A. I saw Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin (1925) as a La Trobe University BA cinema studies / film criticism major. In the early 2000s, I compared the famous Odessa Steppes sequence of a pram rolling down steps with Brian De Palma’s homage in The Untouchables (1987) to illustrate Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes: cultural units of information that replicate as contagious, transmissable-like social phenomena. This occurred in the Spiral Dynamics community with the late Christopher C. Cowan and his partner Natasha Todorovic-Cowan; in the then MSc in Strategic Foresight program at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology; and in the Newcastle, Australia-based This Is Not Art festival founded by Marcus Westbury OAM and other Octapod collective members. Eisenstein’s revolutionary classic is on rerelease with a new Pet Shop Boys soundtrack which is very strange considering that absolutely no major wars are occuring at the moment where it might be relevant.
B. Arizona State University Laureate Professor Noam Chomsky on Education For Whom and for What:
C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on American Literature.
D. The trailer for the new film Anemone (2025) is out.
E. The Hoover Institution’s Kevin Warsh on the United States Federal Reserve system and inflation (also: a useful book):