My mother never loved me
Recent highlights from the Ideas blog
The illustrator Ward Sutton has a superb monthly column in the Barnes & Noble Review called “Drawn to Read,” in which he reviews books via the medium of graphic art (though I don’t think he minds being called a cartoonist). And could a writer-illustrator-reviewer have a better subject than Dave Eggers’s novelization of the Maurice Sendak classic “Where the Wild Things Are”? (Eggers also co-wrote the screenplay for the new film, directed by Spike Jonze, so you might also consider the Eggers book to be a novelization of the screenplay.)
Sutton’s main complaint has to do with the introduction of that creaky Hollywood device, the “back story.” In Sendak’s book, we don’t know anything about Max except that he’s acted up and been sent to his room, which soon, of course, sprouts with trees and adventure. But Eggers re-imagines Max as the product of a broken home, and, what’s more, as a boy whose close bond with an older sister is sadly eroding as she enters her teenage years.
In the book review’s best panel, Sutton shows Max - Sendak’s Max, emphatically - lamenting to a therapist that he really doesn’t have any of the baggage Eggers has saddled him with. In the room with him, actively therapizing, are Darth Vader and the Grinch, characters to whom Hollywood screenwriters have also given tedious back stories.
Psychologists have long used the phrase “the uncanny valley” to refer to the way people react to simulated images of human beings. We respond more and more positively as such simulations move from the obviously cartoonish or robotic to the moderately human-esque. But when the faux-humans reach the point of being very-close-but-somehow-off (think of the Tom Hanks character in “The Polar Express”), a severely adverse reaction ensues. (The positive response then resumes as the simulation becomes hyper-realistic.)
When Asif Ghazanfar, an assistant professor of psychology and member of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Shawn Steckenfinger, a research specialist in Princeton’s psychology department, showed that monkeys experienced analogous heebie-jeebies in the presence of uncanny monkey images, it was the first demonstration of the uncanny-valley effect in a species besides humans.
Their paper, which appeared in the Oct. 12 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, strengthens the argument that the uncanny valley has evolutionary roots: It is a side effect, perhaps, of whatever sensory-processing system helps to identify enemies posing as friends.
It’s a bit of a magpie list. So alongside Robert Oppenheimer’s ruing that Japan was not informed more clearly about what, exactly, the atomic bomb would do, you’ve got Vincent Connare expressing regret over the Comic Sans font. Connare whipped up the cartoonish typeface in 1994 for a
Also, the guy who mandated that double-slashes appear at the start of Web addresses now says that was a dumb move: “Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //.” Huh.
Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com. 
