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Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show has never, in my memory, turned its entire half hour into an interview of a single guest — and they get huge guests. But that’s what they did yesterday for CNBC’s Jim Cramer. And it’s a doozy.

Last week, as part of its Santelli-inspired critique of CNBC, Stewart ran two series of clips of Cramer offering pretty terrible financial advice, first with a bunch of other CNBC pundits, and then (after Cramer loudly and publicly complained) of Cramer by himself. In this interview, Stewart shows unaired clips of Cramer (who used to run a hedge fund) from 2006:

1. talking about how easy it is to manipulate the markets through the media;
2. admitting that he used to do it, particularly to make money on a short sell;
3. suggesting that other hedge fund managers do the same, as it’s a fast and satisfying way to make money;
4. offering specific advice on how to do this right then with a particular stock (Apple Computer).

As Stewart says, we want Jim Cramer the journalist to protect us from Jim Cramer the financial schemer. Instead of being a watchdog, CNBC became a cheerleader.

The entire interview is amazing. I’ve got the clips (including those from previous shows that lead to this) embedded after the jump, but let me also quote James Fallows and Sean Quinn on what went down.

Fallows, “It’s true: Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow”:

Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the “true” voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC…. But I found this — the Stewart/Cramer slaughter — incredible…

Just before leaving China — ie, two days ago — I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn’t have been easy to do what Stewart just did. Seeing this interview justified the three-day trip in itself.

Sean Quinn, “Stewart Destroys CNBC, Cramer, Disses ‘Doucheborough'”:

On the day in October 2004 that Jon Stewart made up his mind to end CNN

I’m coming to this late, but hot damn, Dark Was the Night is fantastic. Thanks, Sopheava.

My friend (and fellow Penn Comparative Literature alumnus) Mark Sample on what’s uncritical about the critical essay:

[C]ritical thinking stands in opposition to facile thinking. Critical thinking is difficult thinking. Critical thinking is being comfortable with difficulty. And this is something else that separates the expert learner from the novice learner: experts are at ease with uncertainty, while novices are uncomfortable with what they don

James Fallows on technology, tradition, and the simplification of Chinese written characters :

Increasingly, Chinese people don’t actually have to write (rite? right?) out these characters by hand. More and more, they key them in with mobile phones or at computers. And when they do that, it’s just as easy to ‘write’ a traditional-style, complex, information-dense character as a streamlined new one. (Reason: you key in clues about the character, either its pronunciation or its root form, and then click to choose the one you want.) So — according to current arguments — the technology of computers and mobile phones could actually revive an important, quasi-antique style of writing.

Hmm — Fallows is definitely one-up on me, since he reads Chinese and I don’t, but I wonder whether other considerations (e.g. screen size and corresponding size of characters) might still put some pressure towards some kind of simplification of the character form. A lot of that information-density just turns into noise if it has to be packed into a tiny space.

Alternatively, kids (it’s always kids, at first) might start using “abbreviations” that minimize the number of keystrokes required to type useful phrases — maybe by not choosing the precisely “correct” character but an approximation of it (the root or a related pronunciation or whatever), like our “lol,” “brb,” “btw,” etc.

In short, technology rarely has a purely stabilizing effect on tradition — it might help block a particular chirographic attempt at reform/revolution, but only to displace it in favor of its own matrix. (And yes, I just quoted Spock from The Wrath of Khan.)

I love the headline announcing that The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat would be the Times’ new op-ed columnist: “A 29-Year-Old Joins Times Op-Ed Lineup.” It’s like they hired a talking horse, or this kid!

One of the ironies of this is that Douthat is really just David Brooks with a beard — not necessarily a bad thing, but he’s not very “young” at all. If anything, he’s maybe too much the natural candidate; it’s weird for the Times to make it out like they’re reaching here (while at the same time denying that that’s what they’re doing).

As for the title of my post — I’m being a little cheeky, because I’m also twenty-nine, but I don’t think the Times should have hired me; if they were looking for a young conservative, I think they should have hired Douthat’s Grand New Party co-author Reihan Salam, who is genuinely young and weird in addition to being talented and smart. I’ll be happy to be wrong, but I predict that Douthat at the Times will try too hard to be gray and lame; Salam would have been offbeat and fun, like Maureen Dowd is allegedly supposed to be.

One reason why Alan Moore (like lots of other people) may have thought that Watchmen was unfilmable was the use of subtle associations and tiny messages that could only be revealed by long scrutiny of the individual pages and panels. According to Moore, in Watchmen we see:

sort of “under-language” at work … that is neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two. A picture can be set against text ironically, or it can be used to support the text, or it can be completely disjointed from the text — which forces the reader into looking at the scene in a new way… the reader has the ability to stop and linger over one particular “frame” and work out all of the meaning in that frame or panel. (Quoted in “Reading Space in Watchmen.”)

