In the glare of the Opening Night Ceremony for the 2012 Olympiad, NBC’s custodians of sporting goodwill would occasionally suggest that the spectacle unfolding beneath their gaze would prove a boon to cash-strapped East London.

The event’s own labored narrative arc told a different story: If the receding industrial prosperity of the East End would ever return, it would only be in the tightly scripted precincts of imagineered spectacle. As a retinue of factory workers poured like so many Orcs out of the Glastonberry Tor erected at one corner of the facility, they hastened to a makeshift foundry to pretend-forge one of the Olympic rings. To Matt Lauer, this tableau was not merely a visual triumph, but an olfactory one: “Not only are you watching this ring being forged actually on the field, you’re now smelling it. They’ve found a way to pump that sulfur smell, that factory smell, out to 65,000 people.” Read More

One thing is even more certain in Aaron Sorkin’s social world than the beloved screenwriter’s trademark walking-and-talking professional banter: the rote designation of his characters—in their own dialogue—as “smart.” Indeed, their intellectual self-regard is so overweening that they are compelled to disclaim it mid-tantrum. Early on in the over-amped professional intrigue of Newsroom, Mr. Sorkin’s summer HBO study in high-minded newsgathering, Don, the disgruntled senior producer for evening news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) dresses him down thusly: “You are a smart, talented guy who’s not very nice.” A few beats later, we get McAvoy’s own compulsively admiring rejoinder: “You’re jumping from a sinking ship. You were always the smartest guy around here.” Read More

After America’s Dairyland rallied in impressive numbers to retain the services of its union-busting, austerity-besotted Gov. Scott Walker, the nation’s pundits clamored to declare Wisconsin’s June recall vote a stinging setback to the re-election plans of Barack Obama. Major-party operatives on both sides dubbed the Walker ballot the “second-most important election in the country this year,” the Washington Post’s Dan Balz reported. By rolling up a margin of support even greater than he amassed in his initial 2010 election campaign, Governor Walker was supplying nothing less than a “template,” Mr. Balz observed, for the national GOP as it seeks to fine-tune a winning 2012 presidential strategy: “big money, powerful organization and enormous enthusiasm among [the] base.” Read More

It’s rare that the soulless machinery of the presidential campaign system emits a telltale creak, exposing the terrifying vacuity that lurks just beneath all the overheated  microprocessors on the motherboard. Yet on the eve of the holiday weekend, we were witness to just such a spectacle, in an interview that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney granted to Time magazine’s politics correspondent Mark Halperin.

Early on in the proceedings, Mr. Halperin lobbed a simple procedural question Mr. Romney’s way: Why should a Romney administration tarry in its appointed mission to roll back the spending excesses of the Obama age? Why not, he wondered, “go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?” Read More