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April 6, 2007
If my posts this week have you thinking about the attraction of expatriate life -- or is that just me? -- here's something to sober you up. A lot of expats are depressed.
Glamour, wealth and a fast track in the promotions race all are on offer to those posted to a distant land.
Those naive enough to hold that dream soon learn otherwise -- and surveys [have] confirmed that the expat reality can be a lonely and isolated one.
Relocation can be particularly hard on families, especially dual-career ones. Among respondents to a recent survey, 52.5 percent of American women who came along with their husbands to a foreign country had worked before the move, but only 19 percent ended up holding a job in the new country.
If you have neither a significant other nor an office job, nor even a pet, however...
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:56 PM
April 6, 2007
Berlin may be be a boomtown or getting there, but there are still some here who retain a wistful nostalgia for the days of a command economy and other forms of state monitoring and control. After a report in Der Spiegel (I think this is it), Germany's interior ministry has confirmed that its head, Wolfgang Schaeuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, has proposed a far-reaching plan to establish firm control (surveillance?) over the citizenry. From the sloppy UPI report:
Schaeuble plans to expand surveillance within the context of the fight against terrorism. He wants to increase the preventive means of the Federal Criminal Police Office, or BKA, by making major bugging and data-trawling operations easier to conduct. BKA agents should [sic] be allowed to conduct preventive criminal data searches and secret online searches of private computers; moreover, the interior minister wants to store the data of Germany's toll system to help prevent and solve criminal and terrorist acts [can you solve an act? I say sic]. Edathy rejected in particular Schaeuble's plan to have fingerprints, which in the future will be saved in a chip in citizens' passports, stored with [sic] federal registration offices.
Germany's left wing isn't lovin' it.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:55 PM
April 6, 2007
The Association for Psychological Science announced this finding last month, but I hadn't seen a reference to it till now. For goalies in our audience, it's news you can use!
Two academic psychologists, based in Hong Kong, have determined that, during penalty kicks, the goalie can influence which side of the net the kicker chooses to target -- without the kicker's realizing it. The trick is to set yourself up 6 to 10 centimeters to the left or right of the center point between the two goal posts. That will subconsciously prompt the kicker to favor the more open side of the net -- a bias the goalie can take advantage of.
Goalies face tall odds in stopping a decent penalty kick no matter what they do. This study offers them a fighting chance for a few more stops per season -- at least until the soccer world in general learns about the Psychological Science article.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 01:17 PM
April 6, 2007
Rats! In my Ideas item about post-apocalyptic global warming novels, last Sunday, I should have included "The Drowned World," a 1963 novel by the great J. G. Ballard. I've read "Drowned World," years ago, but left it off the list because I thought Ballard's book placed the blame for global warming on pollution/greenhouse gases, and the point of the Ideas item was to locate sci-fi novels in which the climate heats up on its own (or because of aliens, or an approaching asteroid).
But LA-based writer Geoff Manaugh, whose Ballard-inspired BLDGBLOG concerns itself with architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures, informs me that I've misremembered "Drowned World." He writes:
Ballard: "A series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminished the Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere. As these vanished into space, depleting the Earth's barrier against the full impact of solar radiation, temperatures began to climb steadily, the heated atmosphere expanding outwards into the ionosphere where the cycle was completed." The result is "a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning
rapidly to their Paleozoic past."
Meanwhile, fellow Brainiac blogger and Ideas writer Jan Freeman nominates "One in Three Hundred" (1954) by J. T. McIntosh -- in which only a few humans can survive the sun's nova to escape to Mars. "I remember I read most of it standing up in the library: Not just un-put-downable but un-sit-downable!" raves Jan.
Thanks, Geoff and Jan!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:17 PM
April 6, 2007
At his Foobar blog, Scot Hacker announces that he's cofounded a website, Stuck Between Stations, described as "an experiment in music writing, built by/for past-and-present music dorks with jobs and families and precious little free time, but who keep listening from the corner of the ear." Sounds right up my alley.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:46 AM
April 6, 2007
I thought I'd publish some photos from Berlin today, where I have a one-day appointment as Brainiac's Continental Europe bureau chief. It's difficult to get a read on the Berlin political climate in less than a day, naturally, but signs of the cultural climate are easier to come by.
East Berlin seems to be, as a friend here noted, a larger version of Manhattan's East Village. Eighteen years after communism reigned, the place is more fashionable than most East Coast cities. Like the East Village and the more shabby-chic parts of Cambridge, Mass., it offers a combination of an anti-establishment vibe -- there's a bunch of graffiti, including "KILL THE BOSS" on the side of a building, foot-high letters -- and a warm embrace of capitalism. Bourgeois bohemians, I suppose, to use David Brooks's terminology. Except more urban.
