Breaking Up and to the Right

“Breaking Bad” made its debut in 2008 to an underwhelming 1.2 million viewers — which would have caused many programming chiefs to drop it. But the show dodged cancellation and slowly built a following — especially once the old episodes were made available en masse on Netflix.

By mid-2012, about 2.6 million viewers were watching live episodes; now, as the ending approaches, that total has more than doubled to 6 million, which might be small for a network television show but makes “Breaking Bad” one of the biggest phenomena on cable.

From Brian Stelter at the NYTimes.

I wonder if any other show on TV has experienced such a strong and steady growth in viewership across its lifetime. The internet and the availability to stream previous episodes and seasons has not only enabled more complex, linear, multi-episode and multi-season storytelling, but it created an environment in which a show like Breaking Bad could survive long enough to accumulate audience and buzz as it went.

If you aren't caught up and are worried about social media spoiling Breaking Bad's series finale this Sunday, you can use this Netflix-branded spoiler foiler for your Twitter account.  

I'm not even going to take that risk. I'll be turning off all my devices and sitting with a tinfoil hat on my head on Sunday, waiting until I've finished watching the finale in real time before I talk or interact with another human being. 

A cinema of uncertainty

The degree to which Antonioni remained in intellectual vogue in the U.S. during this period fluctuated wildly. The original defenders of L’avventura were mainly literary types like Dwight Macdonald and John Simon, both of whom turned against Eclipse only a year or so later, as did a rising star named Pauline Kael (who had also championed L’avventura). Andrew Sarris, who later came back in force to defend Blowup, was already cracking jokes about “Antoniennui” in the early 60s. Many American critics tended to be scornful of Antonioni’s continuing use of Monica Vitti (in four features in a row) because of her limited technical range as an actress, much as Godard was criticized concurrently for repeatedly using Anna Karina. And the fact that Antonioni’s concentration on the idle rich in L’avventura and La notte coincided with the milieus of such contemporaneous movies as La dolce vita and Last Year at Marienbad was enough to make Kael ignore the radical formal differences between Fellini, Resnais, and Antonioni and link them all together in an otherwise amusing broadside called “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties.”

The problem was, many of these people were already starting to adopt a critical attitude that assumed it was possible to know immediately and without a doubt what was good and bad in a movie the precise moment it appeared — an attitude that Kael’s disciples have subsequently adopted with even more shrillness and impatience. Intricate, melancholic mood pieces like Antonioni’s, which invite and reward — and occasionally even require — weeks of mulling over, could find no place at all within this approach, so fewer and fewer critics wound up dealing with them, seriously or otherwise. Better to come up with a clever quip about them right away than continue to think about them for a week or two, or even revise an opinion about them when the review got reprinted (which Kael has never done about a single movie in any of her 11 books — confidence with a vengeance, and one that necessarily rules out a whole cinema of uncertainty). In a marketplace virtually predicated on planned obsolescence, movies that stick in one’s craw rather than speed through the digestive system are bound to cause trouble.

From the classic "A Cinema of Uncertainty" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, first published in 1993. First time I'd read this specific critique of the Pauline Kael school of criticism, the first person instinctive reaction, never to be repeated. Perhaps there are two modes of criticism, fast and slow, and perhaps those have parallels in movie watching, too.

As much as people lament the future of the mid-budget thinking adult's movie, I'm much more surprised when I go to the symphony or even more so the opera and find a packed house. That seems like an art form whose continued survival is even more of a miracle. I suppose I'll look around and puzzle at how the aged audience will replenish itself until the day I'm one of the elderly and genteel patrons that a few younger audience members will look at as the last of a dying breed.

Need a blueprint for The Blueprint

Over a year ago I preordered a book titled The Blueprint, intrigued by its three accomplished co-authors: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Garry Kasparov.  The subtitle of the book was Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.

The ship date on Amazon kept pushing back and pushing back, and finally I learned why in an aside in Why We Can't Solve Big Problems:

Levchin, Thiel, and Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, had planned a book, to be titled The Blueprint, that would “explain where the world’s innovation has gone.” Originally intended to be released in March of this year, it has been indefinitely postponed, according to Levchin, because the authors could not agree on a set of prescriptions. 

The sound of iOS 7

I've been running iOS 7 on my iPhone for about a month now, largely for testing our iOS 7 compatible version of Flipboard, and just at noticeable as the visual and spatial navigation changes are the updated sounds and ringtones. It's like the iPhone got a new voice. 

Alan Hanson at The Awl reviews the top 5 new ringtones of iOS 7.  On Constellation:

It is twilight. You are living inside of a prism beam. You are slowly falling through a prism beam without worry and with a satiated stomach. All of your childhood pets are running toward you in slow motion and they are hungry for your love. Your favorite blanket is playing your favorite instrument on a bed of newly fallen autumn leaves. Insects do not exist and yet, the ecosystem remains beautifully balanced. Your boss who respects you very much enters your line of vision and unrolls a long scroll. She reads from the scroll. She reads all of your favorite words, slowly, then disintegrates and is carried off by a warm wind. You have never had a parking ticket. Your dentist is in awe of your brushing habits.

If you think that sounds overblown, go listen to Constellation . I've never switched from the default ringtone before iOS 7 came along, but now the default ringtone has even changed. RIP Marimba, you were the reigning rooster's crow of a digital generation.

I never browsed the list of ringtones in my iPhone in much detail before, but the Awl article raised my curiosity. Many of the new options, and there are many, strike me as more New Agey in nature. Uplift could be the start of an Enya song.  Many of the are more melodic and tune-like than alert-based in nature. For once, I may opt for one of the former.

Identifying a viral seed group

So a way of finding seed groups in a given social network would surely be a useful trick, not to mention a valuable one. Step forward Paulo Shakarian, Sean Eyre and Damon Paulo from the West Point Network Science Center at the US Military Academy in West Point.

These guys have found a way to identify a seed group that, when infected, can spread a message across an entire network. And they say it can be done quickly and easily, even on relatively large networks.

Their method is relatively straightforward. It is based on the idea that an individual will eventually receive a message if a certain proportion of his or her friends already have that message. This proportion is a critical threshold and is crucial in their approach.

Having determined the threshold, these guys examine the network and look for all those individuals who have more friends than this critical number. They then remove those who exceed the threshold by the largest amount.

In the next, step, they repeat this process, looking for all those with more friends than the critical threshold and pruning those with the greatest excess. And so on.

This process finishes when there is nobody left in the network who has more friends than the threshold. When this happens, whoever is left is the seed group. A message sent to each member of this group can and should spread to the entire network.

More here. The key breakthrough for the researchers was not trying to force themselves to find the smallest possible seed group. This feels like it will be the seed, pun intended, of a Malcolm Gladwell article. Maybe the sequel to The Tipping Point.