In 1984, you could have bought a single share in Warren Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, for $1,300. Yesterday, you could have sold that share for $200,000. Sadly, in 1984 I didn’t have $1,300 to spare. And I’d never heard of Berkshire Hathaway.
Sigh.
Lovely column by Jack Shafer about why news headlines seem so familiar. Sample:
But the periodicity of the news has another cause, as press scholar Jack Lule discovered more than a decade ago in his book Daily News, Eternal Stories. Lule proposed that the news was less a pure journalistic creation than it was the modern expression of ancient myths.
Like many all-encompassing formulas, Lule’s reduction of news into myth suffers by attempting to explain too much. But after reading his book, you can’t help but notice how many front-page stories collapse into the seven master myths he assembles (which will sound familiar to anybody who has brushed up against Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces): the victim, a casualty of randomness or a villain; the scapegoat, who is punished for straying outside the social order; the hero, who smites evil; the good mother, who “offers maternal comfort and protection”; the trickster, the rogue who disturbs the social order; the other world, typically foreign countries; and the flood, or any other disaster.
Lovely stuff. Worth reading in full.
“Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, and the past perfect…”
Andrew McAfee
We’ve lost a genius. May he rest in peace.
RIP.
This extraordinary snapshot showing German infantry advancing through crops in a Belgian field captures something of the shock of warfare that — for most people — came more or less out of the blue. I came on it (of course) while I was looking for something else. That’s the Web for you.
In the wonderful Fondation van Gogh in Arles.
Market stall in Provence.
Nice cartoon in the New Yorker. Wife is mopping up pools of water created by her husband, who is (incompetently) washing up: “Do you really know what you’re doing” she asks, “or do you Google-search know?”
