Zizek on Wikileaks

There has been, from the outset, something about its (Wikileaks) actions that goes beyond liberal conceptions of the free flow of information. We shouldn't look for this excess at the level of content. The only surprising thing about the Wikileaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn't we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

Vanity Fair on Murdoch vs Sulzberger

Like watching the Corleones picking on the Royal Tenenbaums.

Hilary Mantel on starsuckers

We live in a society basted in self-regard, our moralists tell us: fat and dozy on the lion's share of the world's resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance. More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realisation - a "life well lived", as Keith Thomas puts it. But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No: we want to be celebrities. We dream of instant, global fame. We expect it to enrich us, gratify us, but are less concerned that it outlast us. Once, priorities were different.

Bernard Goldberg on Dan Rather

If CBS news were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three quarters of the producers and a hundred percent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches.