Entertainment
They Don’t Make TV Ads Like They Used To
British TV adverts were once worth watching, capturing the public’s imagination even as they drove product sales. Now all we get is forgettable DEI box ticking, says Alexander McKibbin.
Some People Just Want to Go to a Concert
Taken to its logical conclusion, your life gets consumed by things you’re forced to care about and can’t affect anyway. And it’s all at the service of people who’d rather hold you captive than entertain you, or teach your kids, or serve you coffee – the things you’re paying them to do.
Waitaki Councillor and Broadcaster Jim Hopkins Dies
Hopkins was born in 1946 and spent most of his working life in and around broadcasting before he entered local government.
The Making of a Counterculture Capitalist Success Story
In ‘The Rise of Hip Capitalism,’ author Charles L Ponce de Leon traces how Rolling Stone fused countercultural rebellion with entrepreneurial ambition, turning cultural dissent into a media empire.
Why Couldn’t Mozart Get a Job?
if you are serious about music then you have to be prepared to be poor and accept the low probability that you might be one of the very few who somehow fall on their feet and get rich. You shouldn’t expect to be supported out of the public purse when you haven’t proven yourself to the public.
Stanley Kubrick Left Hollywood in 1961 and Never Went Back
Every film he made after that was testimony about the same thing.
Part Star, Part Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall lit up 1970s American cinema – and kept going.
Sam Hunt, Leading Without Authority but Unseen Elsewhere
Peter MacDonald Sam Hunt once said he could have become prime minister, as an accountant. Yet he chose a radically different path: poetry. He realised that while many follow ledgers or wield formal power, poets lead society in subtler ways, through observation, reflection and the quiet uncovering of truths that
AI Slop: We’ve Been Here Before
The similarities between ‘AI slop’ and the first decades of cinema.