Well, movies don’t allow that same kind of attention at full speed in the theater. They DO allow it in the freeze-frame — and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen title sequence actually slows down and freezes the frame for you. Now Meredith Woerner’s got the goods on the easter eggs in the title sequence for Watchmen, and at least one is a doozy:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice has a big Batman reference. First, check out the posters to the right. Look familiar? And isn’t that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death? And according to commenter Rainbucket, the opera bills say: “Die Fledermaus” (The Bat). So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

Via Nerdcore.

P.S.: I haven’t listened to these yet, but apparently there are some Watchmen podcasts that go through the book panel-by-panel the same way Woerner goes through the title sequence. These via Mystery Man on Film.

Kevin Kelly on technology and group identity:

Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance.  We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces, or crafts our identity.

Most of Kelly’s aticle focuses on tool cultures among Highland tribes in New Guinea, but Kelly’s also recently written about technology adoption among the Amish — which is, of course, unusually explicit about the relationship between technology and group identity. 

I’m not sure about this hedge, though:

In the modernized west, our decisions about technology are not made by the group, but by individuals. We choose what we want to adopt, and what we don’t. So on top of the ethnic choice of technologies a community endorses, we must add the individual layer of preference. We announce our identity by what stuff we use or refuse. Do you twitter? Have a big car? Own a motorcycle? Use GPS? Take supplements? Listen to vinyl? By means of these tiny technological choices we signal our identity. Since our identities are often unconscious we are not aware of exactly why we choose or dismiss otherwise equivalent technology. It is clear that many, if not all, technological choices are made not on the technological benefits alone. Rather technological options have unconscious meaning created by social use and social and personal associations that we are not fully aware of.

But aren’t these choices still deeply social? Partly it’s about access: if you don’t have daylong access to the web (or access to the web at all) you ain’t twittering, son. But you’re also not likely to do it if your friends and coworkers and neighbors don’t twitter. Group identity is a lot more complex in the modernized west, sure — but pure individual choice it ain’t. In fact, our adoption of technology actually helps us form new groups and social identities that are not quite tribal/ethnic — or it helps us reinforce those bonds. 

P.S.: My title, “tool culture,” isn’t from Kelly’s article, but from paleoanthropology. One of the things I love about the study of groups like the Neanderthals is that we have evidence of their tool use long after we have fossilized remains. We can actually distinguish between Neanderthal and human settlements based on their tools. 

Neanderthals and homo sapiens definitely coexisted. People aren’t sure whether Neanderthals interbred with modern humans or not, which makes it hard to know when exactly the Neanderthals died out. Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, if a group of anatomically modern humans adopted Neanderthal tools? That technologies could reach not just across ethnicities, but across species as well? 

Don’t get dizzy now: Jason Kottke picks up on a word I kind of made up in response to one of his posts and runs with it:

Retronovation n. The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback’s use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural’s glass bottle, and General Mills’ introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals. In general, the local & natural food and farming thing that’s big right now is all about retronovation…time tested methods that have been reintroduced to make food that is closer to what people used to eat. (I’m sure there are non-food examples as well, but I can’t think of any.)

No sooner does Jason oh-so-gently throw down the gauntlet than Waxy, who almost certainly meant nothing of the kind, answers the question by linking to an amazing post about a transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan about Raiders of the Lost Ark:

(Key: G = George; S = Steven; L = Larry)

G

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times, has some suggestions to remedy the venial sins of cyclists:

NO. 1: How about we stop at major intersections? Especially where there are school crossing guards, or disabled people crossing, or a lot of people during the morning or evening rush. (I have the law with me on this one.) At minor intersections, on far-from-traffic intersections, let

When I wrote my last post, I googled “North by Northwest” to check the train route Cary Grant takes in that film. I came across a term I hadn’t (to my knowldge) seen before: kinetic typography.

Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. Similar to the study of traditional typography of designing static typographic forms, kinetic typography focuses on understanding the effect time has on the expression of text. Kinetic typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text.

A classic example of kinetic typography is the Saul Bass-designed title sequence for North By Northwest:

This concept reminds me of Walther Ruttmann’s great documentary film Berlin, which did kinetic typography the old-fashioned way: take a big, horking street sign and zip past it on a train:

It also reminds me (of course) of Bob Brown’s “Readies” and Eugene Jolas’s Revolution of the Word.

But kinetic typography in these senses are in some sense old hat — how are we taking kinetic type and making it new?

Here is a YouTube playlist of new, digitally produced exemplars of kinetic typography, assembled by Jo