April 2012
39 posts
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Air France Flight 447: 'Damn it, we’re going to... →
Mercifully, data recordings and impact damage on debris confirm the Airbus was still more or less level when it hit the sea. Some of the passengers might have dozed throughout the descent; others may have attributed it to violent buffeting. Those in window seats would have seen only darkness. There is reason to hope that there was not too much panic on board, but this is small consolation.
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Should Catholic Schools Be Able to Fire Teachers... →
Can you explain what you mean by “a life”? Does the Church grant a three-day-old embryo the same status as a baby living outside the womb?
The Church has skirted that question very carefully. You don’t find the Church absolutely declaring that from the moment of conception we have a person. They do say, in a sense, that from the moment of conception we should err on the side...
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It's Good Enough For Me →
Now, I’m not suggesting that “Wonder Pets” is the kiddie version of “The Wire.” (Maybe it’s more like “Monk.”) But there’s something inspiring in the way that these shows find freedom, and beauty, by respecting their medium’s innate strengths and constraints, instead of viewing them with disdain.
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Where Is Boobie Miles Now? →
Boobie makes his 12 dollars an hour, with no benefits until he has worked there long enough to get the benefits, and meanwhile he has to deal with the county probation officer who sometimes comes around unannounced and scares the shit out of him because he thinks his boss will freak out and fire him. He has to pay probation — $275 a month — as restitution for the aggravated assault he was...
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“you DO do a great Mary McDonnell”
– Bobby
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Just Write It! →
Like many “Lost” fans, Martin resented the series’s mystical ending, which left dozens of narrative threads dangling. “We watched it every week trying to figure it out, and as it got deeper and deeper I kept saying, ‘They better have something good in mind for the end. This end better pay off here.’ And then I felt so cheated when we got to the conclusion.”
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The Bully Project →
Documentaries about school, though, are a different matter, particularly documentaries that seek to change social policies and institutions. Bully clearly wants to play a leading role in eliminating the practice of bullying. As a human being who believes that the world could be more compassionate and tolerant, I support the film’s agenda. As a teacher who sees kids every day, I’m...
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What Your Klout Score Really Means →
Fernandez says that he sees Klout as a form of empowerment for the little guy. Large companies have always attempted to woo influential people. It’s why starlets get showered with free clothes and athletes get paid to endorse sports drinks. It’s also why, once blogging took off, popular scribes like mommy blogger Dooce started receiving free washing machines. But Fernandez says that, until the...
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The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories... →
The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In my brain, a network of cells is constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade. That two-letter prefix changes everything.
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Shark in the Kiddie Pool →
In many ways, Nick Roses is a typical 16-year-old. He lives with his parents, goes to school and meets up with his friends for pizza. But he’s also the Ft. Lauderdale area’s youngest talent manager. No matter where he is, he’s always wheeling and dealing, managing clients and barking into his ever-present cell phone. He makes deals from his parents’ dining room table And he does it all under the...
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Search and Destroy →
Denton acknowledged “the irony of us lecturing,” as he put it, and asked, “Is there Gawker ethics? I mean, I guess there’s Gawker ethics. It’s a dangerous thing to talk about.”
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The Flight From Conversation →
Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens.
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The Unfinished →
Not every day was bad. He taught. He e-mailed friends. He and Green tried to maintain their lives. Always self-critical, Wallace would rate good days as “B-plus” or “cautiously optimistic.” They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a...
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Silent Hives →
The Pennsylvania beekeeper Dave Hackenberg was one of the first to draw attention to the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder, or C.C.D., and, as a result, he became a celebrity, at least in apian circles. I interviewed Hackenberg in the spring of 2007, and he told me he didn’t believe that the culprit was a virus or a fungus or stress. Instead, he blamed a new class of pesticides called...
Forest Service may blow up frozen cows in cabin →
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The ugly side of Kickstarter: the risks in backing... →
Studios such as EA and Activision employ people with decades of game development experience to lead their projects, and even games with multimillion dollar budgets are cancelled with alarming regularity. The odds of a two-man team with a game prototype understanding how to use their windfall efficiently while delivering a good game are not high, no matter how good the video on the site may...