Signs of the urban capitalists...
who are bringing in the new...
and hiding the old in a back lot:
[Revised 1:50 p.m. Eastern time. Not "[BLEEP] THE BOSS" but "KILL THE BOSS," on a second viewing.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:46 AM
April 6, 2007
I've just been alerted to the fact that Ken Jennings, the Jedi Master of "Jeopardy," has a blog, and it's pretty good. (I guess I mean "Jeopardy!", don't I?) He has a little kick to his writing and is sometimes funny, intentionally or not. Discussing the game Hangman: "(Mindy’s mad that I got FROCK last week after being down to _ _ O _ _ and only one guess left.)" Jennings also published a book in the fall called "Brainiac" -- yes, we knew that part -- about the weird world of trivia buffs.
The blog shows that Jennings sure does have a command of the world's minutiae. He also will entertain you with answers to questions about appearing on "Jeopardy!"! (Second exclamation point is mine.) Apparently they tape a number of episodes per day, so winning contestants change clothing in between to lend the illusion of a different day. Jennings never saw Alex make someone wear different clothes, except:
a very busy necktie will moiré in the hi-def cameras, so about 15% of all male contestants have to go to their B Tie. Everyone has a B Tie because Jeopardy! asks you to bring three different changes of clothes, just in case you win or something. After my win total exceeded my age, I started bringing five outfits to each taping day... just in case.
Speaking of showing a little swagger... And how about the assumption that we know the word moiré? (Second definition, variation 4, more or less.)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:24 AM
April 6, 2007
A concerned citizen read a March 27 Personal Health column in the New York Times, whose closing paragraph said "that soy milk cannot be legally fortified with vitamin D and provides only 75 percent of the calcium the body obtains from cow's milk." Our reader, known on Wikipedia as Toytoy, brought a question to something called the Wikipedia Reference Desk: "What's going on in the United States that you don't have the freedom to make your soy milk more nutritious?"
The Wiki volunteer team went into action and discovered that the Times's source was a journal article published in 1971. Wikipedian Michael Snow wrote, "Whether or not it was true then that soy milk could not be legally fortified [couldn't find that one out, I guess--EH], it certainly is not true today -- fortification is common and specifically recommended by the federal Food and Nutrition Service."
Fellow Wikipedian Jfarber notified the Times, leading to the following correction posted March 31: "The Personal Health column in Science Times on Tuesday about healthful beverages included incorrect information from the Beverage Guidance Panel about soy milk. It can indeed be legally fortified with vitamin D."
Snow shows a certain swagger in recounting the story, but that's understandable: the famously unreliable set the professionals straight.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:15 AM
April 6, 2007
Due to technical difficulties yesterday involving Internet downtime at Churchill College, Cambridge, mild incompetence at Stansted airport, and paucity of Internet access late at night in Berlin, two posts I wrote yesterday did not make it to publication. They follow.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:06 AM
April 5, 2007
My column last Sunday was about a fascinating article in the Journal of American History titled "'The Cause of Her Grief': The Rape of a Slave in Early New England," by a Yale grad student in history, Wendy Anne Warren. It won Warren a prize in 2006 for best essay by a history graduate student, and appears in the latest issue of the JAH.
The journal's editors have kindly agreed to make the article available to non-subscribers. Here it is -- for those left wanting more after reading my brief summary.
*Nice headline, by the way, editors.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:15 PM
April 5, 2007
Warning: Possible April Fool's hoax.
At the website Hype Beast, one reads that Boston-based New Balance may or may not have produced a sneaker whose tread design pays homage to the great English rock band Joy Division. Take a look:
If it's a hoax, it's funny. If it's the real deal, is that good thing?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:40 PM
April 5, 2007
A couple weeks back, Chris and I were discussing trolley problem thought experiments on Brainiac (all links provided in Chris's last post on the topic). One trolley problem, commonly known, I'm afraid, as Fat Man, is this:
You are standing on a footbridge above a trolley track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realize you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five.
In surveys, most respondents say one should not push the man on to the tracks. It occurred to me yesterday that officials at the highest levels of the US government, particularly Dick Cheney, faced a terrifyingly real variation of this scenario for about two hours on the morning of September 11, 2001. (With Bush in that elementary school and then on Air Force One, Cheney was de facto in command.)
If any other planes appeared to be on a suicide mission, do we try to shoot down that aircraft before it could reach its target? Do we intentionally sacrifice X people to save X+Y? The variation here is that the passengers, who are in some ways analagous to the large man, are presumed to be doomed no matter what.
There is some evidence that at a disputed point that morning Cheney gave the order to shoot down commercial aircraft that were off course and non-responsive. This evidence is to be found in testimony given by former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta before the 9/11 Commission (not discussed in its final report), and in statements from Robert Marr in a BBC documentary called "Clear the Skies":
Colonel Robert Marr was Commander of the North East Defense Sector and remembers the words that came over the secure phone: "we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:26 PM
April 5, 2007
Brainiac readers may have noticed a name change on the roster in the left column of this page. Where did John Swansburg go? And who's taking his place? And what's this Stephenson guy doing here?
Fear not, John is doing quite well, but I'm afraid I do have some sad news to report: This Friday (tomorrow) is his last day at Ideas, where he's served with distinction as my deputy editor for the past 15 months. He's moving to New York City to take a job as a culture editor at Slate. I hope they know how lucky they are. He'll be greatly missed -- not just for his smarts and his keen eye, but all the good humor and genuine humanity he brings with him everywhere he goes. Look out New York, Boston's sending you one of its finest.
