Word: contrarian
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...since they can charge an extra $3 or $4 per ticket for the privilege of seeing a movie like Clash that is retrofitted with no other purpose than greed. This time, audiences responded to the saturation marketing campaign and ignored the mostly negative reviews. (Perhaps they read TIME's contrarian review of Clash of the Titans and decided to give the movie a try.) The Friday-to-Saturday drop for Clash, from $26.4 million to $21.6 million, might be attributed to mediocre word of mouth or preoccupation by the movie's core male audience with the NCAA men's Final...
...conservative Drudge Report. It was the mid-1990s, and the Web was in its infancy. Breitbart went to work for Drudge and served as his legman for 15 years, learning how to excavate news items from databases and wire-service feeds. More than that, he adopted Drudge's contrarian worldview. "Matt rejects entrenched thinking," says Breitbart. If Drudge (who did not respond to messages seeking comment about his protégé) taught Breitbart a new way of seeing, it was another former employer, Arianna Huffington (who also refused to speak about the boss of Big), who whipped him into...
...Yade, the junior Minister of Sports, is under fire for breaking ranks and criticizing a government decision to roll back tax breaks for professional athletes. Though heartfelt, Yade's contrarian stand made for bad politics - something her peers have made painfully clear. Junior Minister for Family Affairs Nadine Morano told a newspaper that if Yade didn't "agree with government policies, [she] should shut [her] trap or resign." (See pictures of Paris expanding...
Still, Levitt and Dubner do tackle one legitimately controversial topic, one that I think could benefit from a somewhat contrarian perspective: geoengineering, or using technology to directly cool the earth to compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth...
Ultimately, that is the right way to use geoengineering and to approach climate change. While geoengineering shouldn't be ignored, Levitt and Dubner's biggest mistake in their examination of the topic lay in being seduced by a clever-sounding, cheap and contrarian shortcut. Climate change, however, is one issue for which the conventional wisdom still works, even though it's costly - and even though conventional wisdom won't sell 3 million books...