.


All of that you have heard before from me and others. Recently, however, watching the neck-snapping speed with which a backlash has formed against Obama's all-Democratic government, I have become convinced of a stronger proposition: In practice, the difference between divided and unified control has become so stark that we should think of them as being, for practical purposes, two distinct systems of government -- if you will, binary government. Though the country has only one Constitution, it has two governability settings. Call them Mode 1 (one-party control) and Mode 2 (two-party control). Power-sharing is the switch that toggles between them.



Rauch goes on to explain that the fundamental problem is that we have two parties whose centers are both too far away from the country's center, its moderate independent segment which forms the critical swing votes in any election, and neither party has enough of a majority to pull off any legislation on their own. When one party controls both Congress and the White House, the other party withholds all its support, it has no incentive to work with the other side. This means the governing party has to govern from its center, but that's still too far off what moderate independents consider to be their center. If they revolt, a majority can't be foundThis is what has killed healthcare reform.


But if the parties share control, compromise is the only way to pass legislation. This acts as a natural pull towards the country's true center, thus pleasing centrist independents. The math works out now.


Rauch admits he has no proof that this theory is true, but he pulls many examples from the last 30 years that support it. A fascinating read, and one that should hearten those who are despairing at repeats of the Massachusetts election leading to a Republican Congress.


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Why Politics Is Stuck in the Middle

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More on politics, I apologize for those looking for a report on my trip to Miami to watch the Super Bowl (in brief: in person, J. Lo looks good).


Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame) covers the current political quagmire from an economist's point of view. It's a great quick read, and I hope Cowen will forgive me for excerpting more than I normally would here, but the economist's viewpoint is a different one and quite valuable. It begins with "median voter theorem".



Economists approach political competition with a simple but potent hypothesis called the “median voter theorem.

Why "TiK ToK" went #1

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Why was Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" such a smash hit? This analysis fascinates me as an example of a field of research that attempts to deduce patterns of popularity in artistic work. Like studies that analyze faces that most people find attractive (we like faces that are symmetrical and that tend to be averages of faces across a large population), the film and music industries have tried to reverse engineer the hit and break it down to a reproducible recipe.


I haven't read Futurehit.DNA, the book whose research is applied here to TiK ToK, but some success elements it identifies in the song are quite specific. For example:



THE DROP OUTS PREVENT BOREDOM


There are two crucial points in the song where the music basically drops out and forces the listener to engage. This is an essential point for any new song to prevent it from being passive. You need it to be active in order to engage people to listen multiple times and actively purchase. The first drop out occurs at 31 seconds when the verse ends and creates a half second of silence before the chorus kicks in. This actively accents the chorus and makes sure you are paying attention before it starts. The second point is just after 2 minutes when the bridge after the second chorus drops out most of the instruments and all the rhythm. Typically most listeners start getting bored right at the two minute mark, so having this change up right at this moment is the smartest move the producers could do. There’s also a subtle, yet crucial change in the chord progressions at this point. This is key as this also creates a shift that engages the listener. This draws from chapters 3 and 4.


LACK OF RESOLUTION AT THE END


The song is in D minor, but that chord first comes in at the 7th beat of the 16 bar progression. So when the song ends cold on the first note of that progression, it ends on Bb. This gives the listener a subtle feeling of an unfinished song, even though it ended on the 1st beat, which is typical of most songs. By not resolving the chord, the listener is more apt to hum the song and therefore more likely to need to listen to it again. This is detailed out in Chapter 5.



A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article called "The Formula" which delved into efforts to crack the formula of hit songs and movies.


Wait for it.


Sorry, I was just trying the Dropout strategy for my writing, inserting a random gap at about 2 minutes in to see if it would keep you interested.


Anyhow, Gladwell profiled a music company, Platinum Blue Music Intelligence (now Music XRay) which used software to analyze songs and predict their hit potential. The more interesting company discussed in the article was Epagogix, a company that claimed to be able to predict the box office potential of any film project given just the script.


It's not clear whether or not these companies can do what they promise with any degree of accuracy. The secrecy around their algorithms makes it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. One could argue that if they did work, artists, studios, and labels might all have an incentive to keep it a secret from the public. No one likes to think they've been duped by some paint-by-numbers artistic work that preys on some Pavlovian wiring in their brain.


On the other hand, if these algorithms really did work, you'd think it would be well worth the cost to employ them and that a higher percentage of songs and movies coming out of the big labels and studios would be commercially successful.


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More on government failure

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I could post one link a day on the structural failings of Congress, it seems. Here's Paul Krugman on how the Senate has hijacked government operation by leveraging arcane rules that permit gross obstructionism. Exhibit A is Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. He's put a hold on all outstanding nominations by the Obama administration, around 70 senior posts, simply to get Alabama a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center. If it were a Democrat doing the same thing, it would be just as egregious, but it so happens that the GOP is turning into a joke before our very eyes. It's tragic, really, because our government benefits from a sensible opposition party to spur a competition of ideas. Instead, they're like a petulant child who, in a funk, answers no to everything just to be difficult. On the scale they're doing it, though, it's not annoying, it's dangerous.



How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.


Readers may recall that in 1995 Mr. Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cut off the federal government’s funding and forced a temporary government shutdown. It was ugly and extreme, but at least Mr. Gingrich had specific demands: he wanted Bill Clinton to agree to sharp cuts in Medicare.


Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.


And with the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.


The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.



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CGI rotting sci-fi from the inside?

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China Mieville is down on CGI's impact on sci-fi filmmaking. Avatar is his exhibit A.



Even those of us exhausted by yet another overlong mawkish gush — let alone one which reiterates the old cliche of Going Native and Leading Them to Freedom by Becoming the Most Awesome (White) Mohican™ — can admit that the special effects are impressive. But that’s a very long way from liking them, or thinking they’re a good thing. That computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rotting science fiction from the inside.


In the relentless search to produce the most ostentatiously spectacular scenes possible, CGI, which once had the potential to be a useful aesthetic tool, has become a mannerist absurdity. It is straightforwardly untrue that CGI “looks real.