If I had to pick two of John's greatest hits at Ideas, just off the top of my head, I'd point you to this piece he wrote last year on the vanishing video store and the one he brought in and skillfully edited about the mythical "gyroball," supposedly thrown by a certain Japanese pitcher, well before the story made the front pages of certain other papers. Movies and baseball. If there are any subjects John cares more about, and knows more about, I don't know what they are.
Who's replacing him? I'm happy (actually, thrilled) to say you won't have to wait to find out. Starting Monday, the section's new deputy editor will be Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter here at the Globe, who also just happens to have broad experience as an editor. Before coming to the Globe in 1999, Gareth was an editor at Foreign Policy, US News, The Washington Monthly, and the Boston Phoenix. And at the Globe he served as editor of the old New England section and as Sunday Metro editor before moving over into his reporting job in 2001.
Interestingly enough, Gareth was also part of the team that conceptualized and produced the prototype for the Ideas section in 2001 and 2002, and he even wrote a story for the prototype. So it's fair to say he's been a believer in the section's possibilities since day one. Like John, he'll be a real partner in shaping the section as it continues to evolve.
So -- welcome Gareth. And Godspeed you, John.
And what am I doing here? I'll be weighing in on Brainiac from time to time, when I can steal some moments away from editing the print section. But for the most part, I'll stay out of the way of Josh, Evan, Chris, and Jan, who need no help from me!
Posted by Wen Stephenson at 02:05 PM
April 5, 2007
"Madness and Civilization," the successful 1965 English translation of Michel Foucault's doctoral thesis, "Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique," a revisionist history of psychiatry, played a crucial role in the European and American academy's embrace of counter-Enlightenment/postmodernist theory. (I think we can all agree on that point?) "Madness and Civilization" was popular, writes Andrew Scull, a historian of psychiatry, in part because
what appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes that decorated the first French edition.... This could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident.
Scull, whose essay "The fictions of Foucault's scholarship" appeared recently in the Times Literary Supplement, has taken a look at Routledge's new translation of the complete book, and says he is shocked, shocked! "Those thousand and more untranslated footnotes now stand revealed, and the evidence appears for what it is. It is not, for the most part, a pretty sight."
What's the problem with Foucault's history of early modern asylums and madhouses? I won't go into detail, but Scull argues that Foucault's account is based mostly on secondary sources that are "so self-evidently dated and inadequate to the task, and his own reading of them so often singularly careless and inventive, that he must be taken to task."
Scull's essay has got 'em chattering in the blogosphere. At the TLS website, some readers are thrilled ("I have waited for years for someone who would bell the cat; now it has happened!") and others dismayed ("Scull has done exactly what he claims Foucault does -- a thoroughly ideological extrapolation from selective evidence").
At his blog Acephalous, Scott Eric Kaufman is in the former camp: "Foucauldian genealogy sweats the small stuff, as it's in the minutiae that metahistory reveals the limits of its teleology. To say -- as some have and others surely will -- that the questionable citations and historical inaccuracies in 'Madness and Civilization' in no way challenge the larger theory built upon them is powerfully stupid." Over at Long Sunday, Craig disagrees: "Scull is engaged in a territorial pissing match with rivals. His concern, it seems to me, is to reject the work of Foucauldians by nit-picking Foucault's major dissertation," i.e., not one of his mature works. The debate also rages at Foucault blog, Cliopatria, Phi Beta Cons, One-Way Street, and The Valve (where Kaufman also blogs), among other places.
Routledge must be thrilled.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:44 PM
April 5, 2007
Remember LED throwies? Back in February, I reported that the infamous Mooninite devices were inspired by the LED throwy, a device -- invented by the Graffiti Research Lab -- composed of an LED, a battery, and a magnet. At the time, I tried to find LED throwies for sale, but all I turned up were some make-your-own instructions.
Now, however, an opportunistic outfit called Streetglow is selling pre-made LED throwies (or "art lights"), under the brand name "Glowies." Take a peek:
"Battery operated accent lighting for parties, events or decoration," trumpets Streetglow. "Let your imagination run wild." Just steer clear of Boston.
Via MAKE
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:30 AM
April 5, 2007
In Kerry Skarbakka's photo series "The Struggle to Right Oneself," currently on exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Skarbakka portrays himself hurtling over balconies, off porches, and down stairs.
Skarbakka at work
Why? Skarbakka says:
Heidegger described human existence as a process of perpetual falling, and it is the responsibility of each individual to "catch ourselves" from our own uncertainty...
That's why, OK?
Via Coolhunting.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:00 AM
April 4, 2007
OK, a little more from Google Sightseeing. Humor me. Someone found a UFO on Google Maps. It's gone now, but here's a little image.
Soon more sightings flooded in, just like in bad sci-fi movies. The forums below the post and elsewhere are afire with competing theories. The most popular are that the spheres are weather balloons or condensation on the lens or housing of the aerial camera. But what of the discovery that the spheres that appeared in Florida were all in a grid-like pattern? An organized flight plan for the lens in question, you say? But more appeared in Los Angeles, in a not-quite-straight line. Speculation welcome.
