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Four trade magazines, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, offer short reviews of many thousands of books. Of particular interest to editors are those that receive a "star" for unusual merit. This regular feature highlights new titles with stars from at least three of the four publications.
Our third When Stars Align includes several debut works—a nice development given that our last list was populated entirely by old hands.
Harry Dolan's debut novel, Bad Things Happen, takes place on the "mean streets" of Ann Arbor, Mich. When the head honcho of a mystery magazine gets pushed out of a window and falls to his death, new hire David Loogan gets pinned for the crime. To prove his innocence, he has to figure out who among the editors, writers, and interns is guilty. Booklist says "rarely have suspects been so archly articulate," and Publisher's Weekly predicts that Dolan "has a bright future." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
James Lasdun's second short story collection, It's Beginning to Hurt, concerns middle-aged characters experiencing existential crises. The protagonist of the title story is a businessman who attends the funeral of his former lover and then falls back into the habit of lying to his wife. Kirkus says the collection merits comparison to William Trevor and Graham Swift. Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire is the second title in the Hunger Games trilogy. In this installment, teen protagonist Katniss Everdeen sorts out her love life and avoids the evil President Snow. Booklist says Collins' "crystalline, unadorned prose provides an open window to perfect pacing and electrifying world building." Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
Christ Barton and Tony Persiani's first picture book, The Day-Glo Brothers, tells the story of Bob and Joy Switzer, who invented a brand of fluorescent paint visible in daylight. Publisher's Weekly raves about the "exuberantly retro 1960s drawings," and Kirkus says "these two putty-limbed brothers shine even more brightly than the paints and dyes they created." Kirkus, School Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In Ulysses & Us: The Art of the Everyday in Joyce's Masterpiece, Declan Kiberd tries to make James Joyce's notoriously difficult masterpiece accessible to those who couldn't get past the first page. He argues that although the book is now largely read by "more snobbish modernists," Joyce wanted to deliver "usable wisdom" to ordinary people. Publisher's Weekly says that this book "should be on every undergraduate syllabus" and Booklist hopes that this "daring work" might put Ulysses "in the hands of its rightful readers." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, NPR correspondent Paul Collins explains how the first collection of Shakespeare's plays became the most sought after book collector's item in the world. Booklist says Collins' history is one of "the most enjoyable examples" of "book biography" ever. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 20: "Seinfeld reunion." Larry David, after previously denying rumors of a Seinfeld reunion, recently announced that there will be a meta-reunion during this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. David told the Los Angeles Times that the former cast members will play themselves and act out the process of writing a Seinfeld episode. The season finale will feature snippets of the show-within-the-show.
No. 22: "Eminem the warning." Eminem released a new single yesterday in which he brings the escalating feud between himself, Mariah Carey, and Carey's husband, Nick Cannon, to a new level. He says he started the word-war because Carey denied sleeping with him, then disses Carey's video for "Obsessed," in which the stalker character bears a striking resemblance to Eminem. (Carey claims the song was inspired by "Mean Girls.") Finally, he warns Cannon: if "you gonna ruin my career, you better get one." Listen to the song here.
No. 29: "Hanging Gardens of Babylon." According to a new United Nations report, the U.S. military did irreparable damage to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The gardens were built in 600 B.C. by Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar to help cure his sick wife, Amytis of Media, who longed for the flora of her former home in Persia. In 2003, the U.S. Military took over the former site to create Camp Alpha.
Photograph of Eminem courtesy of Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
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There’s a guy at Harvard who claims that happiness doesn’t last (it’s good news: unhappiness doesn’t either!) because we humans wildly overestimate how happy or unhappy any given event will make us. He’s got all the research and the tenured professorship, but I have—the 2004 Red Sox. For my whole life, I imagined that a Red Sox world championship would make me deliriously happy. I was not wrong. And the effects have not worn off: Right now, just thinking about this play, I was so overcome with warm and fuzzy feelings that I momentarily forgot that we have dropped seven of our last 10 and are now 3.5 games behind the Yankees.
So my reaction to the news that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were on a list of players who tested positive for steroids in 2003 is this: I am disappointed (Big Papi, did you have to?) and defensive (hey, the other guys were doing it, too!) but not, on the whole, any less happy. Besides, I tell myself, this was in 2003—and we all know what happened then. Even if the whole team was popping steroids like sunflower seeds, it was not enough to overcome the incompetence of Grady Little. The 2004 championship remains untarnished.
Or so I tell myself. One of the joys of being fan, even in the age of Moneyball, is the freedom—the obligation?—to be irrational.
Photograph of Manny Ramirez courtesy of Flickr user KeithAllison.
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President Obama will meet with Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the White House on Thursday for what's being called the "Suds Summit." The three men plan to gather ‘round a picnic table, share a few beers, and, in this relaxed atmosphere, work out their differences. No one can say whether Obama's gambit will work, but to celebrate the great tradition of bonding over brewskies, Slate presents the top five beer-sharing moments from movie history.
5) In The Sure Thing, a classic '80s romantic comedy, John Cusack decides to drink his holiday blues away at a bar. After chatting up two strangers, he buys one a spritzer, the other a beer, and the three break into a drunken, but sweet, rendition of "The Christmas Song," commonly known as "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire."
4) In the 2007 bromance Superbad, two bumbling cops (played expertly by Seth Rogen and Bill Hader) invite a nerdy but charming teenager who calls himself "McLovin" (real name: Fogel) to knock back a couple at a bar. Before McLovin can take a sip, he first has to capture a bum that the cops couldn't quite catch—of course, he's rewarded with a couple extra brewskis for his efforts.
3) A group of British ambulance workers separated from their unit must trek across Africa in Ice Cold in Alex. Their leader, Captain Anson (John Mills), keeps up morale by describing the cold lagers they'll be able to drink when they reach Alexandria. In the climactic scene, a bartender lovingly pours bottles of Carlsberg into chilled glasses for the parched travelers. Rumor has it they used real lager and that Mills was pretty tipsy by the end of the shoot.
2) National Lampoon's Vacation takes the prize for the most disturbing-yet-adorable beer-sharing scene. Chevy Chase, through broken glasses and tears, tells his son, metal-mouthed 'tween Anthony Michael Hall, how much he loved sitting down for a beer with his dad when he was younger. Then he pulls a can out from his pocket and initiates young Hall to the secrets of lager drinking: "Don't let Mom smell it on your breath."
1) In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins barters tax advice for beer. He gets three for himself, and three for each of his buddies. "A man," he says, "working in the outdoors, feels more like a man if he can have a bottle of suds." Morgan Freeman's narration chimes in once they're perched on a roof, swilling away: After drinking that "Bohemia-style" brew, they all "felt like free men."
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The latest revelation about the conflict between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley is that the two men may be very, very distantly related. Late yesterday, ABC News reported that the professor and his arresting officer shared an ancestor in Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fourth-century Irish king whose blood, we are told, runs through up to one in 12 present-day Irishmen. Associated Content goes so far as to claim that the men are "actually cousins."
As this morning's "Google Trends" post noted, the DNA connection has since then become a public fixation. Why do we care? In Slate three years ago, Steve Olson explained that most people alive today, regardless of their races, have ancestors scattered throughout the world. Genetic tests can only measure lineage in a direct male line—father to father to father, all the way back. When you account for connections through women, though, "virtually everyone with any European ancestry" would be able count Niall of the Nine Hostages as an ancestor. In fact, Olson's research suggested that if any two people traced their lineage back to about 1,000 B.C., their ancestors would be identical.
Gates and Crowley's common DNA is not particularly unusual. What's stranger is today's obsession with these way-back family ties. Again: Why do we care? Are the thorny social and judicial questions framing Gates-gate softened by the fact the two men share genetics?
Behind today's interest in the "surprising" DNA connection, it seems to me, is a deeply unsettling public assumption about race as a biological measure of otherness. We know it isn't so: It's still unclear whether race can even be reliably determined from a given DNA sample. Yet a looming belief in biological difference (or, at least, surprise that black and white men should share genes) seems to linger. Had it been two pale-faced people found to have common origins—say, Vladimir Putin and Mikheil Saakashvili—would that news have likewise climbed the Google charts? It's hard to think so. A cultural idea of race as difference has caused enough problems. Seeing that idea show up in biological assumptions, too, is frightening.
Photograph of Henry Louis Gates Jr. by PETER KRAMER/Getty Images
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In recent days, the health care debate has shifted back to an idea that's been kicking around since Barack Obama first started talking about universal coverage on the campaign trail: Let's stick fatties with the tab. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke out (again) this week in favor of a national tax on sugary drinks to fight the obesity epidemic and raise federal revenue. The Los Angeles Times spelled things out: "Tough love for fat people: Tax their food to pay for healthcare."
