FTrain: Poems for Young Capitalists

The man in HR gives a terrible shout--
"Here comes the board! Their meeting let out!"

Industrious shuffles as keyboards start typing.
The writers write copy, PR men start hyping.

The dark suits emerge, each member a clone,
And the rooms fill with clamoring cellular phones.

So, just as our profits triumphantly swell,
The horsemen arrive and we all go to hell.

Globe and Mail: Think tusks, not blubber, an article about Walrus Magazine.

Alexander and Berlin insist Walrus will be around for at least five years, not five issues. Which is why they're going into the fray with a war-chest estimated at between $5-million and $6.5-million. "In my view, the start-up period for a magazine isn't three or four months," Alexander remarked. "When I started to look at magazine financing, the thing that became obvious to me was that, today at least, there's no way to launch and sustain a smart, general-interest magazine without a fourth stream of revenue. Advertising, newsstand sales, subscriptions -- they're not enough."

Globe and Mail: Interview with Filmmaker Harun Farocki

He is noticing, though, that the visual texture of war coverage has changed dramatically. First of all, the embedded cameras have made for endless eventless tracts of videotape, which serve as backdrops for teams of expert commentators in the studio back home. "It's like they borrowed the idea from the pre-game coverage of sports events," he says. During the Vietnam War, he remembers, the images were so charged, like distilled pellets of human drama. Here, by and large, we have experienced no drama, just infinite boredom and second-hand speculation.