Note also that the people behind Google Sightseeing have published a book, "Off the Map: The Most Amazing Sights on Earth as Seen by Satellite." The New York Post ran some images from the book. If you page through them, you'll find "The Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., the place military planes go to die. (The Air Force has a different name for it: The Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. They also say it provides "agile combat support.") The Boneyard is also shown in wider angle here. As a still provided by Global Security demonstrates, there's an aesthetic charm to the place.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:54 PM
April 4, 2007
A reader, Greg Williams of Tampa, saw my post about ""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo," which is a grammatically correct sentence. He wrote in to alert me that he has made a cartoon on the same topic.
In it, turns out, he parses the sentence very clearly. I actually get it now. Nice graphical representation, too.
The cartoon is available on his blog, and it'll pop up here.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:18 PM
April 4, 2007
Thanks to all the readers who sent me more examples. (Here's the first installment.)
Allergic Girl (Please Don't Pass the Nuts): "We spent a lovely and very delicious allergen-free second night Sephardic seder at the home of my dear literary agent friend and her family. As she placed each dish she placed on the table, she listed its ingredients.... Telling the table what was in each dish was a lovely introduction to another culture's traditional foods and also a subtle way of letting me know exactly what I was eating and thus allaying any minor anxieties I might have about partaking. It sounds like a small thing but it made a huge difference."
Hadar (Vegetable Adventures): "A couple of hours before the Seder, Chad had an inspiring (though somewhat gross) idea, and we embarked on an artistic project: we made images of the Ten Plagues out of Fimo, baked them, and placed one on each plate." (Photo below.)
Kitten (A Pocketful of Hope): "Last night Matt and I had the pleasure of attending our first Pesach celebration at my friend Rebecca's house. We were two of the four 'visitors' to the event. We sang, drank, ate amazing food, and commemorating the tortures of the Jews in Egypt and God saving them and leading them out the desert. [sic] ... Once again I am reminded of how interested I am in learning more about Judaism, about possibly converting."
Leah (Mideast Youth): "'Where are you gonna be for the Seder?' asked my brother, who has never invited me or my family to his seder in the 11 years we've been here (and he won't come to my place outside Jerusalem because he likes to invite his 1,875,082 friends over to his). 'My friends.' 'Which friends?' ... He'd already made peace with the fact that his nutty baby sister has Moslem and Christian friends. But he still hasn't got a clue that I have a bunch of Messianic Jewish friends as well. That fact is a bit harder for me to 'let out of the closet' than anything else."
Victory of Roses (Defending Our Hard-Won Uncertainties): "We had the standard-for-us Maxwell House haggadah (which includes quasi-old-fashioned second person usages that make the King James Bible seem sensible). We skipped some bits, with my cousin Janet (who was leading the seder) saying that these were the ones Grandpa used to skip. (If I needed to abridge it, I'd drop the bit about the rabbis arguing that 10 plagues were really forty or fifty, plus 50 or 200 or 250 in the Red Sea.)"
Robin Reagler (The Other Mother: Letters from the Outposts of Lesbian Parenting): "The search for the afikomen (a big cracker wrapped up in cloth) was perhaps the funniest part of the evening. The kids were so excited about the prizes they would get if they found the hidden object, that they could barely focus their eyes. They danced and shrieked for 10 minutes. By the end, all the adults were literally pointing at it in the bookshelves."
***
OK, coming right up: Easter. Here's a nice how-to on making hollowed-out Easter Eggs.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:09 PM
April 4, 2007
New on the (redesigned) website of Harper's magazine:
Ken Silverstein's blog, Washington Babylon, which I rarely read, is joined by Scott Horton's news analysis blog, No Comment, previously available only via email.
Also: "Over a quarter-million scans from 157 years, thousands of interlinked topic pages, and an array of unique web-only content." (Free to subscribers.) Does this mean I can finally throw away those boxes of Harper's up in the attic? I think I started saving them in 1992.
Scott Esposito, at the blog Conversational Reading, says: "Busy is something of an understatement. But, I have to say I do like it. And it looks like they are upping their web content, which I consider a good thing. Now if they would just release a number of articles from each issue on the web when it's published, as The New Yorker does." I pretty much agree with that statement.
PS: Did Harper's pen this note after Lethem's critique of copyright ran?
Copyright law is deeply flawed and can be criminally abused, but we count on it to survive. We support fair use and encourage you to liberally quote passages of a few paragraphs (and please link when you do so). But please don't post our PDFs, page images, or full text articles to other sites.
Meet the new Harper's.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:00 PM
April 4, 2007
Yesterday I wrote here about the online hobby of spotting planes and other cool stuff using Google Maps and Google Earth.
Doing some follow-up research, I've discovered a blog called Google Sightseeing and I'm having a blast paging through it. I've learned that Google carried out a flyover of Sydney Harbor on Australia Day and integrated the photography into both Google Earth and Google Maps. With advance notice, those nutty Aussies sought out attention by doing things like spelling out Google on the deck of a boat, each letter held up by a person, and playing table tennis on a floating table (zoom in). A helicopter in flight also made an appearance.
