John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog, page 7
February 12, 2017
Apology for interruption in service
What’s this doing here? Read on and you’ll find out.
Though we’re unsure exactly what he’s up to, our regular columnist is away this week, on a vacation, or a special project, or a government mission, or perhaps even an antigovernment mission. But that last thing would be illegal, so we had better not even mention it—forget we said anything.
First we asked Charles Dietrich, one of our stand-ins, if he would fill in—or else (you can look at so many things two ways if you try, don’t you find?)...
February 5, 2017
But seriously: A Q&A with humor writer Mike Sacks on comedy and politics
Photo by Chris George
Mike Sacks has contributed humor pieces to The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications (his wedding-tweets piece is here); he has crafted two books of interviews with comedy writers, the more recent of which is called Poking a Dead Frog (both are listed on his Amazon author page); and he feeds Twitter often. Because the current political situation, in the United States and elsewhere, seems like either a very good or a very bad occasion for comedy, I decided to as...
January 29, 2017
Did the world become more dangerous last year? The Doomsday Clock says yes.
The Bulletin of [the] Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock forward by 30 seconds, to two and a half minutes to midnight.
—from The Economist Espresso world-in-brief report, Friday morning
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists used to be concerned mainly with the nuclear threat. In its many articles and its Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin addressed such issues as the chilly standoff between the world’s two major nuclear-armed superpowers as each developed new defensive and (mor...
January 22, 2017
In McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane, the Irish situation looks familiar
Marie Mullen as Mag and Aisling O’Sullivan as Maureen, in the Druid production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane at BAM. (Photo by Richard Termine)
People are looking around and saying, the jobs are gone, the opportunities are gone, I’m stuck, and I don’t like it. That’s Donald Trump’s America, but also Martin McDonagh’s Ireland as seen in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, his first play, being performed at BAM through February 5. Ray, the youngest of the four characters, hasn’t yet left the village...
January 17, 2017
Beyond bad news: There’s more to the story of Yahoo, Twitter, and Volkswagen
It’s the mid-90s, and I’m visiting a colleague’s house after work. He has an account with an Internet service provider; I don’t, and he has offered to show me what’s out there. So he fires up his computer, and we chat over the hiss, squawk, and chime of two modems flirting by phone. Once they’ve mated, they fall silent, and we turn our attention to the Netscape Navigator web browser. My pal has already discovered and bookmarked a number of sites on the World Wide Web that interest him. He sho...
January 16, 2017
Skyfaring: A pilot’s lyrical view of the flying life
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Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot, and his office is the cockpit of a 747. In this entrancing book, published in 2015, he evokes cloudscapes and sunsets and night skies, the complexities of navigation, the sophistication of the machine he operates (a veritable collaborator that even speaks at critical moments), the knowledge of other cities that accumulates from repeated brief visits, the challenge of “place lag,” and his deepened sense of home as “the place that, wherever I am flying, I know I w...
December 28, 2016
Going places: on location, VR sickness, and travel
A woman using a VR headset at SXSW, 2015. (Photo by Nan Palmero, licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
Where are you? The question is both easy to answer and not; it depends on what you think I mean. Maybe, dear reader, you would tell me you’re in Scottsdale, Arizona, or maybe you’d say you’re at home, or maybe you feel yourself to be inside your body, inside your head in fact, somewhere behind your eyes and between your ears. All these things and more—such as “I’m in my 62nd year” or “I’m in a good pla...
December 11, 2016
Fixing the future: Laurie Penny tackles life extension in her recent novella
We enter Everything Belongs to the Future, Laurie Penny’s new science-fiction novella (published in October), by way of a letter from prison. From the first page, then, Penny’s book may put us in mind of other reports from confinement such as Oscar Wilde’s, or Antonio Gramsci’s, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, and those writers’ concerns with how we treat the thing we love, what we rebel against, what we believe in—with trust, and justice, and a form of faith—will prove to be Penny’s concerns as w...
December 4, 2016
A few notes on James Gleick’s time-travel book (in lieu of a review)
James Gleick is the most elegant of companions. His tours take you places you probably wouldn’t have thought were related, much as James Burke did in his television series Connections. In Time Travel, his most recent book, Gleick comes to grips with time, our scientific understanding of it, our view of history, and our cultural fascination with ways of moving through time, whether in memory or through science fiction. Guests on the itinerary includeH. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback, Isaac Asimo...
November 27, 2016
The consolations of comedy: Goldoni at TFANA
Steven Epp, as Truffaldino, at center, with other members of the cast of TFANA’s The Servant of Two Masters (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
Many of us, if you set aside the large portion of the electorate that didn’t bother to vote, feel as if we recently went through something more like a military campaign than a political one, and whether you lost, won, or just watched, you may be ready for some R&R. At the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, Theatre for a New Audience is now offering a ton...
