Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
Lately I’ve had advertising on the brain. I rented billboard space on my cerebral cortex for Gold’s Gym. But also, I’ve been thinking about marketing strategies a lot these days. It seems that advertising is a way to sell people things and thus make money. I love money! I have a plan: marketing [...]
Archive for August, 2009
New Frontiers in Niche Marketing
Posted in Media on August 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The Eiffel Tower: Victim or Monster
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Armageddon, Eiffel Tower, G.I. Joe, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Rise of Cobra, Sigismund Krzyzanowski, War of the Worlds on August 25, 2009 | 3 Comments »
If movie trailers are to be trusted, the new G.I. Joe flick features a scene where the Eiffel Tower is strafed by bomb-fire at its feet and topples over. This is not the first time the most famous landmark in Paris has taken a hit. So many movies have shown the tower being destroyed that [...]
Betsy McCaughey: Still a Liar
Posted in Philosophy, tagged A.M. Lamey, Betsy McCaughey, masterful polemics, shoddy intellectuals on August 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Like Freddy Krueger and Dracula, Betsy McCaughey will always be with us. She first gained fame writing about the health care reform in a notorious 1994 New Republic essay, which was filled with lies but had a wide circulation and influence. Now as health care reform is once again on the table, McCaughey has risen from [...]
Deodorant Ads Help Us Learn About an Important Word: Incitement
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics on August 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
Important ideas are all around us. Just look at anything I’ve ever written—free and easily accessible right here on the internet. But also, things in our daily lives are more than what they seem. Commercials are full of powerful concepts, and they’re fun to deconstruct. But then you realize what is really going [...]
Pages From a Reading Life
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Pages Book Store on August 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Pages Books and Magazines opened in 1979, so it must have still been a relatively spanking new store when I first started shopping there in 1981 or thereabouts. I was a teenager and Queen Street was a good place to hang out if you were a kid in Toronto. It was still a grungy street [...]
Study Shows…
Posted in Philosophy on August 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
Study shows that women eat less around men
For a complete list of things that don’t change, google “the past” and “still photographs of anything anywhere.”
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“Women order smaller and less calorific meals if eating with a man than if dining with female friends,” according to a group of people the DailyMail calls “Scientists.” [...]
Felix the Cat & Blackface
Posted in Animal rights, Popular culture, tagged Art Spiegelman, blackface, John Updike, Niall Ferguson, racism on August 11, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Snorting has greeted Niall Ferguson’s new column, which begins like this:
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.
But aside from derision, Ferguson’s comments deserve some analysis. There is a reason why Ferguson, when he [...]
Banner image: John Wolseley
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Environment, tagged Australia, John Wolseley on August 10, 2009 | 4 Comments »
A detail from “A History of Parrots, Drifting Maps and Warming Seas”, by John Wolseley (2005). Born in England just before World War II, Wolseley didn’t move to Australia until he was 38. But over the subsequent three decades, the immigrant has made the continent his own, travelling extensively through its length and breadth, and [...]
Thoroughly Walled In
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain on August 8, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
Sunday August 9th 2009 is the 156th anniversary of Thoreau’s Walden being published. “But I read that in high school and hated it,” I hear you say. (I have very good ears.) “It’s a bitter guy talking about beans for three hundred pages. Walden is the worst.”
False. You think Walden is the worst [...]
It came from the desert
Posted in Foreign affairs, History, Media, tagged Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, Jeremy Keenan, Maghreb, Sahel, Tuareg on August 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
According to American and European intelligence and military sources, there is a growing menace to Western security in (to use the intervention-justifying cliché of recent times) “the vast ungoverned spaces” of northwest Africa. A New York Times story published earlier this month itemized a string of violent events in the region that officials blame on [...]
