Capitalist Dogs II: Or, What Habit Makes in Smith and Marx

 I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monographic, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

Futures Past: Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol and Hugo

Two quick capsule reviews/analyses:

The Mission: Impossible films come closest to realizing the ideal of a film franchise. They are barely sequels, with minimal narrative threads connecting them, and cannot even be considered remakes or reboots. They are the same basic formula, international intrigue and high tech gadgetry, offered to a series of different directors, DePalma, Woo, Abrams, and now Bird, who become regional managers, adding their own panache and style to the central brand.