The recent push comes in the wake of a report published Monday in Health Affairs that purports to compute the annual medical spending attributable to obesity. According to author Eric A. Finkelstein, "obesity is the single biggest reason for the increase in health care costs" in the United States, contributing $147 billion to our national tab in 2008. A similar study from a few weeks ago pinned California's budget problems on the $41 billion cost of "obesity and inactivity.") Predictably, media outlets have jumped on the story.
This isn't the first time we've been led to believe that we can pay for universal health care by taxing fat people or making them lose weight. During the presidential campaign, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were asserting that preventing obesity could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars. But the idea that a national diet could solve all our problems is purest fantasy. (Or should I say pie-in-the-sky?) If we were really dedicated to cutting healthcare costs—if pinching pennies were a more important goal than making people well—then we wouldn't tax soda and cheeseburgers. We'd subsidize them.
The fact is, fat people aren't breaking the bank at all—they're saving us money. While it's true that someone who's grossly overweight might rack up bills for obesity-related ailments like diabetes and hypertension, those added costs would be more than offset by his shorter lifespan. The rest of us tend to suck more resources over the duration of our slim and fruitful lives on account of all the expensive degenerative diseases we develop in our
bonus years. That's not to say we shouldn't try to prevent obesity. But let's stop pretending it's a reasonable way to pay for health care reform.
(For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see my piece on the fat tax from February of last year.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 7: "Rorschach Wikipedia." Weirdly-shaped blobs throw Wikipedia into chaos! Last month, an emergency-room physician posted all 10 plates of the famous Rorschach Inkblot tests to Wikipedia, which some psychologists claim will make them ineffective, nulling years of valuable research. Wikipedians are waving the banner of free speech: "The APA it seems want to keep what they do a secret. Allowing them to carry this out on Wikipedia amounts to allowing them to censor Wikipedia content," wrote Heilman on the page's massive discussion section. (As of this writing, all 10 plates remain on the page.)
No. 15: "Niall of the Nine Hostages." Medieval Irish king, only son of Eochaid Muighmedon, fearless warrior ... progenitor of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the cop who arrested him? According to ABC News, both Gates—who is part Irish—and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, trace their lineage back to the 4th century king Niall of the Nine Hostages. (Researchers have found that one in 12 Irish men share genes with the king.) Only time will tell if these sons of Niall shall settle their differences at the bar stool with Obama.
No. 31: "Chester Himes." Chester Himes, the crime novelist and author of If He Hollers Let Him Go would have turned 100 today. Himes began writing while a prisoner in the 1930s and went on to become one of the more accomplished black writers of the 20th century. Set in a gritty 1960s New York, the nine books in his Harlem Detective series follow hardboiled NYPD sleuths Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. "I put the slang, the daily routine, and complex human relationships of Harlem into my detective novels," Himes said, according to NPR.
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Kim, your playlist of great pop songs featuring the theremin got me thinking about that instrument’s long life in movie soundtracks. (It was first used in a Soviet propaganda film in 1931, in a score by Dmitri Shostakovich!)
I won’t provide an exhaustive roundup of the many films that have made use of this plangent, ethereal sound. (You can find lists of those here or here.) I’ll just note that when a director wants to signal a transcendent experience, whether it’s insanity (Spellbound), drunkenness (The Lost Weekend), or communication with the divine (The Ten Commandments), it’s the theremin that gets wheeled out every time. Miklós Rósza, that lushest and most ecstatic of golden-era film composers, loved his theremin; in Spellbound, its oneiric warbling makes a perfect aural counterpart to Salvador Dalí’s set designs for the nightmare sequence.
Because of its use in '50s science-fiction soundtracks (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing) the theremin now reads as a camp novelty instrument, explaining its use in retro-'50s Tim Burton movies like Ed Wood (soundtrack by Howard Shore) and Mars Attacks! (soundtrack by Danny Elfman). The groundbreaking soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956), composed by Louis and Bebe Barron, is as theremin-y in sound and intent as any ever composed, but, in fact, there's nary a theremin in it; the Barrons recreated the millennia-old music of the Krell, an extinct alien civilization, using electronic circuitry designed for the film.
I can’t speak for pop music, but at the movies, the theremin revival has been going on at least since the 1994 release of the documentary Kim mentions, Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. In Bartleby (2001) and The Machinist (2004), the instrument’s quavering sounds evoke the wraithlike oddness of heroes played, respectively, by Crispin Glover (who’s sort of the theremin of actors, if you think about it) and Christian Bale. The teenaged Argentine heroine of Lucrecia Martel’s magnificent The Holy Girl (2005) is transported, both erotically and theologically, by the sight and sound of a theremin being played. And in the curiously underrated comedy Walk Hard (2007), John C. Reilly’s pop-singer character, Dewey Cox, feverishly insists on adding a theremin solo (along with didgeridoos, a symphony orchestra, and a bleating goat) to his album-length song "Black Sheep," a parody of Brian Wilson’s never-finished “Smile” album.
The theremin is the only instrument that the person playing it never touches, which gives the very act of playing it a mystical quality; the instrumentalist appears to be summoning otherwordly sounds from the device by sheer telekinesis. Watch this mind-boggling clip of theremin virtuoso Pamelia Kurstin in action, and you can both see and hear why all those Hungarian-born composers, Argentinean schoolgirls, and drunken Ray Millands couldn’t get theremin out of their brains.
Photograph of Ed Wood Courtesy of Wikipedia
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Long relegated to the world of sci-fi movie soundtracks, the world's first electronic instrument, the Theremin, is making a comeback, appearing on tracks by artists like Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists, Wolf Parade, Devotchka, The Polyphonic Spree, and the All-American Rejects. What is it about Leon Theremin's almost-century-old instrument that is suddenly so appealing?
Theremin invented the instrument in 1919. He was working on a device to measure the density of gases under pressure and realized that by passing his hands over it, he could create fluctuations that sounded like musical tones. Played by waving your hands in front of what looks like a black box with one vertical and one horizontal antenna, the Theremin produces a warbling, eerie sound created by the difference in frequency between the two antennas. The story goes that Lenin, after hearing the instrument, was so impressed that he ordered 600 of them made and sent Theremin on a tour of the globe to demonstrate Soviet superiority in the field of electronic music. Unfortunately for Lenin, Theremin quickly defected to the United States and patented the instrument. Theremin was eventually forced to return to the USSR under mysterious circumstances, and the instrument was largely forgotten as other electronic instruments—the electric guitar among them—became more popular.
The Theremin briefly reappeared on the pop culture radar in the late ‘60s when Robert Moog (pioneer of that other electronic classic, the synthesizer) built a better sounding, easier to play instrument. Beach Boy Brian Wilson included it in the song "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and Led Zeppelin jammed to it in "Whole Lotta Love." But the sound never really caught on, and the Theremin again receded into the background, until now. (Elsewhere in Brow Beat, Dana Stevens discusses the Theremin's various uses in the movies.)
The reasons for the current resurgence of the Theremin are a bit hard to figure. John Hoge of ThereminWorld.com says the 1995 documentary Theremin: An Electric Odyssey, helped to spark interest in the instrument as something other than a spooky sound generator. Others, like The Octopus Project's Yvonne Lambert, say that better-quality Theremins by Robert Moog have helped make it easier to learn and incorporate the instrument into more mainstream songs. Another factor could be a larger reliance by musicians on electronics of all sorts, from the blips and beeps on a Garage Band mixer to auto-tune. Lastly, the Theremin's stage-show value ("Look Ma, no hands!") as well as its otherworldly sound fit with the geek-chic aesthetic currently popular among independent bands.
To get you caught up to speed, here's a Theremin greatest hits playlist—add songs we forgot in the Fray:
Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times"
Led Zeppelin, "Whole Lotta Love"
The Octopus Project, "Rorol"
Devotchka, "C'est Ce La"
Wolf Parade, "No One Saves the Day"
Sufjan Stevens, "In the Devil's Territory"
Franz Ferdinand, "Dream Again"
All-American Rejects, "Stab My Back"
Theremin versions of "Crazy" and "Video Killed the Radio Star."
Photograph of Theremin player Toby Halbrooks of The Polyphonic Spree courtesy Jim Dyson/Getty Images.
