On Tuesday, Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced their plan to set aside 99
percent of their Facebook shares, “about $45 billion”, for charity. This announcement is part of a larger trend
called “the Giving Pledge” which was created by Bill and Melinda Gates along
with Warren Buffett which asks the richest people in the world to devote half
or more of their fortunes to philanthropy.
As great as this may sound it has caused some controversy as a result of
the fact that the reliance on the philanthropy of the richest citizens allows
them, for better or worse, to have an oversized role in deciding what is best
for society. Joining me today to talk
all about the Zuckerberg’s pledge and the pros and cons of private versus public spending on social welfare in the United States is Jeff Guo a Business Reporter for The Washington Post. You can also follow Jeff on Twitter.
The French filmmaker Christophe Honoré is known for
challenging his audiences with complex cinematic form, intricate narrative
structures, and aesthetically dynamic filmmaking. Honoré, who is gay, and considered
by many French critics as the heir to the Nouvelle Vague cinema, artistically
address the questions of family, death, and sexual desire in his films and represents
new ground for queer theory. However, the
limited release of his films outside of Europe has left him largely unknown to
U.S. audiences, and as result of this David A. Gerstner professor of cinema studies at the City University of New York,
College of Staten Island, where he is chair of the Department of Media Culture
and Julien Nahmias a psychiatrist who
works at the Institut Paul Sivadon–Association L’Élan Retrouvé, in Paris,
France have written a new book all about him and his work. The book, Christophe Honoré: A Critical Introduction take a close look at Honoré’s cinematic
technique and how it engages with France’s contemporary cultural landscape and consider
critically contested issues such as his cinematic strategies for addressing
AIDS, the depth of his LGBTQ politics, as well as his representations of death
and sexual desire.
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