14 Oct
Do believe Lauren Greenfield is looking for a new intern. While you’re checking that out, take a look at the new essay on Dubai, which is sprouting skyscrapers overnight.
I’ve also just gotten the Kids+Money short she did for HBO, and I’m looking forward to and dreading watching the thing… it’s not supposed to leave you in a better mood than it found you, is it?
29 Jan
Thin, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary on girls with eating disorders, was harrowing. I knew that eating disorders were a rising problem, but I had no idea how prevalent they are and how serious they can get.
It also hadn’t occurred to me that insurance coverage for treatment was an issue – at least two of the girls had to leave treatment prematurely because their insurance ran out once they reached a certain level of treatment. It does make me wonder why the Renfrew Center doesn’t do away with the concept of levels and simply assess their patients’ progress on a more binary basis focused on whether they are ready to handle their problems independently. Maybe the positive reinforcement is more important? Maybe the insurance companies actually require it?
Perhaps coverage is difficult ot get because treatment, at least for the most serious cases, is so depressingly ineffective. Patients had been hospitalized multiple times, suffered heart and liver damage, attempted suicide, yet they are so psychologically attached to their disorders that they’re unable to see that they are already thin, that it’s not worth it to die trying to impossibly thin. In fact, several of the girls irrationally prefer dying to being “fat.”
I’m going to get a secondhand copy of the companion book. If you want to find out more, you can read an interview with Greenfield about Thin and watch video interviews on Greenfield’s website.
Whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently? Both saw change coming. Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches [...]
If you haven’t seen this interview, block out an hour and a half to see it now. I transcribed (and lightly edited) a great deal of it, because it was great (not the least because Chase Jarvis references one of my favorite Errol Morris films, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Originally I was just [...]
What is economic growth for, anyway? It’s for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying [...]
Arturo Soto There are probably more than 10,000 articles about how unwise and un-blog-attractive it is to apologize for not posting frequently enough to your blog. (“Don’t keep hamsters if you can’t remember to feed them”?) It is the blog version of saying, “I’ve really let myself go.” Supposing that I have, it seems that [...]
This is what Hans Rosling says of global development in the documentary I linked to earlier. I want to dig a little deeper into this issue. I’d say that most of the photo world has done a fairly terrible job of making this point. All the images of development are somehow read as “look at [...]
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