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Please join us in warmly congratulating Ben Silverman on today's announcement that his career is still viable. It's not surprising that Silverman, hanging up his hat as an NBC programming executive at the end of his first contract, should have landed a new gig. Because he founded the production company Reveille, which adapted The Office for the U.S., Silverman will never be entirely without something to brag about, and because he is, at 38, the smarmiest showbiz exec of his generation, he will never be shy about bragging. His new producing partnership with Barry Diller is a natural next step after his remarkable performance over the last two years at NBC.
Of course, what made those two years so remarkable was Silverman's actual public performance as a network head, which was vastly more entertaining than the programming schedules he doltishly approved and cravenly promoted on behalf of his last-place network. Everyone who reads the trades knows this. The fun began on June 15, 2007, when Nikki Finke suggested that Silverman was "the most off-the-hook network executive that Hollywood has ever seen" before he'd even taken his company-mandated drug test, which he took an awfully long time to take.
Soon, Silverman was running his mouth foolishly in Esquire and on Page Six, and we were off to the races, and some people with only the most casual interest in the TV industry became acquainted with his buffoonery. Amplifying his poor judgment and personal boorishiness by behaving with the grandiosity of a mogul, Silverman crossed over and became a chattering-class celebrity. His name is now writ on a very short list of legendary showbiz jackasses.
Kudos, Ben! We wish you more of the same in your future endeavors.
Photograph of Ben Silverman courtesy of Jason Merritt/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No 1: "alexis cohen death." Alexis Cohen, the 25-year-old American Idol contestant famous for flipping off Simon in Seasons 7 and 8, was killed in a hit-and-run this morning in Seaside Heights, N.J. "She had a very, very high regard for Simon Cowell ... that [ranting] was done purposely to get ratings," her mother told themorningcall.com. Idol judge Paula Abdul tweeted today: "My heart goes out to the family of Alexis Cohen."
No 19: "apple tablet." The Financial Times today confirmed the widespread rumors that Apple is launching a tablet computer in September, leading to much speculation about the device. The FT report suggests that Apple is trying to revitalize the multi-song album by letting consumers see liner notes and album art; Forbes thinks iPhone App developers will be hurt by the tablet because of the added hassle of programming for a second platform; Wired sees the tablet as a potential "Kindle killer" if it's got sufficient battery life.
"No. 35: stephon marbury." What do NBA free agents do while waiting to be signed? On Friday, troubled former Knicks guard Stephon Marbury streamed his life to the Internet for 24 hours straight on Ustream.tv. A sample of the poetry that came out of his face during that time, courtesy of Deadspin: "UStream TV, you see me. Holla back if the window is crack. Whatup, Star. Born. you know who you are. Holla. I love Canada. 'Ohhh, Canada. We'—I love that song. I love y'all's anthem. That anthem is dope. And I love when I come there and they sing it. I love hearing it. It's fresh. Now, I never suck no wee-wee before."
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 1: "Cash for Clunkers." The Obama administration's Car Allowance Rebate System (colloquially known as the "cash for clunkers" program) begins today, although NPR reports that some dealerships have already jumped the gun. The program allocates $1 billion to be distributed across the country to Americans who are willing to trade in their old gas guzzlers for more energy efficient cars. Visit cars.gov for the full guidelines before November 1st, when the funding for the program runs out.
No. 15: "Emma Watson Died." Googlers seem misguided this morning: Emma Watson is not, in fact, dead. She did, however, recently confirm that she was going to Brown and not, as the Daily Mail reported, Columbia.
No. 72: "Jay Z Run This Town." Jay-Z released today his much anticipated single, "Run This Town," from his upcoming album "Blueprint 3." The track was originally supposed to feature Drake, but now includes the one-two punch of Rihanna and Kanye West. Yesterday, Jay-Z announced that he would be making his first U.S. festival appearance this summer filling in for the Beastie Boys at All Points West after it was announced that Adam Yauch had cancer.
Photograph of Emma Watson courtesy of MAX NASH/AFP/Getty Images.
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A new ad for a mobile phone service in Israel has stirred up some controversy. At the start of the spot, we see a group of Israeli soldiers patrolling the West Bank wall. A projectile hits their jeep, causing them to scatter and draw their rifles. Turns out the object was merely an errant soccer ball that flew over from the Palestinian side of the fence. The soldiers kick the ball back. Soon enough, an impromptu foot-volley game is under way with the unseen Palestinians. Voice-over: "At the end of the day, what are we all after? Just a little fun! Let's everyone have some fun. It's so cool! It's Cellcom!"
Some have denounced the ad for its breezy, upbeat take on a miserable situation. Which is fair enough. The spot is clearly well-meaning, but the bubblegum pop song and cheerleading Israeli chicks do seem a tad out of place in this particular context.
The big mistake, in my view, was to portray the Palestinians as faceless "others." This severely undercuts the ad's feel-good vibe. Resultant message: We can all have fun together—so long as I never have to see you or talk to you! (Imagine the classic "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" ad if, instead of gathering together on one happy hilltop, young people from every nation serenaded each other through bulletproof partitions.)
By the way, if you're wondering whether a scenario like the one in the ad could ever take place, wonder no more. A video response purports to demonstrate what actually happens when Palestinians kick a soccer ball over the fence. The ball doesn't come back. But teargas canisters do.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 1: "Erin Andrews video peep." Searches for a secretly-filmed tape of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews undressing in a hotel room were the hottest trend on Google today. What to add to the glut of commentary, meta-commentary and meta-meta-commentary surrounding the affair? Over at Slate's sister publication Newsweek, blogger Jennie Yabroff has an interesting take: "Privacy, it seems, is the new nudity. This is why, when Jennifer Aniston poses topless for the cover of GQ magazine no one does more than shrug, but when paparazzi catch her sunbathing topless, its tabloid fodder for weeks. ... It's as though ... the only time we're truly interested in watching is when they don't want us to look."
No. 9: "world of warcraft movie." The hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft (subscribers: 11 million) is becoming a movie. The film will be directed by Sam Raimi, the man behind the Spider-Man series and, most recently, the horror flick Drag Me to Hell. Reactions on the official World of Warcraft messageboards ranged from geek-out ("Best. News. Ever!") to skepticism ("You understand that this man ok-ed the dance scene in Spider-man 3?").
No. 10: "Three Body Problem." It's not what you have on your hands after a triple-homicide: Solving the Three-Body Problem was in fact a crucial mathematical prerequisite for the 1969 Apollo 11 landing. Before we put a man on the moon, mathematician Richard Arenstorf needed to predict precisely how three bodies—the Earth, the moon, and the Apollo 11 spacecraft—would interact in space. Not an easy task, but Arenstorf solved the problem, received the NASA Medal of Scientific Achievement, and the rest is history.
Photograph of director Sam Raimi by FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/Getty.
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I stumbled across the amazing site of the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader this afternoon. It opens with a full-frame version of Ader's short film piece "i'm too sad to tell you." I asked Slate designer Vivian Selbo how this effect was pulled off. She told me it's a Flash movie sized to fill the browser window. (If you resize the window, you can watch the video adapt.) Ader disappeared in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a small sailboat. The above video is one of Ader's "falls," an idea that has inspired many homages—though none HAS the élan of the original.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Zachary Pincus-Roth:
After writing a piece for Slate on how journalists proclaim movie box-office records without accounting for inflation, I'm disheartened to see inaccurate reports—fueled by a Warner Bros. press release—that The Hangover's $236 million pushes it past Beverly Hills Cop as the top domestic R-rated comedy of all time.
In reality, if you factor in the rise in ticket prices, The Hangover earned less than half of Beverly Hills Cop's total, and it's also behind other R-rated comedies such as Blazing Saddles, MASH, National Lampoon's Animal House, Beverly Hills Cop II, There's Something About Mary, and even Porky's, according to Box Office Mojo.
I really liked The Hangover (as did 79 percent of critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes), so it's hard to be the naysayer here. It was made on the cheap and features a likable trio of rising stars. It's all too easy to believe that it could dethrone a film made a quarter-century ago by the fading star Eddie Murphy, whose movie Imagine That tanked this summer. But—as any Economics 101 class would surely convince you—it didn't.
What's particularly galling is that this "achievement" has been mentioned in the same breath as Warner's assertion that passing the $1 billion mark at the 2009 domestic box office in only 192 days is a studio record. Again, because of inflation, we can expect this record to be broken almost every year. These misleading statistics demonstrate how a peccadillo on the part of journalists and publicists can skew the perception of an entire company.
