A revealing, highly readable look at the making of the modern home-entertainment environment.
Anecdote-rich tale of how Netflix came to dominate the streaming-video market.
“Underestimating Netflix was an industry default,” write entertainment business reporters Hayes and Chmielewski in their aptly titled study of the streaming giant and the many tech- and film-industry competitors that rose to challenge it. The authors begin their account with the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the world indoors. “America, already accustomed to spending hours a day in a screen-filled cocoon, would respond to the crisis by serving itself more and bigger portions of comfort food,” they write. This comfort food came in the form of bingeworthy series, freshly made or in the vault, and Netflix delivered a substantial portion of it, having essentially had a decade head start in delivering streaming video—though predecessors had paved the way. These included Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com, which, in the 1990s, pioneered the delivery of sports via the early internet, and Jonathan Taplin’s early amalgamation of the libraries of several film studios—a holdout being Paramount, whose corporate parent owned Blockbuster, the now-defunct video-rental chain. Netflix arose from its ashes with a business model that once relied on mail-order rentals but then captured the market for streaming that resulted from ever faster internet speeds. It took years for rivals such as Disney, HBO, Amazon Prime, and other providers to catch up, and all but Disney still trail. Consumers are the beneficiaries, with an embarrassment of riches to watch. The “binge” model was a great hook, even if some insiders didn’t quite understand it. When Lilyhammer star Steven Van Zandt complained that he’d spent months making the series in Norway only to have it dumped all at once, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos chuckled, “Yeah, just like an album.” And the biggest hit of 2021? Squid Game, the Korean show that, the authors convincingly argue, “could really have been launched by only one company: Netflix.”
A revealing, highly readable look at the making of the modern home-entertainment environment.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-298000-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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