Downfall
“You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale.” Here’s some advice from Popular Mechanics, at 120 miles per hour.
In British Columbia, Victoria’s Poet Laureate makes the mistake of venting her indignation over a moderately negative review. And she would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling Scathing Online Schoolmarm …
What does it mean that Sandor Marai’s Embers has the same cover art as Dan Jacobson’s All for Love? Check out this gallery of recycled cover art.
In New York City, the crime rate has dropped to lows not seen since the 1960′s, which begs the question – how does a young gangster represent? The Village Voice investigates.
The New Republic digs up John Dewey’s diagnosis of the failure that brought about the Great Depression – excessive romance: “Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires by an insight into just what is good for him, and that he is equipped with the sure foresight which will enable him to calculate ahead and get just what he is after …”
“Detail upon detail; intrusive, absurd-loving narrator; Ukrainian village life; wonderfully caricatured characters who always seem to be performing:” You can tell how much Nicole Perrin enjoys reading Nikolai V. Gogol …
At Pomona College, Media Studies is being converted into a formal department. Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick has mixed emotions: “What conversations won’t take place, now that our structure has become officially institutionalized?”
On the kid’s show Super Why!, characters called “Super Readers” solve problems in fairy tales by deciphering hidden letters that spell out a magic word, altering the course of story events through the power of reading. “Just what exactly is this supposed to teach children?,” asks D. G. Myers. “That sad stories can be brightened up by changing their endings? That Oedipus can escape his fate by magically transforming Jocasta into an ingénue? That Wilson’s shot misses Gatsby, and he runs off with Daisy, who isn’t really such a bitch after all?”
And finally: Back in 1885, Vermont farmer Wilson Bentley rigged a bellows camera to a microscope, and took the world’s first microphotograph of a snowflake. Over the next 45 years, he took 3,000 more, creating a body of work whose great visual power lies in total honesty.