Holding out the promise of even more fun is the news that Google Earth is rolling out live satellite imagery. For now it's only available for Edinburgh, and Google Sightseeing laments the fact that "Edinburgh is very cloudy today, so you may have to search around a bit to find a gap in the clouds."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:56 PM
April 4, 2007
Bloggers observe Passover...
Rachel (Velveteen Rabbi): "The matzah balls are made. (They turned out light and fluffy, just like Eppie's, may his memory be a blessing.) The hunter chicken is simmering in the pot. The table is set with the embroidered tablecloth two Russian friends gave me years ago at Pesach-time, our blue-and-white china, and my mother's silver. The holiday is only hours away! ... Wishing you all a sweet, joyful, and meaningful Pesach! May we all find surprises and serendipity on the road to liberation."
Daily Intelligencer: "'All right,' said the rabbi. 'We'll try to get to the food as fast as we can.' Rosewater, the Haute Barnyard Park Slope restaurant, was holding its second-annual second-night Passover Seder, and the obstacle between the starving, secular attendees and the five-course prix fixe was an hour-long ritual leavened, as it were, with trademark neighborhood sanctimony. The plagues recitation became a mini-lecture on abused women (the modern-day plagues were rape, shame, and so on)..."
Eszter (Crooked Timber): "Who says there are no benefits to blogging? If it wasn't for CT then I would never have met Matt Gordon and would never have been invited to his wonderful Seder last night. Thanks, Matt! We talked about lots of things, among them how most Haggadahs lack enough information for a newcomer to really get the Passover story while making the central role of He Who Has No Name unmistakable (even while the rest of the story might remain a bit blurry and I don't just mean because of the amount of wine consumed)."
Jean Railla (Meal by Meal): "There was something quite sweet about a group of young (youngish?, under 40?) people, only three of whom are Jewish, taking part of this ancient ritual, going through all the sections, saying the prayers, talking about Elijah, even with the jokes and the irony and multiple glasses of pre-Seder wine. Warmed my atheist heart."
Carmen (Overmatter, via Universal Hub): "At the seder last night, my aunt served only white wine so that nobody would stain the new table cloth while we were finger-dipping the plagues. This didn't sit well with most of us, as white wine doesn't taste very good with brisket and red wine shows up better on the plate. 'You can't do the plagues with white wine,' one of my uncles said. 'It's supposed to look like blood. You can’t even SEE these plagues.'"
Coturnix (A Blog Around the Clock): "Usually we use a Haggadah I made by putting together bits and pieces of several modern versions, including secular humanist, feminist and environmentalist haggadah. But this year we used a Liberation Haggadah (similar but not identical to this one) which was pretty godless on top of being Marxist - to the point of being a spoof of itself. After all, does anyone really believe that Jewish slaves in Egypt a couple of millenia ago met for committee meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays to plot the socialist revolution!? Fun was had by all."
UPDATE: Readers submitted more examples. Check them out.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:34 PM
April 3, 2007
I'm taking a guess that just about everyone here remembers "Doctor Who," the BBC sci-fi program that ran from 1963 to 1989. Not including syndication. It also showed for fifteen years or so on PBS stations in the US. According to Wikipedia, the good doctor, "having already completed 724 episodes, will surpass the number of individual instalments of the Star Trek franchise (726 episodes over five programmes) by the third episode of the 2007 series."
The 2007 series? Yes, the show has received new life from the BBC. In fact, season three premiered this past weekend in the UK.
The old version starred in its prime the poofy-haired and rather-unattractive-on-the-TV-star-spectrum Tom Baker.
The new version stars David Tennant, who seems a little too dashing.
But Saturday's opener, which featured a new doctor's assistant, reeled in over 8 million viewers, an amazing 41 percent share of the Brits who were watching TV. Canada's already picked up the series, but no word yet on a chance to watch in the US.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:38 PM
April 3, 2007
Should Democrats look to the new breed of video games (in which a player can explore and discover to her heart's content) for inspiration? Yes, insists NYU media professor and political activist Stephen Duncombe. After all, he writes, in his provocative, smart new book "Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy" (New Press):
If a game offers power, excitement, and the room to explore, people will play evening after evening after evening, almost regardless of the results. Perhaps the problem is not that people don't want to get involved in politics, but rather that they don't want to take part in a professionalized politics so interested in efficiency that there is no space for them, or they don't want to spend time in a political world so cramped that there's no freedom to explore and discover, to know or master.
There's much more to Duncombe's book than video games, though.
Like Nancy Bauer, the feminist Tufts philosopher who argues that critics of pornography must come to grips with pornography's powers to arouse, Duncombe urges Democrats to come to grips with populist pleasures (Las Vegas, "Grand Theft Auto," advertising, celebrity gossip) and then co-opt and transform those dangerous pleasures in the name of progressive politics.
"Grand Theft Politics," a short essay I wrote about Duncombe's "Dream," appears today in Slate.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:00 PM
April 3, 2007
Jan recently posted about the semicolon's upset victory over the period in one of the many competitions in the book "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything." I was more than usually interested in that post, because I happen to be reading "Brideshead Revisited," by Evelyn Waugh, surely the Shakespeare of the semicolon. Has any writer ever leaned on it so heavily?
