Publishers Weekly Starred Review.

Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior.

Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns.

Underlying the research is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

To appear in 2003's Terminator 3, Arnold Schwarzenegger received a fixed fee of $29.25 million, a package of perks totaling $1.5 million and a guaranteed 20% of gross receipts from all sources of revenue worldwide. With that, writes Epstein, no matter the film's box office results, "the star was assured of making more money than the studio itself."

Such is the "new logic" Epstein explores in this engrossing book. Gone are the days of studio chiefs dominating their stars with punitive contracts and controlling product from script to big screen. Writers now sell their work to the highest bidder, stars have become one-person corporations who "rent" their services to individual productions, and the studios have morphed into what Epstein labels "clearing houses." These multinational corporations exist, in Epstein's description, to collect revenue from an ever-growing variety of sources -- home video, overseas markets and product licensing, to name a few -- and then disburse it to a fortunate minority at the top of Hollywood's food chain.

Epstein explains the structure, personalities and behind-the-scenes interconnection of the "sexopoly" (the six huge media companies that control motion picture entertainment).

In vivid detail, he describes the current process of how a film is made, from the initial pitch to last-minute digital editing. There's a refreshing absence of moral grandstanding in Epstein's work. With no apparent ax to grind, he simply and comprehensively presents the industry as it is: the nuts and bolts, the perks and pitfalls and the staggering fortunes that some in the business walk away with. This is the new indispensable text for anyone interested in how Hollywood works.

The Big Picture : The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Society's growing mania to "propertize" every idea, image, sound and scent that impinges on our consciousness is ably dissected in this hilarious and appalling expose of intellectual property law.

David Bollier compiles a long litany of outrageous copyright and trademark excesses:

Music royalty consortium ASCAP sought fees from the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire; McDonalds threatened businesses with the Mc prefix in their names;

Disney threatened a day-care center that painted Mickey and Goofy on its walls; and Mattel sued a rock band that dared satirize Barbie in song.

Nor is it only corporate megaliths that resort to this petty legal thuggery. Martin Luther King's estate forbids unauthorized use of his "I Have a Dream" speech (but rents it to Telecom ad campaigns), and the author of a completely silent composition was asked for royalties because it allegedly infringed on avant-garde composer John Cage's own completely silent composition.

Bollier is a sure guide through the thickets of intellectual property law, writing in an engaging style that spotlights capitalism and its supporting cast of lawyers at their most absurd. But he probes a deeper problem: as the public domain becomes a private monopoly, he warns, our open society, which depends on the free, collective elaboration of a shared "cultural commons," will wither away.

Brand Name Bullies : The Quest to Own and Control Culture

If perhaps you once dismissed the business plan for General Memetics Corporation, consider briefly the $300 million value of the contracts discussed in this article.

The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military.

"We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based US Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."

"What's changing is the realization that in this so-called war on terrorism, this might be the thing that wins the whole thing for you. This gets to the importance of the war of ideas."

Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Effort

In taking cluster analysis and its classifications to the logical extreme, are we not building a superfinicky society?

Five minutes in any Starbucks line will answer that one.

We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation.

There's a niche born every minute.

One Nation, With Niches for All

Microsoft dips a toe into the movie business.

The process began at about 11:30 a.m. on Monday when several actors dressed as the Master Chief, a green-helmeted warrior from Halo, walked into the lobbies of several Hollywood studios, scripts in hand. Microsoft had taken the unusual step of paying Alex Garland, the writer of the horror film "28 Days Later", about $1 million to write a script faithful to the Halo universe.

Studio executives were asked to read it while the Master Chiefs waited in the lobbies. At Paramount, one studio executive said, the Master Chief held his helmet in his lap because he was hot. When executives were finished reading, each studio was given a proposal with Microsoft's terms and 24 hours to respond.

Hollywood Hardball

How much can be read into whether "sector" or "space" is one's preferred descriptor in this context?

Think about it. Don your semiotics hat and ponder it for a while.

"The problem is that you've got all these software VC's, they don't know what to do with themselves."

"I think it's great that the Internet consumer space is heating up again. But consumer is also quickly becoming a space where lots of venture capitalists are diving in without a clue."

There will be some big winners in this round, but many more losers along the way.

Woo hoo! Let's hear it for the Losers!

Venture Capital Rediscovers the Consumer Internet

Were you inspired by a school teacher? Did you thank them?

We are heading into an age in which jobs are likely to be invented and made obsolete faster and faster. The chances of today's college kids working in the same jobs for the same companies for their whole careers are about zero. In such an age, the greatest survival skill you can have is the ability to learn how to learn. The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Like all the best essayists, Tom Friedman can transform even the most obvious message into a compelling story.

Behind Every Grad ...

A new phase of evolution is dawning in which quadriform Tribal + Institutional + Market + Network societies will emerge to take the lead, and a vast rebalancing of relations among state, market, and civil-societal actors will occur around the world. To do well in the twenty-first century, an advanced, democratic, information-age society must incorporate all four forms and make them function well together, despite their inherent contradictions.

Public policy dialogue has, for over a century, revolved around contentions as to whether government or the market represents the better solution for particular policy issues. In the network age, this choice will prove too narrow, too binary, even for blending. New views will come to the fore that the network is the solution.

This essay by David "netwar" Ronfeldt appears as a chapter in the book Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow. Other chapter contributors include John Seely-Brown and Stewart Brand. (Table of contents)

A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution [PDF]

Decius wrote:

Download all nine of Beethoven's symphonies here the day after they are broadcast.

Grab Beethoven, free, while it lasts...

In view of the recent Beethoven posting, I encountered this excerpt in an essay from "A Jacques Barzun Reader" and just had to share:

The first thing to do on arriving at a symphony concert is to express the wish that the orchestra will play Beethoven's Fifth. If your companion then says "Fifth what?" you are safe with him for the rest of the evening; no metal can touch you. If, however, he says "So do I"--this is a danger signal and he may require careful handling.
-- Donald Ogden Stewart (more), author of Perfect Behavior

Beethoven and 'Perfect Behavior'