Interesting observation of the day: People putting NAMES OF MOVIES IN ALL CAPS so they STAND OUT so you can see at a glance which movies they're name-checking and use that to JUDGE WHETHER THEY'RE WORTHWHILE AS PEOPLE.

This also confused me. Even granting the extremely unlikely possibility that this is okay in context (i.e., Old Dogs is Mad Men, and Robin Williams plays Roger Sterling), it seems like the kind of thing you would not want to decontextualize for a trailer, even one this bizarre.

You expect something more concrete than marginal notes by contemporaneous historians that a carpenter's son existed in Galilee in the first century AD?

My favorite is this line:

Traffic
Man, remember how in traffic that girl smokes pot and ends up whoring herself out? Yeah, drugs are like that.

See two threads above. This movie is like a Supreme Court opinion by Antonin Scalia - artfully constructed on a vile and worthless foundation. Kaufman is like Nabokov, but much dumber and with even less soul.

I am right there with the haters on Eternal Sunshine. With the exception of BJM, every one of Charlie Kaufman's scripts has ranked among the most irritating, indulgent films of my life. He rivals the Dave Matthews Band in terms of incredibly irritating cultural prominence. He is high on the list of artists who are…

I would watch "Jonathan Safron Foer Eating Steven Levitt, and Then Being Eaten by a Bear"

Also, for a very long time almost all corporate interests lobbied against climate legislation, while people who made very little money and had no prospects for gain lobbied for it, which is a plausible reason to think the global warming push is not driven by cash. I know many of the principal policymakers here, and…

I'm about to go home for the day, but a few points:

Aww, poor misunderstood artist man doesn't think the world appreciates what he does.

Well, they're certainly contrarian. It actually makes you wonder if they're full of shit about the whole intellectual rigor and honesty thing.

Forget metaphorical cage matches - let's put both authors in an actual cage and post the video to the homepage.

To the contrary, the global community has spent an awful lot of energy pondering how to reduce CO2 emissions inexpensively, and there's a fair amount of consensus on how to work that. Developing nations are still going to grow (and increase their emissions), but they won't take the same development path as the US and…

To be completely fair, it's not clear that stratospheric SO2 (as opposed to tropospheric) would cause acid rain - as Levitt points out, it happens with volcanoes pretty regularly and doesn't seem to cause too many problems. That said, if we kept pumping it into the stratosphere, we can't really quantify the risk of…

They routinely didn't publish my comments, though they were always "on topic and not abusive" which is the criteria they're supposed to meet for being "generally published." I'm glad other people are noticing this.

There are a couple key points:

I think they're well-intentioned, but suffer from serious confirmation biases. They talked to several people (one scientist) who all had the same perspective. If they had talked at length to people with other perspectives, they couldn't possibly have come away with the same conclusions. Further, their actual…

Public Enemy
Every time I take a step toward the cultural elite - graduating college, getting a job in government, getting into law school - I listen to Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise" extremely loud (preferably in the actual building of the institution in question, not difficult when you're the only one in your…

Shows that are not any good at all and pretty much rely on reprehensible, lazy characters on top of a good elevator-pitch gimmick: