- Endless Summers (via Mankiw). Supercilious he might well be, but some of us still find him absolutely fascinating-- I think I am (in the process of) understanding why :-). Earlier (first bullet point).
- On the poetic prehistory of development economics: a very interesting post by Adam Martin on Easterly's Aid Watchers blog.
- They cannot be blamed for defending/arguing what's in their best interest (click on the British flag in the upper right corner to get to the article in English, if you do not see it immediately through the link above); however, in my opinion, their general case is overstated: most of the translation services as hitherto understood are redundant. There is still a case (and a premium) for translation services from/to Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese & the like, but certainly not for European to European languages, and certainly not in countries from Scandinavia or Benelux...
- Top 100 best films of the decade (?). To be honest, I have seen to date only one film from their top 10. But I did see quite a few from the range 10-20 and, if this hierarchy makes any sense, I ought to definitely see anything that beats the movies at positions 16, 20 or 21, which are all in my very own all-time top 26. Quite impressive is also that Romanian director Cristi Mungiu's film "4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile" is number 14 in this ranking (this movie is in my priority to-see list). See also my earlier entry on The December Children.
- Market-design presentations at a conference in honour of Paul Milgrom, by some of the world's best researchers in this field (via Al Roth on Market Design)
- Did you forget about the Romanian '09 Presidential Election Prediction Markets?! Participate: it's fun!
2 comments:
Looking from the 21st position towards the top I am definitely convinced that you shouldn't just pick any of those:) The top 20 at least strives to be an intelliget "melange" of easy to forget blockbusters and some worthy to be seen movie gems. I've seen most of their top 10 movies and some of them are just a waste of time (Haneke and Herzog are far from being in the "waste of time" category, of course). If you want some genuinly sarcastic and intelligent Trey Parker humour for example, just pick any South Park episode, the Lord of the Rings parody is my all time favourite and one of the finest from the series. "Team America" is just an awful mess.
Hey Dan,
I still think I have to watch them. Most of them are pretty high in the critics' rankings as well (RottenTomatoes), which already says quite something (not all). Plus, as I said, the ones I saw in top 21 are certainly extremely good (in top 10 I have seen the two Bourne movies mentioned: I like more the other 3 films that I mentioned in the post, but the Bourne ones were extremely well done, with the Bourne Ultimatum possibly somewhere in my top 50 all time). But I have a priority movies-to-see list (most movies there are not at all in this top 100 mainly because they are older, but some are) and I do not think I will add there all top 20 not seen from here :-).
More: South Park can be both super good and simply mediocre (I wouldn't say I found any "plain bad"), I thus wouldn't agree that you should just pick "any" episode. That being said, I think "the beauty is the eye of the beholder" is often brought up to justify complete lack of understanding/assessing quality. One can surely agree on hierarchy ranges, full stop :-).
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