With the Brooklyn Book Festival now behind us and the NY Art Book Fair just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of the printed word and whether or not books matter as much now as they used to. I’m not talking about how we’re warming up to our e-readers and giving ink and paper the cold shoulder; I mean the relevancy and power of the content itself – no matter how you choose to access it.
PopTech 2009 kicked off its three days of talks yesterday morning with speaker Kurt Andersen (remember SPY magazine?), the host of Studio360 who has “turned his indefatigable curiosity to examining everything from 19th-century health farms to the dot.com boom to Mick Jagger’s resemblance to Don Knotts.” Other speakers scheduled for today and tomorrow include a…
E. coli? Obesity? Illegal immigration? Hardly a day goes by, it seems, when one of these issues doesn’t appear somewhere in the news. The new documentary film Food Inc. does something that few in the mainstream media have tried with these issues: it demonstrates how they’re all connected to our food system, and the mass production methods that now dominate food processing in the United States.