The medium is the new message
From the Wall Street Journal: The Internet As Art. Just as video and computer technology attracted pioneering artists in the 1960s and 1970s, the Internet today is inspiring artists to tinker with the possibilities and boundaries of the World Wide Web. What started as a playful and often tongue-in-cheek experimental venture by a few code-savvy artists in the early 1990s has grown into a global art movement that is a...
Baby Names and Glocalization
From the Toronto Star: The Net and our shrinking horizons: A study of how baby names spread in the U.S. suggests the Web isn't so world wide after all. The rise of the Internet was supposed to create a global village in which people would be as likely to have friends in the antipodes as in their own street. Poppycock, of course. But the idea that it might instead have shrunk people's horizons is truly counterintuiti...
Star Trek in the Park
William Shakespeare's Statue in Central Park. Photo: Peter Roan This was going to be a very intelligent article. After using this space previously to gush about summer blockbusters and iPhones, I meant for this month's subject matter to be smarter - or, at least, headier. I fully intended to go for that most of academic of topics, the kind of thing you would have to read in one browser tab with Wikipedia open ...
The Hurt Locker: Dismantling the Summer Action Movie
That was a good movie. Let's go fight each other with some bottle rockets. This might be the best way to describe The Hurt Locker if it was your standard summer action movie. But it's not. Probably more a function of the times and not the industry, action films seem to have lost their zest over the past decade or so. The lavish 1990s were a time for just blowing stuff up. We had enough stuff. Lets just blow s...
August 7, 2009
The Hurt Locker: Dismantling the Summer Action Movie By Brian Watkins The Hurt Locker blows apart genre stereotypes. Star Trek in the Park By Jonathan Fitzgerald On two iconic storytellers and their surprising similarities. Snobbery and the True King Corn By Kevin Gosa Popcorn: buying, making, seasoning, and eating it....
Where to Look for Work
From Good: The Best and Worst Cities to Look for Work. I'd quote from it, but you just have to see it for yourself....
Laura and Rose, and the Little House
From The New Yorker: Wilder Women. William Holtz points out that Laura had been so harried by poverty and hardship-doing some of the man's work that Almanzo couldn't manage, in addition to her own-that she might not have had much left to give, except the example of self-denial. Rose herself could be grandiose and domineering. There is nothing explicit in their letters (few of Laura's survive, one a belated paean of ...
Julie, Julia, and the Men They Married
From the New York Times: Full Stomachs, and Full Marriages Too. The film is food porn. (Seriously, don't come hungry.) And Ms. Streep's performance as the vowel-elongating chef will probably earn her another bushel of accolades and give Ms. Ephron her first hit movie in more than a decade. But it is the film's depiction of marriage - particularly the union of Julia and Paul Child - that has sparked chatter among peo...