These examples come on the first page alone of my edition:
When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.
There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; a quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten their caps before passing the guard-room, a quarter of a mile in which concrete gave place to grass at the road's edge.
The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and ploughland; the farm-house still stood in a fold of the hill and had served us for battalion offices; ivy still supported part of what had once been the walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the wash-houses survived of an orchard.
Nothing too surprising there. What separates the men from the boys is stuff like this, deep in the book:
"Oh, he'll find another bargain somewhere," said Julia; "trust him."
NB: I've just discovered this superb essay on, and panegyric to, the semicolon, by Trevor Butterworth, in the Financial Times, featuring quotes from various American and British writers with strong opinions on the matter; it's well worth reading (and also bows before Waugh's virtuosity).
PREVIOUSLY: The stylish semicolon
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:40 PM
April 3, 2007
On Thursday, April 12, three editors of the journal n+1 will appear at Brookline Booksmith to read from and discuss the current issue. Although two of the editors -- Keith Gessen and Mark Greif -- hail from Greater Boston, this is the Brooklyn-based journal's first event here.
The latest n+1
As mentioned previously on Brainiac, I've got an essay in this issue. I may or may not be involved with the reading, haven't decided yet. But I encourage all Brainiac and Ideas readers to make the scene, should be fun.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:21 PM
April 3, 2007
Some months back, John started a thread on Brainiac about the hobby of Google planespotting. John's post was about sites devoted to cataloging strange aviation sightings on Google Earth, but some bloggers, I've just noticed, have discovered planes using Google Maps.
On Google Blogoscoped ("Contains 80% Google"), Philipp Lenssen pointed out in 2005 that if you check out United States Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Cal., on Google Maps, you get to see a stealth bomber, as Der Spiegel had reported that week.
When you follow Lenssen's link now, however, the stealth bomber is no more. Could be that the map data was just updated since the post. But, ah, if you zoom out a bit from this map, you'll find that on this 6,600-acre aviation facility, with several enormous runways, there's not a single aircraft.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:27 PM
April 3, 2007
warns Masukomi, an MBTA rider who doesn't like how bulky the CharlieCard is. The CharlieCard, for you non-Bostonian readers, is a "contactless, stored-value smart card used for electronic ticketing." It's credit-card-sized, which means it's only bulky to those of us who don't carry wallets.
Earlier this month, hoping to whittle down her CharlieCard so that she could just keep the part with the microchip (which she planned to hang from her keyring), Masukomi dissected her card, only to discover that it also conceals a signal-boosting antenna. The chip can't be read without the antenna, apparently.
Whoops! Now we know.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:00 PM
April 3, 2007
Memo to the BPD and bomb squad: Be on the lookout for blinking advertisements in the shape of a drunken crow. Why? On Sunday, May 13, Adult Swim (the folks who brought us "Aqua Teen Hunger Force") will premiere the pilot episode of "The Drinky Crow Show," based on cartoonist Tony Millionaire's brilliant "Maakies" comic strip.
"Maakies," which runs in altweeklies everywhere except Boston, follows the adventures of Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby, an equally drunken and self-destructive monkey sailor. More info at the Maakies website.
View the first 30 seconds of the show here.
I've written about Tony Millionaire -- who hails from these parts -- for Ideas and elsewhere. Because the Globe seems to have misplaced the electronic version of the Nov. 24, 2002 interview I did with him, I reproduce some of it here:
IDEAS: You're from an old Boston family -- whose name isn't even close to "Millionaire" -- isn't that right?
MILLIONAIRE: Yeah, we came over on the Mayflower. My great-grandfather was a doctor in Dorchester; he had the first telephone in the neighborhood. I lived on Mission Hill for several years, after dropping out of MassArt. During the early 1980s i would go from door to door in Boston's nicer neighborhoods, offering to sketch peoples' houses for a fee.
IDEAS: Why are your characters Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby such alcoholics? And why do they blow their brains out in every third or fourth strip?
MILLIONAIRE: Whenever they get drunk, Drinky and Gabby become momentarily capable of comprehending -- and sometimes even justifying -- the horror of just being alive. The nonsensical things they say and do are one legitimate response to the absurdity of existence; killing oneself, I think, is another. The latter option has become much less attractive to me recently, especially since I became a father, of course. But it's still a good way to end the strip.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:00 AM
April 3, 2007
I just noticed something...
When Jack Shafer reviewed the Boston Globe's new Ideas section, way back in November 2002 (Alex Star, formerly the editor of Lingua Franca, had launched the section in September), he used a term that would prove prophetic:
Readers will also recognize the casual brainiac approach that made Lingua Franca such a delight to read. Like Lingua Franca, Ideas assumes that you've done your current events homework during the week and that you've set aside time to read and to think about the important stuff that the news obscured. This is serious journalism that doesn't take itself too seriously.
