24th January 2012
The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land
“Can humans grow enough food, produce enough energy and still preserve some of the last refuges of other species—both plant and animal—on the planet?
23rd January 2012
Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports
“I think we’re pretty much done with the Are Games Art? question. How about this one: Are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn’t put it that way.) Many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set systems made dynamic by human interaction, out of which some kind of “story” emerges. This is, in fact, what excites a lot of us about video games: a brand-new narrative form, etc., etc., but here is my question: Sport itself is another such rule-set system, isn’t it? It’s based on just that kind of rules-meets-human-interaction dynamism and permits almost exactly that kind of emergent “story” to appear. Remember that the whole crux of the Ebert Position1 was that sports — and, thus, games — aren’t art but rather activity, no matter how beautiful and compelling said activity can be from the spectator’s point of view. Art, though, has intent and direction, meaning and submeaning, and is definitively not something that happens to arise within seemingly arbitrary rule sets.
Peeling Oniontown
“There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken. Afghanistan is one. Another lies an hour and a half north of New York City outside the bucolic little Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover Plains. It’s a place called Oniontown. Despite its name, Oniontown isn’t an actual town—it’s more of a mountainside enclave filled with a haphazard collection of run-down trailers on a dead-end dirt road. The settlement has a notorious reputation that conjures up words like hillbilly, inbred, and drugs. Residents have a hard time finding jobs in town because of their addresses. There are stories about people throwing onions onto the court when the local high school basketball team plays away games. While in the past 100 years women attained suffrage, segregation was ended, and civil rights were established that protected minorities, the century-old stigma toward Oniontown has remained remarkably intact.
20th January 2012
The Boy Who Heard Too Much
“Like a comic-book villain transformed by a tragic accident, Weigman discovered at an early age that his acute hearing gave him superpowers on the telephone. He could impersonate any voice, memorize phone numbers by the sound of the buttons and decipher the inner workings of a phone system by the frequencies and clicks on a call, which he refers to as “songs.” The knowledge enabled him to hack into cellphones, order phone lines disconnected and even tap home phones. “Man, it felt pretty powerful for a little kid,” he says. “Anyone said something bad about me, and I’d press a button, and I’d get them.”
Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated
“It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old conspirators would ever have been capable of doing what they were talking about doing, or whether, if they weren’t capable, they could be guilty of any crimes. By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims, by all accounts, had lived a slippery and slovenly life that made him the equivalent of his cell-phone stamp — unknown. He was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.
19th January 2012
National Public Rodeo
“When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the “Minnesota nice,” a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. David Margolick explores how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.
The Architect, The "It” Girl And The Toy Pistol That Wasn't
“One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.
18th January 2012
Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief
““Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”
Euphemisms: Making Murder Respectable
“Euphemisms range promiscuously, from diplomacy (“the minister is indisposed”, meaning he won’t be coming) to the bedroom (a grande horizontale in France is a notable courtesan). But it is possible to attempt a euphemistic taxonomy. One way to categorise them is ethical. In “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell wrote that obfuscatory political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. Some euphemisms do distort and mislead; but some are motivated by kindness.
17th January 2012
The Mystery Woman Behind the Murdoch Mess
“Rebekah Brooks was running the News of the World at 31, and Rupert Murdoch’s entire British newspaper empire at 41. A virtual member of the Murdoch family, close to Prime Ministers Blair, Brown, and Cameron, she relished her power—until the phone-hacking scandal took her down.
See also: Give Me Something To Read’s phone-hacking scandal reading list.