— Zachary Pincus-Roth
Photograph of The Hangover actor Ed Helms courtesy Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
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This morning, Buzz Aldrin and I got to pretend we were on the moon. The astronaut was in Washington for the unveiling of the new-and-improved Google Moon, a digital lunar model with the same fluid navigation as Google Earth. The guest of honor, however, didn’t stay on message. While he would “love to talk about Google and Google Moon,” Aldrin said, he felt obliged to make the case for heading to Mars, a point he emphasized by brandishing what appeared to be printouts of a PowerPoint presentation.
Back to Google Moon: Armchair astronauts can dip down to the surface, tip the camera to the horizon, and admire the topography. To help those of us who are not intimately familiar with lunar neighborhoods, Google Moon is indexed with the sites of the moon landings, the treks of various rovers, and a variety of geological landmarks. As you mosey along, you might chance upon a 3-D rendering of a lunar lander or run into a few astronauts. (They look like Lego men.)
The product, which you can download as part of Google Earth 5.0, is certainly fun to play around with, even if the scenery is a tad barren and monochromatic. On one point, however, I was sorely disappointed: Google cannot fly you to the moon. Presently, it can only teleport you there.
The only way you can get to the moon as of now is to select it from a dropdown menu within Google Earth. (Mars, rendered in much less detail, is also available.) There is no direct flight from the porch of your childhood home to the Paracelsus crater. This is a shame, because Google Earth’s killer feature isn’t its imagery. It’s the mesmerizing navigation—the fact that you can be wandering through downtown Tulsa, type in “Giza Pyramid,” and lift into space to take a giant leap across the ocean.
Fortunately, Google does want us to soar through space eventually. Brian McClendon, who is in charge of most of Google’s geography products, told me it’s a feature they’d like to implement once all the databases can be squared with one another. It seems as if it should be doable. We did put a man on the moon.
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It's worth remembering, on this 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's moon walk, that not all Americans viewed the event as an inspiring "giant leap" forward in human exploration. A rather dimmer view of the lunar landing is expressed in Gil Scott-Heron's classic 1970 protest song "Whitey on the Moon." A short, sharp poem drawled by Scott-Heron over percolating conga, "Whitey on the Moon" is an example of the black-nationalist-infused proto-rap pioneered by (among others) Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, and The Watts Prophets. Scott-Heron was by far best writer of the lot, and "Whitey on the Moon"—which contrasts the squalor of the inner city with the government largesse that put Apollo 11 in space—is one of the one of the finest, funniest protests ever recorded, an indictment of American racism as mordantly witty as any Lorenz Hart lyric:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor's bill
But Whitey's on the moon
Ten years now I'll be paying still
While Whitey's on the moon
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 15: "Angelas Ashes." Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, died yesterday at age 78. McCourt wrote the book chronicling his miserable childhood in Ireland after more than three decades teaching in New York City public schools. In 2007, McCourt wrote in Slate that "when the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. ... Citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost."
No. 46: "nomura s jellyfish." What's with July and huge sea creatures? Last week a 20-foot-long shark washed ashore in New York while jumbo flying squid terrified residents of Southern California; now massive Nomura's jellyfish are ballooning up from the deep off the coast of Japan. The jellyfish can grow as large as 6 and a half feet in diameter and weigh as much as 450 pounds—big enough to destroy Japanese fishermen's expensive nets. This is the third invasion in less than five years: During the 2005 episode, an estimated 300 million to 500 million of the jellyfish passed through Japan's Tsuhima Strait daily.
No. 59 "Michael Collins." As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traipsed about the surface 40 years ago today, Michael Collins—the oft-forgotten third Apollo 11 astronaut—was sailing around the dark side of the moon in the command module. "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life," Collins wrote in his 1969 memoir Carrying the Fire. "If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side."
Photograph of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins courtesy of NASA/Getty Images
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Esquire has always taken a gentlemanly approach to the pin-up photo. Let Maxim grease up spray-tanned starlets. Esquire's game is to dub some top-drawer actress a "Woman We Love" (not, say, a "Woman We Ogle"), pen a purplish essay on the woman's charms, often making reference to her wits, brains, and less obvious body parts (some "cayenne hair," an exposed "right clavicle," "long, ribbony limbs," etc.), and then convince her to cavort in swimwear or lingerie.
Or, in the case of Mary Louise Parker this month: In an apron. And nothing else. Our colleagues at Double X have already discussed the tush-baring photos. But I'm interested in something else: How the imperatives of "search engine optimization" have forced Esquire to drop its genteel mask and confess that—yes—it's luring horny readers by snapping women naked, just like the laddie mags. Consider the disparity between the text of the Parker article, which refers to her "long, platinum neck" and "deep, Guinness eyes," and the text in the title tag, that headline in the bar at the top of your browser window, which is what search engines like Google pay particular attention to: It reads "Mary Louise Parker Naked Photos - Mary Louise Parker Ass - Esquire." You can find similar disparities in recent pieces on Katy Perry ("gigantic" eyes vs. "Katy Perry Hot - Sexy Pictures of Katy Perry") and Anna Friel ("rainbow leggings" vs. "Anna Friel Naked - Tribe Anna Friel Breasts").
That "Tribe" line is particularly slimy. Anna Friel, an actress known lately for her roles in Pushing Daisies and Land of the Lost, also appeared in a 1998 film called The Tribe, and in it—at least according to sites like Mr. Skin that keep track of such things—you can see her breasts. So whoever was writing the title tags at Esquire was hoping to anticipate the Web searches of people looking for the naked Friel of 10 years ago, and steer them to the naked Friel in Esquire this year.
This is not shocking, of course. We live in a world where New York magazine's site traffic spiked by 2000 percent when it ran a gallery of naked pictures of Lindsay Lohan (although that gallery had the accurate, relatively tasteful title tag of "Lindsay Lohan Recreates Last Nude Photo Shoot of Marilyn Monroe"). But it does signal a certain unseemly desperation on the part of Esquire's editors. They may love these women, but it appears they love the Web traffic more.
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L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, has redeemed two cultural sinners this week: Harry Potter and Oscar Wilde. Only days after deciding that the Chosen One of Hogwarts is indeed an exemplar of “the values of friendship, altruism, loyalty and self-giving” (rather than “a wrong and malicious image of the hero,” as the same publication declared last year), L’Osservatore ran a review of a new Italian book on Wilde that goes out of its way to praise the Irish author. According to the reviewer, Andrea Monda, Wilde “was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic church.”
Wilde’s deathbed conversion in Paris, where he spent the last three years of his life after serving a two-year prison term for sodomy offenses, is a much-debated aspect of his biography: Was it the last-ditch gesture of a sick and broken man, or the culmination of a lifelong fascination with Church ritual? (This testimonial from the priest who administered his last rites suggests that Wilde’s turn to Catholicism was a conscious and deliberate, if hasty, act.) But the fact that Wilde may have embraced the Church in his last moments doesn’t make it any less odd that, 109 years later, the Church should suddenly decide to embrace him. As long as Pope Benedict XVI continues to label gay marriage "pseudo-matrimony" and same-sex desire a “disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent,” the Vatican’s eagerness to welcome Wilde into the flock rings hollow at best. There’s a Wilde epigram for every occasion; the one this news item brings to mind is, “One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”
Photograph of Oscar Wilde courtesy of Wikipedia.
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I'll say this for the excerpt from Frank Bruni's memoir that appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: Never before has a story of bulimia made me so desperately hungry. "Macaroni and cheese. There was macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it's sort of congealed and stiff at the edges." Yes, yes—me, too!
It's a wonderful piece, but I'm a little bothered by what it says, or implies, about our relationship with food. Bruni makes it sound as if he's been endlessly skirting between the Scylla of overeating and the Charybdis of bulimia. (According to Michael Pollan's blurb for the book, he's "plumbing the depths of our personal and collective eating disorders.") Yet there's no real evidence that the author was ever fat to begin with. Sure, he may have been chubby as a kid, but according to the memoir, he was 5-foot-10 in high school, and about 180 pounds. That translates to a body mass index of 25.8, or just barely "overweight," according to the standard cutoffs.
If anything, Bruni seems to have been much healthier than most Americans. Studies have repeatedly found that those who register as slightly overweight (on body mass index) live longer than people in the "normal" range. Bruni's a clear example of why that might be the case: As the star of his high-school swim team, he spent hours in the pool every day—a practice that surely contributed more muscle mass, and an inflated BMI. (At the time, writes Bruni, his doctor recommended that he lose "5 to 10 pounds." That was bad advice.)
Another clue emerges when Bruni shows up for his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He signs up for a fitness class, but at the first meeting "the teacher talked about something called a body-fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists ... I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day." But if he was fatter that half of the other students, that means he was thinner than half of them, too. Young Bruni was exactly average.
