The Wisdom of Profiteers: Prediction Markets and Democracy

Despite the ever-present abundance of contrary opinions on what various markets will do (Should you short sell gold this week? Is bitcoin a bubble? Is there a bond bubble? Is the Euro safe? Is my financial fly down?), there’s one thing we know for sure: speculation itself never goes out of style, and any market inevitably consists of a collection of investors who are “in it to win it,” whether they aim for internal profit through a boom or collapse or external profit through market manipulation. Where the assets on which stock markets trade are businesses, prediction markets (also called information markets) trade on an information asset: they query investors about the likelihood of …

Inauthentic Authenticity: Ian Svenonius and the Challenge of Indie Rock Satire in an MP3 World

Saturday night, Washington D.C., a stone’s throw from one of D.C. hardcore’s central nodes and the playground of Nation of Ulysses (NOU) front man Ian Svenonius: the Embassy in Mt. Pleasant.  In the late 1980s and 1990s, Svenonius, NOU, and other D.C. punks used to gather at the Embassy to discuss music, politics, and agit prop, even serving as an ally to the Riot Grrrl movement when Kathleen Hanna and others left Washington for a sojourn to the capital in what for many, became a transformative experience.   Tonight, though, sitting in independent book store Politics and Prose and waiting for Svenonius to appear from on high to assault us with his latest philosophical tract, the shop …

A Mediating Mess: How American Post-WWII Media Undermined Democracy

Editors notes: This review originally appeared in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture (5.2, pages 254 - 257).  Unfortunately, in its original publication, the review  misidentified Professor Morgan as Edmund rather than Edward. These errors  have been corrected here. Apologies to Prof. Edward P. Morgan for the mishap. When the Swift Boat controversy engulfed the 2004 election campaign, America’s obsession with the Vietnam War once again reared its ugly head.  Democratic candidate and decorated Vietnam Veteran John Kerry’s staunch opposition to the war upon his return from deployment drew harsh critiques from conservatives in the early 1970s and in 2004.  The …

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Best of 2012 Part V

I read the bulk of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, appropriately enough, on a flight to Mexico City. I’ve always appreciated the urban dystopia genre despite its obvious flaws. While Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums annihilates any particularities in the proliferation of slums throughout the world, he at the very least writes with the urgency the phenomenon demands. Boo’s book is of an altogether different nature. Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells the story of several children and families in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. Lurking throughout the novelistic narrative is a vivid critique of global capitalism. In addition to this critique, Boo attempts to display the failings …

The History Channel: Selling the Past in the Age of Reality TV

For a website dedicated to the concept of “historiography for the masses,” perhaps it was only a matter of time before the contemporary History Channel would be addressed. Once maligned for its excessive focus on World War II and military history, the History Channel of the past nonetheless remained fairly dedicated to its core concept. Historical documentaries, such as the Engineering an Empire series, The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross, The American Revolution, and Ancient Rome: Story of an Empire, tackled serious historical topics with sophistication and insight. However, following the tried and true model of channels like MTV and VH1, with their respective series the Jersey Shore …

Dog Days Classics: Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s Ideal Idler

"It was profoundly true that movements of the spirit came first, and that events of history were consequences thereof." -Upton Sinclair, Wide is the Gate Several years ago I was directed toward Upton Sinclair’s socialist-minded quasi-spy novels about a young man named Lanning Prescott Budd. The 11 books span the breadth of time from the onset of The Great War to the rise of the Cold War, but as I have been able to acquire only the first half of the series, my investigation has followed Lanny only so far as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A New York Times reflection on the books gives a decent introduction to the protagonist: Born in 1900, he was the illegitimate child of an …

Dog Days Classics: The Wages of Whiteness and the White People Who Love Them

July, 1956. It had been over a decade since the Carnegie Foundation solicited Gunnar Myrdal’s opinion on American race relations. A Nobel Prize in economics and Swedish citizenship rendered him an objective observer. That year James Baldwin wrote a scathing critique of what is now a long forgotten book—Daniel Guerin’s Negroes on the March. “Labor’s interests may often be identical with the Negro’s interests,” Baldwin explains, “but Mr. Guerin fails to understand that, in the light of the white worker’s desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.” (Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation”) In the 1986, sociologists …

The Specter of Revolution in “The Dark Knight Rises”

The twenty-first century has not given humanity a lot to smile about between 9/11 and Iraq, Katrina and Snooki.  One of its more unexpected joys, though, has been the brutally dark Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan.  Where to begin?  That the films redeemed the Dark Knight after the cinematic abortions of the 1990s, which plugged big name actors like Tommy Lee Jones and Arnold Schwarzenegger into comic book roles in a depressing, madlib fashion?  That a talented indie filmmaker did not just put an eccentric gloss on a major studio franchise, but actually took the opportunity to address the urgent issues of the day on an epic scale?  That summer blockbusters could embrace a …

Emily White Killed Vic Chesnutt

As anyone in politics knows, admitting the obvious can get you into a whole lot of trouble. NPR intern Emily White recently discovered this unfortunate fact the hard way, when she admitted in a blog post that she had 11,000 music files in her library.  The problem?  She had only bought 15 CDs in her lifetime.  I for one was surprised that a 20 year old American college student would own that many CDs, period, but much of the Internet went abuzz over White’s post—some applauded her for pointing out what they see as realities of a changing digital environment, but many others reacted with indignation. Who was this insouciant young blogger who didn’t feel guilty about taking food out …

The Food Truck Conundrum: Urban Politics and Mobile Eats

When local DC cultural website DCist tweeted a celebratory announcement of the arrival of Chic-fil-A’s new roaming food truck in the nation’s capital, one might have thought the tweet rather ho-hum. At most, cries of corporate infringement on a burgeoning subculture might have been expected to ring out. However, within minutes several prominent DC restaurant proprietors responded with harsh admonishments, but not about aesthetics or subcultures. Perhaps most notably, Dean Gold owner of Cleveland Park’s popular Dino restaurant, rebuked DCist for publicizing the food truck of a company known to support anti-gay causes and legislation tweeting: ChickFilA_Fuckers hate gays and we need to …