That's right, Shafer predicted that we'd launch a blog called Brainiac! How'd he do that?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:49 AM
April 3, 2007
Have you voted for your favorite Star Wars stamp yet? I voted for this one:
Cast your vote today.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:42 AM
April 3, 2007
The capture and detention of British Marines and sailors by Iran continues to run very high in the newspapers here in England -- higher than I would have expected. The coverage tends to be rather tendentious, in what some might call the English tradition. "NEW VIDEO TAUNTS BRITAIN," for example. These are clearly our boys who have been wrongfully seized.
The Times of London today publishes a column under the heading "World Briefing" lamenting that it has been "a difficult business for Britain to muster solid international support in the row with Tehran." Running alongside are pictures of all 15 detainees, some of whose names have not been released, and a box headed "What they said...and what they meant," which decodes the "hidden meanings and possible clues" in the detainee statements broadcast on Iranian television. Excerpts:
"Representative (sic) of the House of Commons"
Leading Seaman Turney.
Not a phrase used in Britain to refer to MPs. Evidence that the statement was dictated by someone else
"This has caused even more distrust for the people of Iran, and the whole area of the British"
Leading Seaman Turney
She has not corrected the glaring grammatical error of the "whole area of the British"
"Yes, I would like to say to the Iranian people, 'I can understand why you are so angry about our intrusion into your waters'"
Lieutenant Felix Carman
Evidence that the statements by the sailors and Marines is being controlled by their captors
Posted by Evan Hughes at 08:12 AM
April 2, 2007
Over at Separated by a Common Language, Lynne Murphy looks at (among other social niceties) the salutation cheers as used by Americans and Britons:
Cheers is interesting because it is so flexible. In AmE, it is simply used as a salutation in drinking (or sometimes with a mimed glass in hand, as a means of congratulations). In BrE it has this use, but is also used to mean 'thank you', 'goodbye' or 'thanks and goodbye'.
"I find it very useful for those situations in which one wants to close an e-mail with thank you for something that hasn't been done yet," Murphy adds.
Americans, too, have noticed the usefulness of cheers. It has been gaining ground fast as an e-mail signoff here -- I've used it myself occasionally, since (the record reveals) fall 2005. And a count of total uses of cheers in my saved e-mail -- incoming and outgoing -- shows a dramatic rise:
2002: 17
2003: 37
2004: 32
2005: 81
2006: 217
Some of these instances, of course, must be repetitions of the greeting as a discussion goes back and forth, but still, the recent surge is striking. And though cheers may be a British import, nearly all the correspondents in my collection were Americans.
Before cheers was a drinking salute, says the OED, it was merely a cheerful greeting, like the slightly earlier cheerio (1910, as cheero), which also evolved into a hello/goodbye greeting.
That made me wonder if cheers had been helped along, in its transition to America, by its resemblance to ciao, another cheerful hello/goodbye (but one that declined from wordly to cheesy -- in non-Italian usage -- some decades ago).
I don't have an answer, but I do have this fascinating etymological note: Ciao, according to the OED, is a dialect version of schiavo, Italian for slave. Hence ciao means "I am your slave." And you thought "your humble servant" was as sycophantic as a signoff could get.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:07 PM
April 2, 2007
When Jean Baudrillard died, I wrote in Brainiac that one of the things I most appreciated about his thinking was the idea that
the fake, the copy, the inauthentic, all these phenomena that were reviled in the authenticity-mongering 1960s, are actually preferable to what the real (itself a suspect concept) makes possible: the simulation, the cloned duplicate, the digitized and multiplied, the "hyperreal."
People pooh-poohed Baudrillard as a science fiction writer masquerading as a philosopher. But the hyperreal is very much with us. For example, I just read in the LA Times about MGM Mirage's Project CityCenter, a $7-billion city within a city that is being designed on the Las Vegas Strip by famous planners and architects.
Architect's rendering of Project CityCenter
"Sure, the ambitious, 76-acre venture will have a massive gaming floor, a convention center and a lineup of luxury hotels," we read. "But when it opens in late 2009, it will also have 2,700 condominiums. Its theme? Dense urban reality."
To paraphrase Baudrillard, the fake Las Vegas (ersatz Eiffel Tower, etc.) is charming. But the hyperreal Las Vegas (ersatz dense urban reality) is sinister.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:17 PM
April 2, 2007
A while back I wrote here about a site that offers instructions on building a miniature version, exacting and to scale, of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond in Concord. The plans are free!
Now, as the warm weather arrives, I thought I'd point out a couple of similarly low-tech sites devoted to the art of boat building. At Fritz's Boat Page you can get your fill of information about boat-building projects, many of them amateur, that are under way or have been completed in Juneau, Alaska "..and Around the World!" At Simplicity Boats you can pick up plans for itty bitty crafts and vessels you can actually climb into.
Maybe this is a new, incredibly time-consuming hobby to distract you from the Internet.
[via Metafilter]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:33 PM
April 2, 2007
Ian McEwan's new novel, "On Chesil Beach," is not to be published in the US until June, but it is just out here in England, where McEwan is among the most prominent novelists currently working. The Guardian published a review by Natasha Walter over the weekend. She finds much to praise but calls the book "surprisingly low-key. Here is a quiet middle-class couple's wedding night in a Dorset hotel at the beginning of the 1960s, described in a style that is very leisurely for such a short novel."