It's fine with me if Frank Bruni wants to be skinny for aesthetic reasons. (In the Times piece, at least, he never claims another motivation for his diets and purges.) But let's be careful about what we call overeating. If he wasn't putting his body at risk, then why make it sound like a problem?
Crusty Mac 'n Cheese photograph courtesy of Spike Mafford/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 25: "Obama NAACP Speech Video." Googlers were eager to watch and read Barack Obama's speech at the 100th annual NAACP Convention. Obama spoke on the themes of responsibility and individual achievement, telling his audience that there were "no excuses" for failure. Addressing black parents, he said he wanted to see more children aspiring to be doctors or Supreme Court justices because "our kids can't all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne."
No. 74: "Billie Holiday." Billie Holiday died 50 years ago today. To commemorate the anniversary of her untimely death, WNYC's Leonard Lopate show interviewed jazz historian Dan Morgenstern on her legacy, and Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid reinserted panels referring to Jim Crow into a Billie Holiday statue. (The panels had been removed by city officials in 1985, right before the dedication.) Watch rare footage of the lady singing the blues here.
No. 94: "Jumbo Squid." San Diego residents no longer need to go to the zoo to see mysterious creatures: Flying jumbo squid have invaded the shoreline in recent days. Known as Humbolt squid, marine bioligists have been trying to figure out what is causing the invasion—theories range from a recent earthquake to global warming. Watch a video of a dazed squid on the National Geographic Web site.
Jumbo squid photograph courtesy David McNew/Getty Images.
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The country band Gloriana will release its debut album next month. The group, from Nashville, is fresh-faced—their publicity photos look like Clearasil ads set in haylofts—but they're not quite showbiz neophytes. Brothers Tom and Mike Gossin, who play guitars and sing, briefly co-starred in Madison Rose, a reality TV series about the travails of their rock group. Cheyenne Kimball (vocals, mandolin) was the winner, at age 12, of the NBC show America's Most Talented Kid; starred in the short-lived MTV series Cheyenne; and in 2006 released The Day Has Come, a better-than-average collection of post-Avril Lavigne teen-pop ballads. (Vocalist Rachel Reinert rounds out the quartet.) Gloriana is modeled on Fleetwood Mac—or modeled on Fleetwood Mac-inspired country acts like Little Big Town: two guys, two girls, lots of four-part harmonies. What Gloriana adds to this formula—in addition to gallons of mousse and pomade—is boundless, shameless pep.
Exhibit A is the video for the group's debut single, "Wild at Heart," an eruption of beatific singing, dancing, hand-clapping, and ear-to-ear grinning. "Wild at Heart" is a bubble-gum pop song of the sort rarely seen these days: unrelentingly perky without a hint of distancing irony. In the wised-up world of postmodern pop, Nashville is the last bastion of pure camp.
Gloriana's daffiness might be too much to take if the song weren't so damn good. But "Wild at Heart" is a perfect single, a song-length hook, or patchwork of hooks: the "We Will Rock You" drum machine beat, the "Jack and Diane" guitar strum, the "funky breakdown." The lyrics are also a pastiche—a sequence of clichés so complete that they transcend cliché and approach conceptual art. The song was composed by three pros, Music Row veterans Stephanie Bentley and Josh Kear, and Matchbox Twenty's producer Matt Serletic, and it seems as if the songwriters grabbed random phrases from old hits, and assembled them, exquisite corpse-style, into verses, choruses, and a bridge. The result is a narrative, of sorts, about young lovers: "a couple kids runnin' loose and wild" who have "nothing to lose but time." The moon is shinin'. (It's a "rebel moon.") The stars "burn like diamonds." The chorus delivers the money shot:
I'll follow you where you're leading
To the first sweet taste of freedom
You got me runnin', baby
Wild at heart
In this summer of 2009, there's no beating the hits of the summer 1983. But the next-closest thing to a song of the summer is "Wild at Heart." Predictably, Gloriana is forecasting a long summer, and a hot one. ("Down a back road/ Long, hot summer," sings Tom Gossin over the opening strains.) The song is almost as catchy as it is silly and almost as silly as it is great. It is the doofy sublime.
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Fans of Scott Schuman's street style blog The Sartorialist—which posts elegant, color-saturated photographs of enviably chic individuals loitering on sidewalks from Moscow to Rio—should check out the Pipeline's spot-on guide to "getting shot by Scott." The blog presents a handy flow chart explaining which looks catch his eye. (If you're a man, be "old, rich and European"; if you're a woman, be "model pretty" or wear a "quirky hat".) The Pipeline leaves out a few Schuman staples—it also helps to be a crinkly-eyed great-aunt type or to have a charming, girlish ‘fro—but it effectively nails the range of styles he loves, which left me wondering: Is that range too narrow?
Reading the Pipeline's chart and flipping through the new Sartorialist book, due out from Penguin in August, I'm left once again with a feeling that's nagged at me in my years reading the blog: Schuman's photos are much more impressive individually than in aggregate. Gathered together, his subjects often seem rich and pampered, too many fashionistas wearing the same expensive and unwieldy shoes. But I can't help loving his work. I think that's because of Schuman's eye for facial expressions, for the people behind the clothes. He's attracted to a limited spectrum of looks, but he seems to have a generous lens, capable of finding the joy, wit, and candor in his subjects' eyes. You tend to feel you've met the people he shoots. Which is why I'll keep reading, even if it means I see men in rolled trousers and girls on bicycles again and again.
Photograph of Scott Schuman by Christopher Peterson
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I sigh even as I type the words “Tony Awards”—that everyone I know, even in an arts-obsessed workplace, chuckles every time I mention them says all you need to know about the place of Broadway theater in the larger cultural scene—but yesterday’s decision to ax journalists from the ranks of Tony voters has led to some of the most scabrous reviews of recent memory, and deservedly so.
People used to be warned not to pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel; in the age of the Web, it’s probably advisable not to piss off the people who make their living by distinguishing junk from genius.
The justification for the change was skimpy to say the least: “the Management Committee took into consideration the fact that certain publications and individual critics have historically pursued a policy of abstaining from voting on entertainment awards in general, to avoid any possible conflicts of interest in fulfilling their primary responsibilities as journalists.” Huh? Broadway Stars’ Matthew Murray translated that into English: “It's a conflict of interest for journalists—who live by the standards through which their very jobs and statuses within their professional community exist, and don't work professionally on shows or with people they write about—to vote for the Tony Awards, because they might write about the shows they see. But it isn't a conflict of interest for hundreds of other people to vote for themselves, their friends, or the shows in which they have a vested, public, and frequently financial interest.”
Time Out’s Adam Feldman put it best in Upstaged, the magazine’s theater blog:
[The decision] represents another regrettable step toward the marginalization of critics within the New York theatrical community. It is true that critics do not vote for the Oscar or Emmy Awards; but theater is an inherently more local and personal industry, in which critics have historically played an important role. (Not for nothing are Broadway theaters named after Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson.) But critics, and indeed criticism, are inconvenient to the modern theater marketer: Old-fashioned in our insistence on quality, unreliable in our support for expensive projects and less necessary in light of the diffusion of information in the Internet Age. We can expect to see more such gestures of exclusion in the future, each chipping away, as intended, at the status of critics within the theater world.
Photograph of Liza Minnelli by BRYAN BEDDER/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 16: "Basking sharks." A 26-foot, 5,000-pound basking shark washed ashore yesterday on a Long Island beach, and Googlers want to learn more before their next ocean dip. Luckily the basking shark is harmless and eats mostly plankton. Still, according to a 1894 New York Times article, the first person to describe the shark "tried to prove that this was the species of fish which swallowed Jonah ... Jonah could have lodged quite comfortably in a shark's stomach, and it would have been easier to enter that organ than to squeeze his way down the small throat of a whale."
No. 53: "how long is the new harry potter movie?" One hundred fifty-three minutes, according to IMDB. This puts the Half-Blood Prince at just over the series average of 150.3 minutes per Harry Potter film. Those with small children and/or child-size bladders will be glad to hear that the proprietor of the invaluable Runpee.com (a database that tells you the best times in a movie to take a leak) is watching the film right now, according to his Twitter status.
No. 97: "pet airways." In-flight treats are the newest luxury available to America's already pampered pets. Pet Airways is a new pets-only airline, where dogs and cats fly coach instead of whimpering in the cargo hold. Yesterday marked Pet Airways' inaugural flight when a modified turboprop plane took off from Baltimore's BWI Marshall with about 40 cats and dogs bound for Chicago. Tickets cost $150 to $299 one-way, depending on the route, and a trip from New York to L.A. takes about 24 hours. "It's a niche market, no doubt. But the pet community ... they get it," said co-founder Alysa Binder.
