Month: September 2012

A sudden dip on Intrade:

Not so long ago, his odds were around 42 percent; they're now around 29. Not a real poll, just where the punters are placing their actual money.

Torie Bosch recently eloped:

I love a good wedding just as I love any party with an open bar and "The Electric Slide." But unless you are wealthy, come from a family that has never known strife, enjoy giving up an entire year of your life to planning, and can smile in the face of any possible wedding disaster (and mean it, not just for pictures), you should elope. That’s because weddings—even small-scale ones—are more pageant than sincerity. …

Many men and women have told me that their weddings were so frantic—worrying about whether the caterer was late, whether a simmering family feud was about to boil over, whether everyone who should have been thanked was acknowledged—that it felt like a blur. We all know people who were too busy on their wedding day to eat the food that they so carefully selected—and if that isn’t a demonstration that a wedding is for everyone else but the couple, I don’t know what is.

Phoenix, Arizona, 7:07 pm

A scientific primer:

Should you drink champagne from a tall, long-stemmed glass, a "flute" in French? Or should it be a "coupe," the shallow cup that according to legend is moulded on the breast shape of Marie-Antoinette? Gas chromatography showed a "coupe" loses CO2 at least a third faster than a "flute." So unless you drink very quickly, you lose the precious effervescence. In similar vein, drinking champagne from a plastic cup can be a drab experience because the sides are hydrophobic, or liquid repelling. The bubbles adhere to the sides through capillary action and inflate into the size of tiny balls.

Alexander C. Kafka pans About Cherry:

Films about porn that get at deeper truths … are scarce. P.T. Anderson's memorable Boogie Nights (1997) leaps to mind, but it's worth noting that it took years for Anderson to digest the zeitgeist of '70s/'80s wide-screen wantonness. And the picture's pathos really rested on pitifully endearing characters like John C. Reilly's sad-eyed hanger-on Reed Rothchild and Heather Graham's crazily blissed-out Rollergirl. You might say it was a period-pinpointing, outsider-group portrait dressed as (or undressed as) a movie about porn.

Maybe it will take a decade or two before our own age's digital down and dirty gets its definitive take. The Internet is fast, but cultural epiphany won't be rushed. That, anyway, is what's suggested by the disappointing new feature About Cherry, which sees theatrical release this week.

Michael McGrath lays out the reasons why cinematic portrayals of writers often fall flat:

These films take the work itself less seriously (often a lack of literary merit is part of the joke) and instead focus on the pitfalls of the creative life. They ignore the words for the work and all that can inspire and disrupt it: psycho fans, ex-wives, portals to the Underworld. These writers can be cynical hacks (As Good As It Gets), genre stars (Misery) or dislocated sportswriters (Funny Farm). In romantic comedies, the writer is often a witty Lothario or a good-natured wimp. Either way, the profession’s primary function is to provide the character with plenty of free time. …

Better to make a biopic (Quills, Becoming Jane, Miss Potter). While these films are frequently dull, they can coast on borrowed esteem and there’s much less potential for embarrassment. Nobody has to do the extra work of creating a fake masterpiece.

Caroline Stanley admires the conceptual portraits seen through a scanner, darkly:

Admit it: Whether it was back in your high school’s library or more recently, during a really slow day at the office, you’ve made a photocopy of your face before. In his series Behind the Glass, Berlin artist Enrico Nagel (who bizarre collages of humans with flower heads we previously featured) takes the concept and elevates it, creating painterly portraits by capturing his subjects’ pressed-in mugs with a high resolution scanner. 

(Composite of two of Nagel's images by Junkculture)

Tracy Clark-Flory ponders the evolving science of pregnancy:

Imagine a woman being able to convert her own eggs into "pseudo-sperm" to fertilize herself – or perhaps instead an artificial womb that will carry the pregnancy to term while she continues her uninterrupted climb up the career ladder. Picture an older woman harvesting eggs from her own bone marrow to beat her ticking biological clock. … [It] sounds like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but a new book suggests it’s an inevitable reality. In "Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redefining the Rules of Sex," author Aarathi Prasad writes, "This would be the great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex. The question is not if it will happen, but when."

It isn’t just women who stand to benefit, either: Artificial wombs will actually give men "more potential than women to make a baby without the opposite sex," says Prasad, a biologist and science writer. The takeaway is that "male plus female equals baby will no longer be our only path forward."

Prasad's book also examines single-sex parenting in the animal kingdom. For example, here is an explanation of how an all-female tribe of Whiptail lizard reproduces through a form of lesbian sex.

Tomorrow marks the show's 50th anniversary. So why are we still comparing that fictional future to our own? Matt Novak begins a series on the lasting influence of the show:

People point to "The Jetsons" as the golden age of American futurism because (technologically, at least) it had everything our hearts could desire: jetpacks, flying cars, robot maids, moving sidewalks…. It’s important to remember that today’s political, social and business leaders were pretty much watching "The Jetsons" on repeat during their most impressionable years. People are often shocked to learn that "The Jetsons" lasted just one season during its original run in 1962-63 and wasn’t revived until 1985. Essentially every kid in America (and many internationally) saw the series on constant repeat during Saturday morning cartoons throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Everyone (including my own mom) seems to ask me, "How could it have been around for only 24 episodes? Did I really just watch those same episodes over and over again?" Yes, yes you did.

The Rommneyites packed the Univision audience and Mitt threw a hissy fit before it began? But he didn’t put on extra-brown make-up.