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Bizarre cosmic ray mystery deepens →
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Six Rules for Dining Out →
In the Fanciest Restaurants, Order What Sounds Least Appetizing
Beware the Beautiful, Laughing Women
Get Out of the City and Into the Strip Mall
Admit What You Don’t Know
Exploit Restaurant Workers
Prefer Vietnamese to Thai
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Girls Girls Girls Girls →
I don’t know if you’ve been following the pre-coverage for “Girls,” but there is so much out there—including an admiring profile that I wrote about Lena and the making of the show—that viewers were already well into the backlash, and even the backlash-to-the-backlash, before tonight’s episode even aired.
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Girls: And It's Chill to Hear Them Talk →
Girls is best viewed outside of the maelstrom of pre-hype and backlash that’s consumed it, at least in the city in which it’s set. (It’s par for the course when you make a television show precisely about the sort of people who write about television for a living.)
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Misreading Lena Dunham →
In any case, the creation of artistic products is intrinsically an “elite woe,” regardless of the financial status of the artist; priests and poets and painters are all members of the idle class.
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"Girls" Talk →
I’m reminded that Woody Allen was in his forties when he made “Annie Hall.” We don’t know what movies he might have made in the late nineteen-fifties, about his own long way up; for that, there’s Robert Weide’s excellent documentary. Dunham is her own documentarian, tracing her path as she advances along it.
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In San Antonio, a Coach’s Player, a Player’s Coach →
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Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die →
“I think that allows us to deliver powerful value to advertisers, and powerful value to those who want to speak freely.”
He pauses again. “I killed that answer, I absolutely nailed that answer,” he says.
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Just One More Game ... →
At some point late in my teens, in a spasm of post-adolescent resolve, I decided to renounce video games forever. They had, I recognized, a scary power over me — an opium kind of power — and I was hoping to cultivate other, more impressive ways of spending my time. I had aspirations of capital “c” culture, and so I started pouring my attention into books, a quieter and more socially respected...
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The Obama Memos →
In the past three years, though, he has learned that the Presidency is an office uniquely ill-suited for enacting sweeping change. Presidents are buffeted and constrained by the currents of political change. They don’t control them.
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The Disconnect →
Klinenberg’s data suggested that single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Women’s liberation, widespread urbanization, communications technology, and increased longevity—these four trends lend our era its cultural contours, and each gives rise to solo living.
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Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tips on How to Write a Great... →
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and...
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The Ketchup Conundrum →
It took a long time for the food world to catch up with Howard Moskowitz. He knocked on doors and tried to explain his idea about the plural nature of perfection, and no one answered. He spoke at food-industry conferences, and audiences shrugged. But he could think of nothing else. “It’s like that Yiddish expression,” he says. “Do you know it? To a worm in horseradish, the world is...
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The Case Against Kids →
But none of this really matters. Procreation for the sake of the parents is ethically unacceptable. “To have a child in order to benefit oneself is a moral error,” Overall writes.
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The War Against Youth →
It’s the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody’s parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don’t have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for...
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What Do Women Want? →
“Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”
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The White Savior Industrial Complex →
Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone’s feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good...
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The Unpersuaded →
A broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict, he writes, is woven into the fabric of a political system in which a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another. Both sides end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite...
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Those Fabulous Confabs →
“We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” as Andrew Zolli, PopTech’s executive director, puts it.
Thus the rise of a cohort of speakers and attendees who migrate along the same elite social-intellectual trade routes. Throw in Sundance and SXSW and Burning Man, and you get what Michael Hirschorn has called “the clusterfuckoisie,” tweeting at each...
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The Villain →
Bernanke’s emphasis on transparency rests on the notion, dear to modern financial economists, that people rationally adjust their behavior in line with expectations; thus, the Fed’s predicting a market outcome can help make it so. That may be partly true, though the theory is far from perfect. First, people do not always respond rationally to information. Second, the Fed has been poor at...
