Consider some recent findings: Only 4.4 percent of the top 100 box-office domestic releases between 2002 and 2012 were directed by women. In 2012, only 28.4 percent of all on-screen speaking characters in the top 100 were women. If you thought women in movies don’t have much of a voice, you’re right.
.. “Our contribution,” Mr. Cogan said, “was to say that the way you address this problem is money. It’s about access to capital for women directors. That’s it. It’s not about mentorship. It’s about putting the money on the table and giving it to women.”
When Entertainment Passes for Investment Advice
The undisputed king of macro-tainment is Peter Schiff. Schiff has managed to combine the most effective form of political entertainment — right-wing talk radio — with the most popular and addictive flavor of macro-tainment, Austrian economics. Schiff was elevated to dizzying heights of popularity after 2007, when one of his many, many, many, many bubble calls proved to be right. Since then it has seemed like Schiff is everywhere — I’ve seen his face on three banner ads in three different magazines just this morning.
Frum: Reform Republicans
It is a sign that progressive arguments about inequality have gained sufficient purchase that Senator Marco Rubio is willing to acknowledge, as he did in a speech earlier this year, that “from 1980 to 2005, over 80 percent of the total increase in income went to the top 1 percent of American earners,” and that “70 percent of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class.”
.. Although the story is told differently by different sides, Frum’s dissidence had something to do with his departure from (or his being asked to leave) the American Enterprise Institute in 2010. His break with AEI happened to come only a few days after he lambasted the Republican Party for its failure to negotiate with the Obama White House over the Affordable Care Act. Frum’s heresy included acknowledging that the ACA had “a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan,” building on “ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.”
Against Republican cries that Obama was leading the nation to socialism, Frum insisted (correctly, as it happens) that “the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.” He also earned the opprobrium of many a conservative talk show host—and coined a highly useful term—by declaring the bill’s passage “a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry.” Their “listeners and viewers,” he wrote, “will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio.”