Steffen Huck

Thursday

Steffen Huck

Can you trade love for wealth? The economics of Breaking Bad

From our UK edition

It has been the social-science equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider, the most expensive and most awe-inspiring experiment of our time. Like Cern’s particle collider, it started in 2008 and this week, just six months after the Geneva researchers confirmed that they had found the Higgs Boson, it, too, has reached a conclusion. Walter White (above), hero of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, is...(spoiler averted). When Breaking Bad hit our screens, it dumbfounded viewers and critics alike with the sheer complexity of its narrative and aesthetics. The reviews were mixed and its future uncertain. The social experiment that the series set out to explore was strikingly simple: take an ordinary, law-abiding citizen and have him dabble in crime.

Thursday

Steffen Huck

Meltdown in Valhalla

From our UK edition

What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant quantities hand-in-hand with public subsidies; after all, the show (which originally was intended to be produced only once, the set consumed for ever in the last scene’s flames) is notoriously expensive to produce. The show in question is, of course, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, arguably the greatest and surely the longest piece in the repertoire that the opera houses of the world have to stage in order to be taken seriously.