Welcome to the age of the hermit consumer | A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | “Maestro” Is a Leonard Bernstein Bio-Pic as Restless as Its Subject

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Welcome to the age of the hermit consumer - The Economist

In some ways the covid-19 pandemic was a blip. After soaring in 2020, unemployment across the rich world quickly dropped to pre-pandemic lows. Rich countries reattained their pre-covid gdp levels in short order. And yet, more than two years after lockdowns were lifted, at least one change appears to be enduring: consumer habits across the rich world have shifted decisively, and perhaps permanently. Welcome to the age of the hermit.

In the years before covid, the share of consumer spending devoted to services rose steadily upwards. As societies got richer, they demanded more in the way of luxury experiences, health care and financial planning. Then, in 2020, spending on services, from hotel stays to hair cuts, collapsed owing to lockdowns. With people spending more time at home, demand for goods jumped, with a rush for computer equipment and exercise bikes.

Three years on the share of spending devoted to services remains below its pre-covid level (see chart 1). Relative to its pre-covid trend, the decline is even sharper. Rich-world consumers are spending on the order of $600bn a year less on services than you might have expected in 2019. In particular, people are less interested in spending on leisure activities that generally take place outside the home, including hospitality and recreation. The money saved is being redirected to goods, ranging from durables such as chairs and fridges, to things like clothes, food and wine.

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A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft - The New Yorker

I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential, and ever more so by the day, encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world.

I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer, while working on a small hobby project. A few months back, my friend Ben and I had resolved to create a Times-style crossword puzzle entirely by computer. In 2018, we’d made a Saturday puzzle with the help of software and were surprised by how little we contributed—just applying our taste here and there. Now we would attempt to build a crossword-making program that didn’t require a human touch.

When we’ve taken on projects like this in the past, they’ve had both a hardware component and a software component, with Ben’s strengths running toward the former. We once made a neon sign that would glow when the subway was approaching the stop near our apartments. Ben bent the glass and wired up the transformer’s circuit board. I wrote code to process the transit data. Ben has some professional coding experience of his own, but it was brief, shallow, and now about twenty years out of date; the serious coding was left to me. For the new crossword project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. He’d signed up for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.

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“Maestro” Is a Leonard Bernstein Bio-Pic as Restless as Its Subject - The New Yorker

Among other things, "On the Waterfront" (1954) is a glove story. Walking near the river, on a cold day, Eva Marie Saint drops a glove. Marlon Brando picks it up and puts it on. He unwraps a stick of gum. After a while, she tugs the glove from his hand. Contact is made. She goes and stands by an iron railing. He says, "You don't remember me, do you?" Just before she replies, we hear music: woodwind solos, with the clarinet leading the way. "I remembered you the first moment I saw you," she says. Strings join the woodwinds. Brando chews gum, walks off, turns, and beckons, calling out, "Come on."

The music, unobtrusive yet edged with romantic encouragement, is by Leonard Bernstein. It's the only score that he wrote directly for the movies. If only he had written more. ("On the Town" and "West Side Story" sprang from the theatre and, for many listeners, lost a jolt of energy when they arrived onscreen.) In truth, given his influence on so many realms of American cultureâas a composer, a conductor, a lecturer, a TV presenter, an author, a New Yorker, and an activistâit's astonishing how faint a mark Bernstein left on cinema. Maybe he feared, with good cause, that the compromises involved in filmmaking were even more grievous than those inflicted elsewhere. His most astute contribution may be "What a Movie!," a mezzo-soprano number composed for his 1952 opera, "Trouble in Tahiti," during which the heroine, Dinah, derides a film that she just saw ("What escapist Technicolor twaddle"), only to be swept up, despite herself, in the tropical fantasies that it purveyed.

Now we have "Maestro," a new Bernstein bio-pic. It's directed by Bradley Cooper, who wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer and, to treble the fun, takes the role of Bernstein. The movie covers miles of chronological ground. We start with the aged Bernstein, adenoidal, snowy-haired, and armed with the tools without which he can't exist: a piano and a cigarette. (Warning: The tobacco consumption in this film will take your breath away. Bernstein even smokes in a doctor's waiting room.) Then it's a long hop back to his twenty-five-year-old self, plucked from his slumbers by a phone call, on November 14, 1943, informing him that, alas, Bruno Walter is indisposed and that Bernstein, with only a few hours' notice and no rehearsal, must conduct the New York Philharmonic.

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Why the U.S. won't change physical cash - CNBC

The Federal Reserve will spend $931.4 million to print bills in 2023 â but there's a problem with U.S. cash.

"We haven't modernized or changed our currency. That's probably a mistake," Aaron Klein, senior fellow of economic studies at Brookings Institute, told CNBC. "We should have dollar coins instead of paper notes."

Physical currency has been updated around the world but not in the U.S., and while an increasing number of Americans are ditching cash for electronic payments, experts say cash isn't going away.

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