Brainiac

Brainiac http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/ en-us Copyright 2009 Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:58:16 -0500 Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:50:45 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=1.53 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Pre-Thanksgiving links argues that scandal-ridden Warren Harding was a better man--and president--than Woodrow Wilson. --The reality-distortion machine whirls on: Consumerist, citing Pop Culture Madness, examines a recent Demi Moore cover shot for W magazine. Though Moore denies it, it seems pretty clear that W editors placed her head atop the body of a twentysomething model.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=1bf2a4baff4ec8144427c5685055ec5d http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/prethanksgiving.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/prethanksgiving.html Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:58:16 -0500 Roger Ebert on "Lolita," uncensored (yet) his blog at the Chicago Sun-Times, a scanned version of an article of his in the new Playboy, on the difficulty of filming Lolita. The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic declined to edit out the surrounding Playboy pictorial, which has only a tangential (though predictable) link to the article. (I linked to the Ebert's blog, not yesterday's NSFW post, which you'll have to find yourself.) Hat tip: John Swansburg.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=15d3a4369ba018995cbb65f7fedebdbe http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/roger_ebert_on.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/roger_ebert_on.html Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:21:22 -0500 "Jesus never hugged" Feministing--is a "Christian side hug": a hip-to-hip, arm-around-shoulder approach.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=a63b6f2f77414ea7acb04d69f733f0a3 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/jesus_never_hug.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/jesus_never_hug.html Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:47:50 -0500 Image doctors respond to the Henry handball hand, controlled it, and dropped it to his foot, allowing him to set up a goal. Amid a scrum of bodies, the refs failed to see the blatant penalty [includes video]. Afterwards, Henry, who said using his hand was instinctive, not intentional, suggested the game should be replayed (at the time, he celebrated wildly), but soccer officials denied Ireland's appeal to do so. Photoshop-enabled Ireland fans (and France-haters) took it from there.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=04e71ae89b3474e3aa1a4334be9f2046 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/image_doctors_respond.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/image_doctors_respond.html Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:00:41 -0500 Hitchens vs. Wright this collision (following this piece) has been a long time coming. I assumed that, when it came, it would involve the contradictory arguments of the respective authors' recent books about God (arch-atheist Hitchens does refer to Wright in passing as "the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based"). But I should have guessed that Wright's argument that American anti-terror strategy may be breeding more terrorists -- possibly including Nidal Malik Hasan, who committed the Ft. Hood murders -- than it is killing or thwarting would cause Hitchens to unsheathe his pen.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=fcd6d2f333297f1b7f2003f361f8583a http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/hitchens_vs_wri.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/hitchens_vs_wri.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:54:04 -0500 Does the world need two Sarah Palin indexes? "The Sarah Palin Index." The subhead was: "Sarah Palin didn't put an index in her book. So we made one for her." It included the following entries (drawing only from the "A" and "B" sections): Alaska --autumn bouquet of, 1 --robin's egg sky of, 2 --superiority to Lower 48 of, 1-413 Baldwin, Alec --preference for Stephen over, 314 Biden, Joe --gaffes of, 278 --pre-debate stretching regimen of, 296 --accidental reference to as "Sen. O'Biden," 289 Now--today--comes Christopher Buckley, in The Beast, with another rich piece of satire: "'Going Rogue': The Index." The subhead is "The Daily Beast's columnist enjoyed Sarah Palin's memoir so much, he created his own index for it." It includes the following entries (again, staying within "A" and "B"):

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=98ee3e900f5cff1256f0800ebcdaeb62 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/does_the_world_need_two_sarah_palin_indexes.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/does_the_world_need_two_sarah_palin_indexes.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:42:12 -0500 Free "On the Origin of Species" -- with a catch

The special new edition of "On the Origin of Species"

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=908240142c42a1ff5847d549256dc134 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/free_on_the_ori.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/free_on_the_ori.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:41:50 -0500 <![CDATA[AD:]]> http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=908240142c42a1ff5847d549256dc134&p=4 908240142c42a1ff5847d549256dc134

