Month: December 2012

Thomas Rogers wishes the computer interfaces shown in TV shows were more mundane:

Of course, in real life, technology is rarely exciting. For the most part, we use computers by ourselves, hunched over kitchen tables or our office desk. Things break, and take too long, and our screen freezes when all we're just trying to do is watch the trailer for The Hobbit. Over the past decade, our familiarity with technology has increased dramatically, to the point that computer interfaces are one of our primary ways of interacting with the world and each other. That's why these misrepresentations are especially jarring: They misrepresent something that is fundamental to our everyday lives. Imagine if every time someone drove a car in a movie it was a Ferrari that spewed flames and put on a laser light show.

More seriously, this depiction of spy technology as unrecognizably sophisticated and beautiful feeds the notion that government agencies are mystical and magical entities. This may scare off the potential terrorists, but it also makes it harder to see intelligence work as something that exists in the real world, with all of the drawbacks and moral ambiguities that come with it.

Literally:

Particulate air pollution, along with obesity, [are] now the two fastest-growing causes of death in the world, according to a new study published in the Lancet. The study found that in 2010, 3.2 million people died prematurely from the air pollution–particularly the sooty kind that spews from the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks. And of those untimely deaths, 2.1 million were in Asia, where a boom in car use has choked the streets of India and China's fast-expanding cities with smog. 

Gabe Habash collects the best songs inspired by literature:

You may not realize it, but literature is well represented by metal bands. Iron Maiden alone has songs with references to the works of C.S. Lewis, Orson Scott Card, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Tennyson. Another literary metal band is Metallica, whose "For Whom the Bell Tolls" references Hemingway and "The Thing That Should Not Be" (and "The Call of Ktulu") references Lovecraft. "One," a seven-minute power ballad, is based on Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, with lyrics like "Fed through the tube that sticks in me just like a wartime novelty." The music video features dialogue and scenes from the 1971 film version of Trumbo’s book.

(Video: Devo's "Whip It" was inspired by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow)

Megan Gambino explores the history of medicinal tattoos. She talked to Lars Krutak of the National Museum of Natural History about a 5,300 year old mummy discovered frozen in 1991:

The preserved body has a total of 57 tattoos—short lines etched in groups on his lower back and ankles, a cross behind his right knee and two rings around his left wrist. "Incredibly, approximately 80 percent of these tattoos overlap with classical Chinese acupuncture point utilized to treat rheumatism, a medical condition that plagued the Iceman. Other tattoos were found to be located on or near acupuncture meridians [pathways that connect internal organs with specific points located on the skin] that may have had the purpose of relieving other ailments, like gastro-intestinal problems," writes Krutak in his latest book, Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification, published this fall.

Previous Dish on the history of tattooing here.

Simon Garfield highlights a literary map of America:

Sawers’s Literary Map of the United States of America includes more than 200 novelists, poets and cartoonists, and the selection process, as in all literary contests, had an element of the arbitrary. First, Sawers and his co-artist, Bridget Hannigan, drew up a list of names they felt had to be on there, a combination of prizewinners and personal crushes. Thus F. Scott Fitzgerald was an early inclusion, but so was Charles M. Schulz, creator of Snoopy. Then there was the placement issue: where a writer appeared was only sometimes determined by birthplace. So while Tom Wolfe stretches up towards his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, Herman Melville appears whaling away north of Nantucket with "Moby Dick."

"People from all over the world are buying the maps,” Sawers says, “and they can get quite angry when their favourite writers don’t appear where they expect them to.”

Much of it hails from Sweden. David Michael reports on the strange relationship:

As an American, it is bizarre to think of modern Sweden, so often lauded as a paragon of social and economic stability, as coughing up migrant workers. Stranger still is that the Swedes migrate to Norway, which has always been regarded as Sweden’s little brother. Often at war, Sweden forced Norway into an uneven union for most of the 19th century. Though politically independent of Sweden for over one hundred years, Norway has remained culturally subordinate to its larger, more-established neighbor. Norwegians watch Swedish television, listen to Swedish music, and read Swedish books. Before the Norwegian translation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was released, the original Swedish version was the best-selling book in Norway. But in the last 25 years, Norway has added workers to the list of things it imports from Sweden.

