Month: November 2012

Michelle Dean traces the transformation of witches in the popular imagination, from religious menace to figures that can be harmless, even subservient:

[T]he witch is no longer terribly wild to us; she’s domesticated, normal, prone perhaps to a spell of madness but one from which she’ll emerge sunny and whole. She no longer signals a liberating spirit. Culturally, we have replicated witch-figures like Samantha of “Bewitched,” whose powers aid her in serving her husband. Our emblematic witch is Hermione Granger, who performs all the magic and takes none of the credit from Harry Potter. She is self-effacing and noble and never in any real danger of contamination by the dark. There are bad witches in Harry Potter, indeed, bad witches in many stories. But their cartoonish one-dimensionality cancels out any real portent. 

Emily Eakin connects the film to philosopher Ken Wilber, who delivered the "philosophers’ commentary" on the Matrix trilogy's DVD set. How Eakin describes Wilber's Integral Theory:

In simplified form, it says something like this: reality is composed exclusively of holons, a term borrowed from Arthur Koestler to denote that which is simultaneously an autonomous whole and a part of something larger. Just as a brain cell is both a self-contained unit and part of a larger organ, so, too, a human being exists as a single individual and as part of a larger collective—a family, an ethnic group, the human race, all living things—in a pattern that extends indefinitely in both directions. It’s holons all the way up and all the way down.

Previous Dish on the film here.

Jason Pontin wonders why more writers haven't adapted their work to the new ways we read. He finds that literary innovation is driven most of all by the technology used to compose the text:

At a time when new media are proliferating, it is tempting to imagine that authors, thinking about how their writing will appear on devices such as electronic readers, tablet computers, or smartphones, consciously or unconsciously adapt their prose to the exigencies of publishing platforms. But that's not what actually happens. One looks in vain for many examples of stories whose style or form has been cleverly adapted to their digital destinations. Stories on e-readers look pretty much as stories have always looked. Even The Atavist, a startup in Brooklyn founded to publish multimedia long-format journalism for tablet computers, does little more than add elements like interactive maps, videos, or photographs to conventional stories. But such elements are editors' accretions; The Atavist's authors have not been moved, as Baker was, by the creative possibilities of a new technology. Writers are excited to experimentation not by the media in which their works are published but, rather, by the technologies they use to compose the works.

Unsurprisingly, then, blogs have been one example of a new style emerging from new tools:

Even when a writer's style is informed by a publishing platform, it's more often because that technology is also an authoring tool: blogging programs, such as Movable Type or WordPress, are content management systems that publish blogs to the Web, but they are also sophisticated word processors that make it easy to link to other blogs, use block quotes, or embed photographs and videos. The distinctive voice of modern bloggers—impulsively reactive, colloquial, intimate, allusive, and, above all, chatty—owes much to such software.

A cutout cutting a rug:

The Modern Dance from Rogier Wieland on Vimeo.

While shopping in a used bookstore, John Lingan stumbled upon Michael Dirda, the famous book critic, "known apocryphally as the best-read man in America." He tagged along to see "what the farthest-ranging literary mind looks like in its natural habitat":

Dirda’s final pile included the Bradbury, Davies, Twain, the Zola bio, and an extremely handsome book of Cézanne prints that he’d poached, in passing, from the Art shelf. There were others, things I didn’t recognize and things that looked, in all honesty, like juvenile garbage. But if I’d learned anything by following him around, it was that you don’t get to be the best-read man in America by giving a damn about someone else’s taste. You buy and read books that entice you for small reasons like a good cover or an intelligent introduction, books that appeal to your eccentricities. You keep as many books as possible nearby because they are in fact the very record of your eccentricities.

Pivoting off Anne Applebaum's new history of life behind the Iron Curtain, Louis Menand notes the indispensable part that rock and roll played in the liberation of Eastern Europe:

“The Wild One,” “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rock Around the Clock” caused youth riots in both East and West Germany in 1955 and 1956. In the notorious “cultural Cold War,” during which the C.I.A. covertly supported—and the State Department and American museums and foundations overtly funded—the dissemination of American art, books, literary and intellectual journalism, dance, theatre, and music, the one product that can plausibly be argued to have made a difference in the eventual overthrow of Communism was rock and roll. Bill Haley and Frank Zappa likely did more to inspire the dissidents in Eastern Europe than Jackson Pollock or the writers at Partisan Review.

Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman, and Steven Kotler consider the horrifying prospect of personalized bioweapons:

Personalized therapies designed to attack a specific patient’s cancer cells are already moving into clinical trials. Synthetic biology is poised to expand and accelerate this process by making individualized viral therapies inexpensive. Such “magic bullets” can target cancer cells with precision. But what if these bullets were trained to attack healthy cells instead? Trained against retinal cells, they would produce blindness. Against the hippocampus, a memory wipe may result. And the liver? Death would follow in months.

The delivery of this sort of biological agent would be very difficult to detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless and easily aerosolized. They could be hidden in a perfume bottle; a quick dab on the attacker’s wrist in the general proximity of the target is all an assassination attempt would require. If the pathogen were designed to zero in specifically on the president’s DNA, then nobody else would even fall ill. No one would suspect an attack until long after the infection.

Palm Springs, California, 12 pm

In his latest book, Eating Aliens, Jackson Landers advocates hunting invasive species like feral boars and Asian carp. In an interview, he describes his food philosophy:

There are so many people right now who have meat-eater’s remorse — people who eat meat and feel kind of bad about it, but they’re not actually going to stop. Or they’re vegetarians and their bodies actually crave meat. But there’s so much awareness about what’s wrong with the mainstream food system — and they haven’t known what to do about that. The beautiful thing about hunting, especially invasive species, is it’s a way of dropping out of the mainstream meat paradigm, where so many of the ethical and health problems associated with eating meat arise.