Some reviewers and readers had a similar response to McEwan's last novel, "Saturday." It charts a day in the life of a wealthy neurosurgeon in London, whose comfortable life, before it is significantly altered, is described in loving detail. The novel takes place on the day of a large public protest against the Iraq war and begins with intimations of terrorism, and some wondered whether a book that wants to comment on terrorism should be so concerned with interior decorating and fresh food.
Amidst a chorus of high marks for the book were a few grumblings and one outright hit job. John Banville, an Irish novelist, panned "Saturday" in the New York Review. His memorable phrase "a dismayingly bad book" made more than a few ripples in the literary world.
It didn't go unnoticed, either, that Banville's own novel "The Sea" took home the Booker Award over "Saturday," the favorite to win. I suspect Banville will politely stay away from reviewing the new McEwan.
[Revised 4/3 to reflect a reader's observation that Banville is Irish, not English. Apologies to Banville and Ireland.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:23 PM
April 2, 2007
The cover story in the current issue of Wired magazine is about "radical transparency," the idea that smart companies, these days, are "sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about products in their pipeline, even admitting to their failures." So Wired naturally ran a cover shot of Jenna Fischer, who plays receptionist Pam Beesly on "The Office"; when you peel away a transparent layer of the cover, Jenna's clothes disappear. Get it? Get it?
Not everybody is amused. At the Wired blog Table of Malcontents yesterday, Annalee Newitz wrote:
Devastated by criticism of its sexist "naked secretary" cover, Wired magazine's top brass have apologized publicly and hired a feminist consultant to prevent further mistakes of this nature. Next month's cover will reflect Wired's new feminist sensibility. Readers will be treated to a picture of pretty boy entrepreneur Kevin Rose naked except for a laptop covering his business package.
April Fool's! Newitz only wishes that would actually happen.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:25 PM
April 2, 2007
"Did Rudy just lose the PETA vote?" asks Jason Zengerle, a Boston-based New Republic staff writer, over at The Plank. As Zengerle notes, today's New York Post breathlessly announces that presidential candidate Rudy Giuliana's wife Judith once worked for a medical-supply company hated by animal rights activists -- because it demonstrated its surgical wares on dogs that were later killed. Sure to be buzzed about this week.
The Post tastefully illustrated the story with this photo of Judi:
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:15 AM
April 2, 2007
Craig Yoe, the cartoonist and pop-cultural archivist who's been mentioned in Ideas before, has a funny running gag at his blog, Arf Lovers. Every Monday, Yoe presents a different cover from the 1940s-era, Will Eisner-created comic book "Doll Man" and points out the phallic symbols and bondage motifs.
Sometimes a canister of poison is just a canister of poison, I know! But it's astonishing how often The World's Mightiest Mite was hogtied and threatened by tapering, cylindrical objects. Did Fredric Wertham know about "Doll Man"?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:20 AM
April 2, 2007
Greetings from Brick Lane, London. I'll be blogging from Brainiac's UK bureau this week, and plan to bring you more content from this side of the Ocean.
The Guardian has managed to resist a marked trend toward the tabloid format here -- even the Times of London, after 216 broadsheet years! -- and continues to produce great cultural coverage, as well as feistier left-wing stuff than you see in the States if that's your thing.
This week the paper's Saturday Review published an engaging profile of Andy Goldsworthy, on the occasion of his exhibition/installation to mark the 30th birthday of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield, England. Goldsworthy was born in the UK and raised in Yorkshire, and is best known in the US as the subject of the entrancing 2001 documentary film "Rivers and Tides."
A sui generis artist, Goldsworthy makes his art from the stuff of nature, like sticks, stones, and mud; his works evolve over time, and are in some cases transient and self-destructive, as the natural world is allowed to do its entropic thing. The Guardian has an online slideshow accompanying the piece, but Goldsworthy's work ought to be seen in person, so seek it out when you can.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:44 AM
April 1, 2007
I mentioned on Brainiac recently that Al Gore got off a Capitol Hill zinger in which he appeared to poke fun at Michael Crichton's "State of Fear."
But what if Gore was actually talking about a different science fiction novel about catastrophic climatic change? That's the premise of a short item I've contributed to today's Ideas section...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:41 PM
April 1, 2007
I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the recent Dave Eggers/Samantha Power event in Cambridge, sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, but it seems that the Red Cross is launching a literary magazine.
According to a press release posted at the Pazzo Books website, the Red Cross is launching a journal titled Una (the title refers to the wife of The Red Cross Knight in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queen"; also to a river in the western area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, "an area of great beauty and of great sorrow").
The "Una" window at the American Red Cross Museum
Says executive director Frank Milkers:
Our magazine will be focused on the art of the horrific and the horrors of art. As the real and the imaginary collide in today's complex world, we wanted to take this opportunity to sell our vision of the world to the American consumer. Who is better equipped to save literature from certain doom than the Red Cross?
Who indeed?
*
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:17 AM
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