Gary Giddons on Motion Picture Masterpieces
You've got to love an essay that begins, "It is a universally acknowledged truth that a movie studio in possession of a good fortune must be in want of Great Books."
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This One's For JA
At a get-together the other night, I observed John Atkinson squinting at his cell phone when he received an in-coming call, and parroted Jon Stewart's remark that the amazing thing about the Mark Foley scandal wasn't that there was abuse in the page system, but rather that a 54-year-old could text message.
Better Late Than Never
I've just recently discovered the blog <I>We Are All Mozart</I>, billed as "A project to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time."
Boom, Pow! Right in the Kisser!
<I>Dial "M" for Musicology</I> recounts the confrontation between champion of the world Mike Tyson and 77-year-old philosopher A. J. Ayer.
Al Yankovic A Genius?
Maybe so, says <I>The Village Voice</I>'s Ben Zwickel. Perhaps a better theory is that he's "a canary in the coal mine of pop music, and when pop music's good—or interesting, at least—Yankovic has more to sing about."
You Do What You Eat?
Have the changes in our diet in the past century constituted "a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to the societal burden of aggression, depression and cardiovascular death"?
On the TV/Autism Link
<A HREF="http://www.slate.com/id/2151538/"><I>Slate</I></A> published a short piece on a <A HREF="http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/waldman/autpaper.html">… academic paper</A> that suggested several possible correlations between the increase of autism and television watching.
Do We Own Our Own Bodies?
<I>The New England Journal of Medicine</I> weighs in on an increasingly pertinent question: Does a cell-based breakthrough belong to the cell donor or the people who harvested and developed it?
Forcefield On!
Here's a Fox News segment on the Trophy Active Defense Systems, a division of General Dynamics. Although the video makes it look like it's all but installed on IDF vehicles, <A HREF="http://www.defense-update.com/products/t/trophy.htm"><I>Defense Update</I></A> throws some cold water on the rosy predictions, quoting US Army deputy for acquisition and systems management, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A, Sorenson, who said the project is obviously not good to go. "If this thing was ready to go, my question would be, why wasn’t it on the particular tanks that went into Lebanon?" he said, noting that no Israeli Merkava tanks carried the Trophy system.