Basking shark image courtesy Wikipedia.
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As the latest Harry Potter movie comes rumbling into theaters tomorrow, I wonder: What major best-selling book has Hollywood somehow not adapted? Let's go to the Internet for a debatable list of best-selling books. The first five are the Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao, the Quran, Xinhua Zidian (a Chinese dictionary), and the Book of Mormon. (I, for one, would love to see the Book of Mormon adapted by Steven Soderbergh and starring Brad Pitt as the prophet Moroni.) J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone lands at No. 6 with 107 million copies sold. Next is Agatha Christie's, And Then There Were None (multiple adaptations, including two TV shows under its original, scandalous title), then Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, then another Potter, then The Da Vinci Code, then yet another Potter.
The 12th book on the list is The Catcher in the Rye, with claims of 60 million copies sold. The latest rumor, circa 2006, had Terence Malick working on an adaptation. But even if a Catcher movie were somehow allowed to be made, today's teens may not care. Jennifer Schuessler wrote a great piece recently in the New York Times about how many of them don't like the book. On the list of best-sellers, Catcher is followed by three more Potters, Ben Hur, Heidi (adapted into a beloved Shirley Temple movie), The Alchemist, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, The Little Prince, and, at 21, The Mark of Zorro. Of these, only The Alchemist and Dr. Spock have yet to be filmed, though Harvey Weinstein is developing the former, and if Blink can be adapted into a thriller, surely a screenwriter can get a decent romcom out of Spock's manual.
The end of the list invites a further question: What classic book should be adapted but has not been? The Faerie Queene anyone?
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Though art in the past century has often sought to lay bare its own production—displaying the artists' inspirations and ephemera, making the circumstances of creation part of the work, parodying the commercial infrastructure of the industry—one subject that has largely been avoided is the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between an artist and his gallery. A new exhibition at Brooklyn's Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery is trying to expose this symbiosis by making the show's planning process—e-mails, sketches, drafts—a part of its display. The exhibition's organizers have also archived the whole project (and thrown it open for discussion) on the Internet.
In May, Dam, Stuhltrager selected two young artists that it wanted to promote. One subsequently dropped out; the remaining artist, twentysomething Jerry Blackman, spent the next weeks preparing for a show under the gallery's aegis. The e-mail that he and the gallery's staff exchanged during this period—a fascinating chain of aesthetic discussion, logistic back-and-forth, and passive-aggressive notes—now hangs on the far wall of the gallery, opposite Blackman's central work, "Anchor (gradient)," a three-dimensional cutout that plays with the difference between icon and representation.
This is hardly the first time business and logistics have been unveiled together with the work—Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been blazing paper trails for decades. But the risks of such an undertaking in a small gallery space are particularly steep. For one thing, there's the danger of a reality-TV-type Heisenberg effect: How illuminating is this correspondence, really, if some of it was written knowing it would be displayed? (Gallery owner Leah Stuhltrager, for what it's worth, pooh-poohed the possibility that such self-consciousness influenced any of the e-mails.) There's also a risk that all this emphasis on process distracts from the work itself—a threat that Blackman, understandably, seemed quite aware of. When I asked him about the wall of e-mail printouts, he promptly redirected my attention to his working sketches for the anchor. The printouts, he said, were chiefly the gallery's project. Meanwhile, Stuhltrager told me the e-mail display had been Blackman's idea. The crossed wires seemed to say as much about the artist-gallery relationship as anything hung on the wall.
Photo of Jerry Blackman sculpture, courtesy of Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery
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For those of you on the island of people who actually like to read stuff on the Web, point yourself toward Readability. The original post describes it best: Imagine a "Peace & Quiet" button on your browser. Readability strips away all the ads and links and visual clutter and leaves you with a minimalist igloo of text. It makes the Web appear like Harper's Magazine.
Designers have achieved some consensus on how to make screen reading softer on the eyes: bigger text, shorter (but not too short) lines, and just the right amount of white space. Go here for a definitive take.
In a light irony, I installed Readability while doing research on attention span. The program helped me get to the end of many of the articles—a rare event in my Firefox window. So perhaps Readability will help you focus more and curtail Web-induced ADD. But, as my Readability-enhanced reading revealed, try not to fall prey to "the myth of the concentration oasis." That's the coinage of the research psychologist Vaughan Bell, who asks us to stop whining about electronic distraction:
The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot.
Check.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 2: "TV tropes." The joke of today's installment of XKCD, a popular Web comic, rests on the addictive properties of tvtropes.org. Tvtropes is a sprawling wiki cataloging the various hackneyed devices TV writers use to advance plot and outline characters while instilling in viewers the warm glow of expectations fulfilled. Some examples: The Childhood Memory Demolition Team tears down main character's quaint childhood home and replaces it with a parking lot, and the Erudite Stoner "is always a font of wisdom despite the fact that they're completely fried from years of drug abuse."
No. 14: "Jackson 3." Today the British tabloid the Sun is reporting that Joe Jackson wants M.J.'s kids—Prince Michael, 12; Paris, 11; and Prince Michael II, aka "Blanket," 7—to tour the world as the Jackson 3 next year. In other Jackson news, LaToya Jackson is claiming Michael was murdered: "Michael was worth well over a billion in music publishing assets and somebody killed him for that. He was worth more dead than alive."
No. 35: "Shawshank Redemption." A spike in searches for the 1994 film stems from the sentencing last week of two prisoners who pulled off a great escape, Shawshank style. In 2007, Otis Blunt and Jose Epinosa broke out of the Union County Jail by digging through the concrete walls of their cells, hiding the holes under pinup photos. It took almost 20 hours for authorities to notice the vanished duo, who were captured four weeks later in Mexico City.
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Rating the live Webcam's value as a tool of procrastination is a tricky proposition. Once the initial thrill of spying on strangers thousands of miles away fades, it's hard not to notice that traffic looks pretty much the same in Lagos, Nigeria, and Seattle, Wash. Still, if you're trying to avoid distractions, boredom is generally a good thing. A few seconds staring at Lun Lun, Yang Yang, and Co. Co. on Zoo Atlanta's Panda Cam is enough to drive even the most determined time-waster back to work. But a thwarted distraction is no distraction at all. If pachyderms fail to entertain, the blocked writer will soon turn to computer solitaire or culture blogs, and nothing productive will be achieved.
Friend, I have the answer. From July 6 to Oct. 14, London's Trafalgar Square is providing 2,400 people with 60 minutes of fame. Rather than erecting one of his sculptures on the square's empty plinth, artist Antony Gormley instead decided to "create a living monument." He invited U.K. residents older than 16 to apply to spend one hour on the platform, "a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals." According to Gormley, "They will become an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity." Meanwhile the rest of humanity can watch the spectacle via a live Webcam. The production values are higher than for most Webcams, and the scenery is much better—cameras also take in the crowds, the National Gallery behind the plinth, and the square's shockingly clean fountain.
Most of the time, the plinthers show themselves to be all too ordinary. There are endless banal cell-phone conversations, far too much meta-photography ("and here's one of some people taking a picture of me taking a picture of them"), and a lot of high-concept justifications for doing very little. (My favorite, Graham from London, claimed to pay "homage to middle-aged fathers by assemblying a flat-pack deck chair, and then sitting in it and reading a Sunday paper.") It's mostly boring and awkward, but every hour on the hour, there's an audience-participation version of the changing of the guard when a cherry picker brings up the next plinth-sitter and carts off the old one. Take my advice and skip everything but these often awkward interactions. Here you can see Graham packing up his deck chair, newspaper, and potted plants while Alistair, his successor, prepares to take the first of what must have been hundreds of self-conscious stretches during his hour above the square. Or check out the moments when Heather, dressed as a giant pigeon, traded places with a considerably less outgoing young woman.
It's all downhill from there, so set an alarm, turn to oneandanother.co.uk at the top of the hour, and after two minutes have passed, you can close the window and go get some damned work done.
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You're at a friend's barbeque, all set to indulge in some ice cream for dessert, when your host offers you a choice between original vanilla or "slow churned" vanilla. Quick! Which do you choose? Slow churned, right? It sounds positively artisanal—handmade on the farm by some wholesome milk maiden. Or something out of the slow-food movement—an ice cream you can feel good about, a product of sustainable agriculture and fresh, local ingredients. But you'd have made the wrong choice: In the ice cream business these days, "churned" is just a clever marketing ploy, a euphemism for low-fat.