]]> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:41:50 -0500 To scan or not to scan Howard Kurtz's reaction to the federal panel's controversial recommendation on mammograms, which starts out sounding like reportage then turns into, basically, a rant.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=2fdae79806ef23e45a0dfeef55978904 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/to_scan_or_not.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/to_scan_or_not.html Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:02:22 -0500 Literary criminals, caught on paper The Believer asked the "forensic artist" Barbara Anderson to sketch eight literary criminals, working from descriptive details offered by their creators. In real criminal cases, observes The Believer's Joshua Cohen, it is amazing that sketch artists like Anderson "work from so little information": a few glimpses from one shaken witness, perhaps. Likewise, novelists can be stinting with the details: "just a hint here, a shade there." From such hints, Anderson drew up sketches of such notorious rogues as Dickens' Fagin, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, and also a few lesser-known bad guys.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=96edf394734f3c03dea3569160998c6a http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/literary_crimin.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/literary_crimin.html Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:25:20 -0500 The problem with the Patriots-helmet redesign circle around it, but I think commenter Gen Hendry over at Fast Company nails the conceptual problem with the redesign of the Patriots helmet that has been proposed by a prominent graphic designer:

[T]hey're not just "The Patriots." They're "The New England Patriots." Up here, being a patriot isn't about wearing a flag pin and isn't proved by wrapping oneself in the stars and stripes. The "patriots" in our team's name *are* the Minute Men and the founding fathers.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=d7d9668999a8525e62402da41abce1dd http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_problem_wit.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_problem_wit.html Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:15:25 -0500 It's cold and lonely work Andrew Sullivan:

Just get on with it, my fellow hacks. Know your place. It's cold and lonely work, but we chose this profession and we should get off our high meta-horses and do it.

He's talking about why he's still writing about Sarah Palin, despite some suggestions that she is so transparently attention-craving that perhaps silence would be the wiser response. But the counsel seems to have more general applicability. It's almost worthy of printing on a t-shirt.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=9c1e83ffd5d83da6dbe29908e7a6f644 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/hear_hear.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/hear_hear.html Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:56:45 -0500 A new helmet design for the Patriots? he's devised a replacement.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=ef87a408793a444661ff8942ce34b772 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/a_new_helmet_de.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/a_new_helmet_de.html Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:07:01 -0500 The New York Review of Books on its Galbraith problem a statement that is less sternly worded than that of The New York Times, the editors of The New York Review of Books write, concerning Peter Galbraith: "We regret that we were not informed of Mr. Galbraith's financial involvements in business concerning Kurdish oil. If we had known about them, we would have wanted them to be disclosed when his articles were published."

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=da89b56aba69571bf0a6aa442390eba7 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_new_york_re_1.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_new_york_re_1.html Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:01:17 -0500 Contrarian fail Pontiac Aztec ugly" has entered the vernacular. (From a review, at about.com, of the 2007 Subaru Tribeca S.U.V.: "It's not slipshod, design-by-committee, Pontiac Aztek ugly, but it is ugly nonetheless.") Yet the article the headline refers to, which appears in Slate's sister publication, The Big Money, says we should reconsider our mockery of the Aztek and view it instead as representative of ahead-of-the-curve thinking.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=120e749cf004959f422c6ebe77af3ee5 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/too_contrarian.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/too_contrarian.html Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:51:59 -0500 A season for reading Levi-Strauss journalist and lecturer, has created an online-book-group-cum-group-blog devoted to talking about Lévi-Strauss's classic work "The Savage Mind." The project, called The Savage Readers, is loosely based on the "Infinite Summer" online reading group which, last summer, worked its way through David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," also as a memorial of sorts.

]]> http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=65a33f8e5e1fc22dad831320721a4050 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/in_honor_of_the.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/in_honor_of_the.html Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:22:38 -0500