Today on the Dish, Andrew challenged Frum’s assertion that there was nothing redeemable about marijuana, fisked WaPo’s attempted smear of Chuck Hagel, and nominated John Boehner for a Malkin Award after the Speaker turned his bullshit cannon on the press.

In continuing coverage of the aftermath of last week’s school shooting, more readers joined our discussion regarding mental illness, Massie took a historical view on America’s gun-violence problem, Google searches for “gun control” increased dramatically compared to other shootings, a Mormon-owned classifieds site stopped allowing the listing of firearms, Adam Lankford explained how a mass-shooter’s likelihood of committing suicide went up with their death toll, and Charlotte Allen channeled her inner Malkin to point out how “feminized” Sandy Hook Elementary School was. Also, readers shared their ideas on how to talk to children about the tragedy, considered the logistics of crowd-rushing an active shooter, and chimed in on the media’s failures while reporting on the shooting, as did the NYT’s Public Editor. Andrew J. Rotherham hoped the NRA would become more moderate as well as more environmentally focused, a reader was newly offended by the gunplay in A Christmas Story (only to be quickly rebuked by other readers), and we read a hearbreaking letter from a young boy in Newtown.

In political coverage, Chait claimed we would fall off the fiscal cliff due to the lack of rational players involved, Thomas Jefferson believed that our institutions should keep pace with the progress of the human mind, David Kuo shared his gratitide for Obamacare, Lucianne Goldberg got a Malkin nod for accusing Hillary Clinton of faking a concussion, and Richard Kahlenberg foresaw the end of affirmative action. Also, S.J. Culver wished more people understood the reality of America’s prison system, Ezra and Suderman decoded entitlement reform efforts, Jacob Sullum explored the social history of weed, Victor Menaldo told us why dictators bother to have legislatures, and James McPherson rejected some criticism of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

In assorted coverage, a reader added to our thread on digital journalism by considering alternative paths for advertisers, David Vinjamuri checked in on the battle over ebook lending, Ramin Setoodeh found fault with the excessive lengths of modern films, Noah Berlatsky objected to the added violence in (the 169-minute film version of) The Hobbit, and Silvia Killingsworth panned the Inbox Zero productivity system for its reliance on good memory. Gary Marcus pushed back the arrival of sophisticated household robots, Alan Cumming let us know what it’s like to have a very big foreskin, Hilton Als penned an essay about (the maturing) Prince, and we dug into the backlash over Instagram’s new terms of service. DJ Earworm mash-recapped the year’s pop in our MHB, a BBC executive took some heat in our FOTD, and there was Milwaukee snow through the VFYW.

– C.D.

While on a $28 tour of Alcatraz, S.J. Culver considers our attraction to dark tourism:

The popularity of these types of destinations is enduring, the earliest perhaps being the Egyptian pyramids, the Catacombs of Rome, and the Tower of London. Today, the dark tourist’s choices are greatly expanded: for around $160, you can tour the Chernobyl zone; for $2, you can visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former high school in Phnom Penh where the Khmer Rouge tortured thousands. In 2011, when tickets became available for the 9/11 Memorial, the first days of reservations were booked solid within a few hours. 

The Alcatraz tour fails to mention that "one in forty-three adults in this country is behind bars or on probation or parole." Her takeaway on the missed opportunity to educate the prison's visitors:

Here is one of the few social spaces in the country where people with real political power (those who can vote, have disposable income, etc.) seek out information about incarceration; it’s a disappointment that what they get instead is entertainment. The real problem is our complacency, and perhaps it’s bigger than any tourist attraction could hope to correct. 

Previous Dish on Angola prison's golf course here and gang tours in LA here.

(Photo by Jeff Vier)

Andrew J. Rotherham wants one:

[S]uch an organization could take on all the issues of more immediate concern to sportsmen than the Second Amendment, in particular the loss of wildlife habitat. The NRA and its even more radical cousins are pretty much exclusively focused on maintaining access to all kinds of firearms and ammunition. It’s an economic agenda to preserve the interests of the companies that make these products, not a pro-sportsmen’s agenda to preserve natural resources and open space; the gun lobby frequently supports politicians with horrendous records on environmental issues. Its narrow focus, as Field & Stream columnist George Reiger observed a few years ago, could lead us to become a nation where people can have "a closet full of guns with no place but a shooting range to use them."