Dreyer's (or Edy's, depending on where you live) first introduced its Slow Churned Ice Cream back in 2004 (the company registered the trademark), and churned has since become the ice cream buzzword du jour. Breyer's has a "Double Churn" ice cream, and Baskin Robbins launched a "Premium Churned" ice cream in December. Although these companies claim that their various "churning" methods account for the taste (Edy's describes its as a "process of extremely cold blending over a longer period of time, to create an incredibly smooth and creamy light ice cream"), churned ice creams also possess any number of synthetic ingredients (Propylene Glycol Monostearate, anyone?) to make these lower fat, lower calorie versions taste better. Most also offer a no-sugar-added variety, also dubbed some sort of "churn," which boast even more additives—fake sugars and ingredients like polydextrose, added to create a richer texture.
In honor of National Ice Cream Month, keep it natural, and don't let these labels fool you—just because it's been "churned" doesn't mean it's any more wholesome than your typical additive-riddled light ice cream.
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In his Wednesday Culturebox on Norwegian and Swedish crime lit, Nathaniel Rich used Scandinavian and Nordic interchangeably, spurring an exchange in our reader discussion forum over whether these two terms are, in fact, synonymous. A frayster who goes by the handle "lazygirl" argues that "Nordic [means] Iceland and Finland. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are Scandinavian." Lapskojs disagrees, claiming that Nordic not only refers to Iceland and Finland, but to the aforementioned Scandinavian countries plus the Faroe Islands. Who's right?
Technically, the term Scandinavia refers to a geographical region, the Scandinavian Peninsula, which encompasses Norway, Sweden, and part of Finland. It may also refer to a language group, Continental Scandinavian, that is descended from Old Norse and includes Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. (Technically, Faroese and Icelandic are descended from Old Norse as well, but they belong to a different group called Insular Scandinavian.) Nordic is a cultural term and includes these three countries plus Finland, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. All of these territories were once united under the Kalmar Union of the 14th century. It dissolved in 1523, but the cultures remained similar with a predominately Lutheran population. They currently participate in the Nordic Council, founded in 1953, and, except for Greeland, still have similar flags featuring the "Nordic cross."
Lapskjos is right.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 1: "Obama Looking at Girl"; No. 2: "Obama Checking out girl"; No. 3: "Mayra Tavares"; and No. 7: "Tail to the chief." You wouldn't think a wire photo of world leaders at the G8 summit would own the top three Google Trends spots. But the Drudge Report, TMZ, and other sites yesterday picked up on a Reuters shot in which President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appear to be ... appreciating certain assets of Mayra Tavares, a 17-year-old Brazilian delegate to the summit. Since then, the photo has been making the rounds across the web. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times claims, after video review, that it was Sarkozy, not Obama, who was doing the real ogling.
No. 20: "Edgar Martins"; No. 21: "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." The New York Times on Wednesday removed photos from its Web site after it was revealed that the photos had been digitally manipulated. Metafilter commenters were the first to uncover the manipulation, and the animated simulation of the alteration is striking. The work of Edgar Martins, the photographer responsible for the images, is now being rigorously examined for other instances of manipulation. The Times's "Lens" blog promises Martin will tell his side of the story soon.
No. 45: "Nikola Tesla Inventions"; No. 53 "Nikola Tesla Death Ray." Google has decided to go all out in celebration of the 153rd birthday of the pioneer scientist whose experiments formed the basis for modern electric power. The Google logo today features purple sparks and electricity leaping from the letter G, which is drawn in the shape of his Tesla coil transformer. This follows the April celebration of Samuel Morse's birthday with a Morse code Google logo.
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Four trade magazines, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, offer short reviews of many thousands of books. Of particular interest to editors are those that receive a "star" for unusual merit. This regular feature highlights new titles with stars from at least three of the four publications.
Our second When Stars Align includes two mysteries, a children's book, a short story collection, a love story, and a nonfiction chronicle of life in Montana. None of these authors is new to the book world: Not only have they all published books before, but almost all of them have previously garnered starred reviews.
The only book to receive four stars this time around is Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, a science-fiction book aimed at 'tweens. When 12-year-old Miranda receives a cryptic postcard that says "I'm coming to save your friend's life, and my own," she doesn't know what to think—until she realizes the note is from the future. Booklist warns that "if this book makes your head hurt, you're not alone" but Kirkus promises that "teen readers will circle back to the beginning and say, ‘Wow ... cool.'" Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
2008 Man Booker Prize Winner Adiga Aravind's collection of short stories, Between the Assassinations, received great press when it was released in mid-June (just after our first roundup). The stories are set in Kittur, India between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Ghandi in 1991. Publisher's Weekly says that "the small epiphanies" in the stories "hit like bricks from heaven." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In Reggie Nadelson's Londongrad: An Artie Cohen Mystery, a New York City police detective attempts to avenge the gruesome murder of his love, Valentina Sverdloff. Kirkus says this is the story that Nadelson was "born to tell." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
The recently deceased Donald E. Westlake's 15th and final book, Get Real, takes its title from a reality-show production company that tries to stage a televised robbery. Publisher's Weekly promises that the book will "rouse chuckles from even jaded readers" and Booklist toasts "Here's to crime: how sweet it is!" Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Dai Sijie's Once on a Moonless Night, received rave reviews from Britain and France, where it has already been released. An unnamed Western student in China falls in love with a greengrocer, Tumchooq, who tells her the story of a lost Buddhist sutra written in a forgotten language. The novel, according to Booklist, proves "that language is transcendent; books are precious; translation is a noble art; stories are the key to freedom; and truth prevails." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Rich Bass' The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana records his seasonal observations of nature in a remote corner of Montana. Library Journal calls it "a walk through the author's soul." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 4: "google operating system." A day after finally taking Gmail out of beta, Google announced its newest project, the Chrome Operating System. Chrome OS (not to be confused with the Google browser of the same name), will be targeted at "people who spend most of their time on the web," according to Google's official blog. Since this statement describes an increasing number of mainstream computer users, the Google system could end up in direct competition with Windows: "The Internet is Everything," writes TechCrunch.com's Michael Arrington, "all the OS has to do is boot the damn computer."
No. 28: "sevin nyne." "civil conspiracy" and "theft of trade secrets" could be the newest addition to Lindsay Lohan's impressive rap sheet: The 23-year-old embodiment of the phrase "hot mess" is being sued by a Florida chemist for allegedly filching her artificial tanner formula and passing it off as her own designer line, Sevin Nyne. The product's provenance might not be its biggest problem if this Amazon review is accurate: "It turned me orange. Enough said."
No. 68: "4chan down." 4chan.org, possibly the fourth-largest bulletin board on the Internet, has been brought down by a sustained denial of service (DoS) attack. It's just desserts for the site, probably best known as the unruly spawning ground of some of the Web's oddest pranks: In May, 4chan users bombarded Youtube with porn, and they were probably to blame when "#gorillapenis" appeared at the top of the Twitter trends list on Sunday. (An unrelated DoS attack linked to North Korean hackers was launched yesterday against the Washington Post.)
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Take a look at this great Kenneth Koch poem, rendered in kinetic typography:
Can you have love, work, and friends? Koch maintains that only 2 out of 3 are possible to have. I can't argue with that, though Facebook can help a bit.
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Have you heard? It's rough going in the newspaper business these days. Which makes it a special pleasure to open the New York Times and find, tucked at the bottom of the editorial page, the latest in Verlyn Klinkenborg's occasional series "The Rural Life." That the paper still reserves a few inches for Klinkenborg's short dispatches from his farm upstate is somehow comforting. These items aren't hard news, and they aren't "A Night Out With: Judissa Bermudez." They're lyrical meditations on subjects like the relationship between man and fox and the perspicacity of horses. Monday's was a particularly wonderful edition, a playful attempt to find words to describe the afternoon thunderstorms that have been buffeting Klinkenborg's farm:
Soon the tuberous blunderheads trundle over the horizon; they begin to "wampum, wampum, wampum" until at last they're vrooming nearby, just down the valley. Or perhaps they're harrumphing and oomphing, from the very omphalos of the storm. Onomatopoeia is such a delicate thing.
