Month: April 2012

Russell Saunders, a doctor at the same hospital as Mark Schuster but 10 years younger, compares their experiences:

I have been lucky to have come after a generation of people like Dr. Schuster and those before him, who bore more of the burden and took more of the risk.  Because of them, I have always been able to say without apology that I would not take a job that didn’t offer benefits to my partner.  Because of them, I can display pictures of my husband and son on the mantle of my office right along with the families of the other people who work there.  Though there is still so much to be done, as Dr. Schuster notes at the end of his piece, we have come so very far.  And it is because of people like him.

I can be nothing but grateful.

He insisted his greatest book wasn't Huckleberry Finn but rather Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: 

Throughout her short life, Joan of Arc maintained the sort of traditional values that can make social change infinitely more palatable. She was strong. She was a legendary leader. She was an unrepentant and proud soldier. But to Twain at least, she also represented something decidedly feminine: she was a virgin; she was pure of tongue; she was respectful and unassuming. … In this way, Joan somehow miraculously fulfilled the two parts of Twain's ideal of womanhood—she was an intellectual equal but a modest and self-abnegating one. She represented both his love for traditional girlishness and the aspirational benchmark he set for the generation of intrepid young girls he imagined were about to come of age.

A reader writes:

How can you write a post about your beagles without linking back to this or this? Or, at the very least, to this. Your longtime readers really expect better from you.

Prospero pinpoints Titanic's enduring appeal:

Over a decade before "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games" made a mint from having shy teen heroines with two gorgeous suitors apiece, Rose was a perfect wish-fulfilment version of the film’s teenage female viewers. Like those viewers, Rose has a comfortable existence, but she still feels stifled—and it is all her mother’s fault. As obnoxious as she is, men are drawn to her inner greatness. She is not untouchably beautiful: Winslet carries some puppy fat and is drenched in garish red hair dye. And at the end, she gets to start a new life with a new identity, far away from a mother who thinks she is dead.

In short, "Titanic" reassures adolescent girls that they are not just grumpy and hormonal, but tragic captives, destined for love and adventure. No wonder they couldn’t resist. The business with the iceberg was just the icing on the cake.

But the male appeal is there as well:

On IMDB, Titanic is ranked 8.2 out of 10 by males under the age of 18—a number on par with teenage boy-targeted hits like Iron Man and the latest Star Wars movie, and higher than films including Captain America and all three entries in the Transformers franchise. Perhaps even more tellingly, Titanic actually ranks higher with contemporary young men than with the 15-year-old girls—now in their early 30s—who saw it three, four, or five times during its initial 1997 run.

Dana Stevens comes around to the film in 3D: 

Titanic isn’t subtle or tasteful or novel—if those are the only qualities you prize in movies, this one’s brushstrokes will probably be too broad for you—but it’s indisputably big and bold and beautiful. The movie’s themes—which go beyond star-crossed love to include class conflict, the ephemerality of human existence, and feminist empowerment through nude modeling—seem to swell up in recurrent waves, like leitmotifs in an opera. A soap opera, sure, but an opera nonetheless, complete with passionate arias (Kate and Leo at the prow) and grand choral laments (the still-jawdropping, and now inevitably 9/11-invoking, sequence where the ship cracks in two and the bodies slide down the deck into the water below). All I know is that somewhere around hour two, my intermittently muttered "oh, brother" suddenly started coming out as "Oh, the humanity."

Another early skeptic, David Edelstein, is also onboard.

(Image via Adam Kaplan)

The new Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is bringing higher education to the local watering hole:

To get the Brooklyn Institute off the ground, [instructor Ajay] Chaudhary recruited several Columbia colleagues to join him, then convinced his neighborhood hangout to donate space, promising big bar tabs in return (so far, so good). … The Brooklyn Institute is learning for the Slow Food set, with lower barriers to entry, students and faculty sharing in academic responsibilities, and minds enriched by regular tending, the ivory tower eschewed for a community garden. It’s not a model that works on a mass scale, but it’s certainly one that can be cloned. After all, it’s been done before. As the students of Politics in the City would be all too happy to remind the reigning university overlords: Plato’s academy itself began with just a few guys sitting around, talking.

This from National Review editor Rich Lowry:

Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.

A new study reveals that most movie quotes follow a certain set of criteria:

[M]emorable phrases tend to use very ordinary grammatical structures that are highly likely to turn up in the corpus. They also found that memorable phrases tend to use pronouns (other than you), the indefinite article a rather than the definite article the, and verbs in the past rather than present tense. These are all features that tend to make phrases general rather than specific. So memorable phrases contain generic pearls of wisdom expressed with unusual combinations of words in ordinary sentences. 

Test the formula for yourself here.

Is buoyed by recent events:

In the short term, at least, Burma seems headed for further transformation. One measure of the new atmosphere has been the stampede of American and European businessmen heading to Burma now that the European Union and the United States are considering easing sanctions, and the government has brought Aung San Suu Kyi into the electoral process. For months, Rangoon’s hotels have been packed with prospective investors; a breakfast conference on February 27th at the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangkok, "Doing Business in Burma," filled up almost immediately after it was announced. Burma watchers say that Thein Sein is trying to dilute Chinese domination of the economy, and that opportunities in everything from natural resources to hotel franchises are there for the taking, provided that foreign investors can navigate the shoals of the military bureaucracy.

As a counterpoint to this week's thread on bicycle road rage, Jon Day waxes poetic over his profession:

It was the solitude I valued; the freedom of the outside; the sounds of the street; the thinking time. … Cycling is a collaborative act, a meditative engagement with the world of material things, and riding a bike encourages you to build up a private map of the terrain you travel over. You learn what it’s like to ride down a particular road when wet (noting the placement of slippery drain covers that wait to catch you on sharp turns), or the specific sequence of traffic lights at a much-crossed junction. For drivers the road is merely, in Iain Sinclair’s words, that “dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape,” but for cyclists, like pedestrians, every road has a personality.