Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
Technology:
Economics:
disability, immigration, globalization, and technological unemployment:
Lives up to its fame (as long as you watch with subtitles), more than 12 years later. Satisfyingly intricate and intelligent police drama delving into the War on Drugs from a realistic point of view not blinded by idealism or unfounded confidence in police, courts, or governments like so many other shows which are based more on what writers think the audience wants to be true. Better than any other cop show I've watched. The filming on location in Baltimore helps realism for me, since I've wandered around Baltimore more than once. The downside is that the ~60 hours demands to be marathoned, and ate my month.
The first season is perfect in its taut narrative from start to finish and illustrating the theme of The Wire: it's the incentives, stupid.
There's a lot of discussion of The Wire and praise for how it deals with racial themes, but this misses the mark - race is almost entirely irrelevant in the series, except occasionally as something fools are blinded by and can be manipulated with (such as how Clay Davis gulls voters and jurymen with racial rhetoric). What is important is how, black or white, male or female, everyone faces pressure from the system & realit
The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, by Francis Fukuyama.
The project is like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but with a focus on institutions. Basically, it's an overview of all the different routes political development has taken. It mostly presents historical examples. This overview of the first book is decent, which covers autonomous states in China, India, the Middle East (so early Islam, Mamluk slave-military-rulers (!), and Europe (he focuses on the balance of powers between Church/aristocracy/monarchy in France, Spain+Early Spanish Colonies, Denmark, UK, Hungary and Russia) up to the French Revolution. The second volume covers modern democracy (contrasting early American and European democracy, and contemporary Italy/Greece v Northern Europe), colonial and post-colonial states (contrasting Latin America and African, and then the different paths within each area), and bureaucracies (a lot of German stuff; a surprisingly interesting discussion of the US Forest Service). He makes some nods to contemporary issues at the end of the last book, but probably not in a way that will trigger any particular tribal reflexes; he talks about why he t...
You summarize it well, but I'd like to add that most of the characters feel amazingly real. The language is a big part of that of course, but much of the rest is that the cast largely played people they knew personally. The extreme is Felicia Pearson, a murderess who is played by a convicted (supposedly second-degree) murderess of the same name.
I'm amazed at how well this series has aged. It looks copyable, but somehow nobody ever did - maybe showrunners would rather avoid the comparison? Even Breaking Bad, which started out somewhat similar, went away from the realistic and toward the cinematic after the first few episodes, and I imagine the reduced comparisons to The Wire were an intended part of the effect.
(Although now that I think about it, there's a German series ("Kriminaldauerdienst") that obviously copies The Wire. Makes sense though, because The Wire is practically untranslatable, and its German dubbing is atrocious, so you can kind of avoid that juggernaut if you hide inside the German language market. Maybe other non-English language markets have similar series.)
It definitely needs subtitles if English isn't your first language.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
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