Letters to the editor

Letters are welcome via e-mail to [email protected]

Roll cameras

The timeline to produce blockbuster films is far longer than most people realise (“That’s a wrap”, September 30th). In addition to pre-production before shooting and the actual filming of the movie, blockbusters often spend 12-18 months in post-production before they are released. Many of next summer’s blockbusters will be nearing the end of this long road to completion over the next six months. So the strikes in Hollywood have in some cases had an impact on films that have long since finished shooting but are still in post-production.

Much of the post-production time on the biggest films is spent on visual effects (or VFX). The tennis ball on a stick that an actor ran from on set may need to become a fire-breathing dragon. The creature will need to be designed, a digital model constructed, digitally painted and rigged (think strings on a digital marionette). Then, once the dragon is ready, it still must be animated, its fire simulated, and all these elements digitally composed for dozens or hundreds of individual shots in the film. This work is time consuming, highly skilled and costly. The workforce is global, though it tends to cluster where government incentives have brought together studios and highly skilled, well-paid jobs to a city or province.

Zachary Mallett
VFX producer
Vancouver

He did it his way

Writing about how we mourn famous writers and musicians you readily dismissed intimacy as a cause of our grief (Back Story, September 9th). Great artists bare their souls through their art, revealing something deeply personal about themselves. I remember feeling grief at the death of Frank Sinatra, a result of having got to know something about the man through his music. His obituary in the New York Times reflected this, observing that, as he matured, “Sinatra’s interpretations grew more personal and idiosyncratic, so that each performance became a direct expression of his personality and his mood of the moment.” Of his impact on popular music, the Times said, “Sinatra transformed popular singing by infusing lyrics with a personal, intimate point of view.”

Eric Lane
Rye, New York

Expanding PrEP treatments

Too many people continue to become infected with HIV globally and in sub-Saharan Africa particularly, so I appreciate your leader highlighting the need to improve prevention efforts (“How to beat HIV” September 23rd). Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), using drugs to reduce the risk of HIV infection, is a critical tool in efforts to end the epidemic. Oral PrEP works for everyone, men and women, regardless of sexual orientation.

True, the impact of PrEP among women in sub-Saharan Africa has been suboptimal because of challenges with adhering to daily pill-taking, limited access and stigmatisation. However, making oral PrEP easily and widely accessible in communities has been shown to facilitate its uptake. Indeed, research such as the SEARCH study in Kenya and Uganda has found this approach to be associated with lower HIV infection risks among men and women.

New PrEP options, including a long-lasting injection and the vaginal ring, are exciting and needed. People should have choices that suit their needs. Cabotegravir, an injectable PrEP, has been found highly effective at preventing HIV. However, manufacturing injectable PrEP is complicated and generic cabotegravir is years away. Access remains very limited. Moreover, most projects planning to offer injectable PrEP do not focus on so-called key populations who are at particularly high risk of HIV, such as sex workers, transgender people and men who have sex with men. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls and young women face substantial HIV risk, about half of new infections are among key populations and their sexual partners. Punitive laws like those criminalising same-sex relations undermine HIV-prevention efforts. Removing these barriers is critical to ensuring health-care access for those who need it most, something no new pharmaceutical product will do.

Dr Robin Schaefer
Forum for Collaborative Research
University of California, Berkeley

Treat your workers well

Bartleby’s tour d’horizon of the most important person in a company (September 16th) makes stimulating reading for what it includes and for what it omits. Most of the people mentioned, including the chief executive, are employees. As companies migrate, or at least inch, towards some form of stakeholder capitalism, CEOs would do well to measure the value of employees not merely as productive assets or human capital but as sources of intelligence, reputation and resilience. At every level, employees who are esteemed and rewarded for everything they can offer to their company, as opposed to just being paid for work done, are much less likely to engage in quiet quitting and much more likely to display lasting loyalty to their organisation. Moreover, Bartleby conspicuously omitted shareholders. Here again, if shareholders are cultivated for their contribution beyond their investment and not just until the next quarterly results, they too can show loyalty as sources of intelligence, reputation and resilience.

Nicholas Dungan
Chief executive
CogitoPraxis
The Hague

In my teaching, I always try to convince students (especially executives) of the absurdity of their actions. On the one hand, companies spend millions of dollars on marketing research. On the other hand, the same firms treat employees who have first-hand knowledge of customer feedback poorly. The person who knows you best when you check into a hotel is the maid. The employee who knows what makes you happy on a plane is your flight attendant. No investment in AI, loyalty programmes, or advanced analytics can match that knowledge.

Dr Michael Haenlein
Professor of marketing
ESCP Business School
London

Schumpeter amply plumbed the abysses to which customer service, particularly for tech firms, has sunk (September 30th). He wonders why customers are becoming increasingly uncivil. Anyone who has found themselves locked in voice-mail jail or in the clutches of an incompetent chatbot to resolve a problem that they know could be easily taken care of if they could just reach a human understands this. When things go awry, people need knowledgeable help quickly without being forced to go through a chain of time-consuming, fruitless connections with automated “intelligent agents”.

I have found it extremely difficult to reach a human at two big telecoms and cable companies. The sorry track record of those and other corporate giants gives little confidence that they will make the kind of enlightened, sophisticated use of generative AI that Schumpeter thinks will help solve the problem.

Stewart Wills
Silver Spring, Maryland

Are diamonds forever?

You describe diamonds as long-term investment driven by a fashion fad instigated by a slick marketing campaign and made profitable by the market power of a monopolist (Buttonwood, September 16th). What could possibly go wrong?

Grant Lewis
Canberra

Lady blue

Your article on the two women vying to be Mexico’s next president didn’t capture the true colour of Xóchitl Gálvez’s slang (“Señora Presidenta”, September 9th). Both huevones and pendejos best translate as “assholes”. Using words like “loafers” and “idiots” barely begins to represent her style.

Andrew Winter
United States ambassador, retd
Quito, Ecuador