:: Media Times Review Blog ::

The Wachowski Brothers FAQ, Wired

By Mark Miller

They may be famously untalkative, but Larry and Andy Wachowski sure know how to generate a lot of noise. With the November 5 release of The Matrix Revolutions, the final film in the epic trilogy, the media hype is once again deafening. The movies have transformed the brothers from small-time carpenters to fabulously wealthy and powerful Hollywood players. What hasn’t changed is their reticence. If anything, the Wachowski brothers have become more reclusive since the first Matrix came out in 1999. They haven’t given an interview in four years, and under an unusual deal with Warner Bros., they never have to talk to the press. Anyone who works on a film with them is made to sign a nondisclosure agreement. “They just want to stay as incognito as possible,” says their manager, Lawrence Mattis. When I told him I was writing a story, he chuckled: “Good luck going down the rabbit hole. There’s no map.”

J.D. Lasica, Nieman Reports

The transparency of blogging has contributed to news organizations becoming more accessible and interactive.

Journalism is undergoing a quiet revolution, whether it knows it or not. Readers will always turn to traditional news sites as trusted, reliable sources of news and information — that won’t change. But the walls are cracking. The readers want to be a part of the news process.

Suggest to an old-school journalist that Weblogs have anything to do with journalism and you’ll be met with howls of derision. Amateur bloggers typically have no editorial oversight, no training in the craft, and no respect for the news media’s rules and standards. Does the free-for-all renegade publishing form known as blogging really have anything to do with journalism?

Anthony D. Smith, Axess Magazine

The nation endures. Many have predicted that national identity will be replaced by global identity. But this is true only for a small global elite that most closely resembles a pre-national aristoricracy. For most of the world’s citizens national identity has maintained, and even strengthened its grip. But what do we now mean by terms such as “nation” and “state”?

Stephen Schwartz, Tech Central Station

What do we do about terrorist incitement on the internet? I have noted on several occasions that the main enemies of democracy and pluralistic Islam — al-Qaida, the ultra-Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia, and jihadists in Pakistan — seem to have far surpassed the antiterror forces in use of this versatile and effective form of media. Those of us who have studied terrorist sites and video products are struck by how much more sophisticated and impressive they are, in their presentation, when compared with U.S. government and other outreach efforts.

Rob Mitchell, Business Week

The charities we choose to support say a lot about us. Consciously or not, we prioritize and decide which charities mean the most to us, just like we do with a consumer brand.

Occasionally a single cause captures the public imagination, as Make Poverty History (MPH) has; its symbolic white wristband has become as ubiquitous as iPod earphones or the latest Harry Potter book, and is in itself a fashion statement (or as Richard Curtis, one of the UK charity’s patrons, prefers to call it, a “passion statement”).

Bojan Pancevski in Sofia and Colin Freeman, Telegraph

Georgi Iliev, the gangster and proprietor of Bulgaria’s Lokomotiv Plovdiv football club, was in jubilant mood as he stepped out of a bar to take a mobile phone call. Hours earlier, his team had pulled off victory in a UEFA Cup qualifying round. His last words to the barman were: “More champagne”.

Seconds later he lay dying, his chest ripped apart by a single sniper’s bullet - the latest underworld victim in a spate of more than 60 expertly executed killings in the former communist state.

From Mark Flanagan,Your Guide to Literature: Contemporary.
Author of “The Historian”

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of The Historian (June 2005), a chilling historical mystery that reaches from the present day into the medieval past of Vlad the Impaler, Wallachia’s barbarous 15th century ruler whose gruesome deeds gave rise to the legend of Dracula. In The Historian, Kostova’s characters hunt the immortal Prince Vlad across twentieth century Europe, from ancient village to dank crypt in a quest to destroy the vampire.

Kostova, a graduate from Yale and The University of Michigan’s MFA program, spoke with me about her novel which is quickly topping the bestseller lists.

Jennifer Snead, n+1

David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit
(Yale, 2005)

In mid-July, 1962, Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall came for a BBC television interview to Zermatt where I happened to be collecting that summer. The lepidoptera lived up to the occasion, so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish wonderment with which they viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud at various spots of the mountain trail. Pictures were taken of the swarms that arose at my passage, and other hours of the day were devoted to the reproduction of the interview proper. It eventually appeared on the Bookstand program and was published in The Listener (November 22, 1962). I have mislaid the cards on which I had written my answers. I suspect that the published text was taken straight from the tape for it teems with inaccuracies. These I have tried to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech.
The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1963.

Economist Magazine

Remembering, and rewriting, the past

AUGUST, in eastern Europe, means anniversaries: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that divided the region into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence; the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961; the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 that crushed Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring; the birth in 1980 of Solidarity, the Polish trade union which dealt a death-blow to communism; and the Soviet coup of 1991, where hardliners locked up Mikhail Gorbachev to preserve the Soviet Union, but ended up giving Boris Yeltsin the power to destroy it.