"Suddenly the air is grackling," he writes as the storm arrives overhead. "Dark and furious in its plumage." It's a lovely image, evoking both the sudden, menacing darkness of a summer storm but also its beautiful iridescence, as the sun plays off the clouds. Monday's essay reminded me of the prologue to The Last Fine Time, Klinkenborg's book about Buffalo, N.Y., which introduces the city by describing how it reacts to word of inclement weather—"Snow begins as a rumor in Buffalo" reads the opening line—and then to the snow itself, falling out of a sky "as black as the pupil of an owl's eye." (You can read the prologue here.) Klinkenborg is now officially my favorite chronicler of upstate weather. Here's hoping the Times continues to publish "The Rural Life," despite the stormy climate.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 8: "Disney Monorail Accidents." Sunday's deadly monorail accident at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., was the most Google-worthy fatality of a pretty dangerous Fourth of July weekend: On Saturday, four workers were killed in a fireworks explosion on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina when 40 minutes worth of fireworks exploded in four seconds; fireworks killed one worker in Eastern Pennsylvania; in Spokane, Wash., a police dog spooked by fireworks pried open the lock to its cage and escaped. (He was found the next morning.)
No. 16: "Codex Sinaiticus Online." The oldest bible in the world has gotten the Google Books treatment: Today, the British Library announced it's posting a digital version of more than half of the Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible written in Greek in the fourth century. The Codex contains uncanonical texts, which, a columnist for the Guardian writes, "point up yet again ... the erroneousness of those who insist that the current Biblical text represents the inerrant and unchanging word of God." Visit http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/ to see the Codex. (As of this writing, though, the Web site was down.)
No. 19: "Ok magazine Michael Jackson photo." Michael Jackson queries still account for a quarter of the Top 20 trending searches today. The big story, besides Tuesday's funeral, is the fracas over OK! magazine's $500,000 purchase and subsequent fronting of a photo of Michael Jackson, supine on a stretcher, maybe dead. The New York Post reports that Jay-Z and P Diddy are calling for a boycott of the magazine, but the Los Angeles Times points out that the CBS tabloid news show "The Insider" showed the photo first on Friday.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 1: "Wimbledon Semi-Final." For the first time in a while, Wimbledon semifinals are on schedule because of a new roof on center court, and tournament-related searches are among the most popular today. The biggest news for British and American tennis fans is the Andy (Murray) vs. Andy (Roddick) semifinal, which some are predicting could be "the greatest diplomatic incident between Britain and the United States since the Boston Tea Party."
No. 10: "Sears tower unveils 103rd floor glass balconies." Googlers are looking to get a (digital) sense of America's tallest building's newest attraction: transparent balconies suspended 1,353 feet in the air. The effect, according to visitors, is to give you the sensation that you're floating over the city. Get vertigo here.
No. 49: "National Security Archive." Today, the National Security Archive obtained declassified accounts of almost all of the FBI's 20 interviews with Saddam Hussein that were conducted after his 2003 capture. Hussein admits that he allowed the world to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction because he did not want to appear weak to Iran. He also cites North Korea as his strongest ally and reads his FBI interviewer, George Piro, some of his poetry. The full set of interviews are available here.
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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, opening today, will likely become the fourth 3-D movie this year to gross over $50 million. The basic technology is old—and for some, including Slate's Daniel Engber, still a headache—but the genre may have finally overcome its boom-and-bust cycle of past decades.
Stereography, or 3-D photography, has had less luck. It was among the most popular photographic formats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Each stereograph card presents two slightly different images of the same scene, which when viewed properly create an illusion of depth. In stereography's heyday, middle-class families stocked their homes with the stereographic images of lands too distant to visit. Teachers wove stereographs into lessons about history, botany, and geology. The military used the technology for aerial reconnaisance. Stereography's popularity, however, faded quickly with the advent of television and color photography after World War II. Since then, 3-D photography has largely been relegated to the plastic View-Master children's toy, also waning in popularity. Could the box-office bonanza for 3-D movies drive a stereography renaissance?
There's much to admire about the medium. Unlike 3-D movies, you can view stereographs without special glasses. In many cases, the depth enhances otherwise cluttered scenes. In the stereograph above, the woman, her stereograph viewer, her artifacts, and the fireplace get the breathing room that each image of the flat pair lacks. It's also just fun to have the scene "pop" out at you. Curious viewers can find hundreds of thousands of historical stereographs, and a smattering of contemporary albums, online. And it's pretty darn easy to make them yourself, either with a standard camera or by rigging a specialized setup for $15.
Still, it seems more likely that stereography will remain a small-time hobby, if only because there's ostensibly no money in it. Hollywood loves a good cross-promotion, but there have been few if any stereograph tie-ins to the latest 3-D films. But it's not such a far fetched idea—stereographs did begin as a mass consumer product. Pixar could drop stereo pairs promoting its next 3-D film into boxes of sugar-packed cereal or a Happy Meal. Until then, I'm happily consigned to getting my 3-D photography kicks from historical gems like this rare Abe Lincoln hairdo.
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To write about Michael Jackson is to write about so many things at once: race, gender, sex, fame, money, music, dance, childhood, child abuse, aging, the media, the law. America, really. Maybe that’s why his death has prompted such an outburst of good writing. Tomorrow will mark one week since Jackson’s death; by the pitiless clock of the news cycle, we should be done thinking about him already. But a lot of smart people are just getting started.
Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Jackson has appeared in the most unexpected places. Of course you’re going to turn to Robert Christgau on Michael Jackson, or Ann Powers, or Greg Tate, or Slate’s own Jody Rosen (as well you should; all four have written powerfully on the Jackson enigma). But who would have expected to find James Wolcott recounting his attempts to learn the moonwalk? (“My heel caught on a cat toy […] and I found myself reeling backward like Martin Balsam on the staircase in Psycho.”) Roger Ebert, on his indispensable Chicago Sun-Times blog (it's not just about movies, and the man responds to reader comments with the promptness and energy of a 24-year-old blogger with nothing else to do), relates the experiences of his wife, who as a young dancer once opened for the Jackson 5. Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star, interrupted his vacation to write a fantastic blog post about the inescapability of Jackson’s music in the early 80s. And a guy named Bob Rossney, who maintains a seldom-updated blog called “Koax! Koax! Koax!,” wrote perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the unfathomable sadness of Jackson’s personal life.
David Gates’ remembrance in Newsweek contains one image I can’t shake; recalling the wraithlike backup- dancing zombies in the “Thriller” video, he writes: “When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.” (Newsweek’s photo spread opens with a shot of the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael and his pet chimp Bubbles, which now looks like the Pietà of the 1980s.) And (I swear this isn’t just logrolling for a colleague and friend) the first piece of Jackson writing to make me cry was Stephen Metcalf’s trenchant and stunningly written reflection on this blog.
Then there’s the experience of coming across things written long before Jackson’s death that, if they were creepy before, seem positively frightening now. In 1983, a 24-year-old Jackson granted a rare interview to the Guardian (insisting, as he often did, that all questions be filtered through his then-teenage sister, Janet), in which he gushed about his love for children: “I feel I'm Peter Pan as well as Methuselah, and a child. ... Thank God for children. They save me every time!” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then writing for Salon, reported on Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial in chilling detail. Seth Stevenson’s dispatches from that same trial are a glimpse of the macabre spectacle Jackson’s late life had become. (In ’06, Seth also compiled a video roundup of red-flag moments from early Jackson videos.)
Brow Beat readers, what are your favorite pieces of writing (or tributes in other media) that you’ve seen about MJ? Send links to SlateBrowBeat@gmail.com. (And thanks to the Twitter followers who responded to my call by suggesting some of the great links above.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 4: “Propofol.”Developments in Michael Jackson’s death continue to be reflected in almost real time by Google Trends: Today, M.J.’s nutritionist, Cherliyn Lee, told the AP that Jackson “pleaded” for the powerful anesthetic Propofol (brand name: Diprivan), and TMZ reports that the drug was discovered in Michael Jackson’s house. Propofol can cause arrhythmic heartbeats.
No. 12: “Canada Day.” Happy 142nd anniversary of your becoming a semi-autonomous territory of the British Empire, Canada! Today is Canada Day, which celebrates the creation of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867. (The holiday was originally called Dominion Day but changed in 1983 to downplay Canada’s colonial origins.) Canada Day celebrations usually include outdoor barbecues and fireworks, but in Toronto,a municipal workers’ strike has put the kibosh on most of the city’s official celebrations.
No. 16: “DV 2010 results.” The Diversity Visa lottery is one of the only ways many foreign workers can hope to enter the United States legally. Today, lottery results were posted online, so would-be immigrants can see whether they qualified to receive one of the 50,000 Diversity Visas available each year. The odds are only a little better than those for the $113 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot: In 2007, just 99,600 applicants qualified for the 2009 Diversity Visa out of more than 9.1 million entries. (Not all applicants accept the visa.)