Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 931

Jason Segel to Steal a Whole Lot of Maple Syrup

Today in showbiz news: The Canadian maple syrup heist gets the movie treatment, FX renews The Bridge, and Lifetime cancels Army Wives.

Sony has just bought a comedy starring Jason Segel about last year's heist of over $20 million in maple syrup in Canada. It'll be a comedy, directed by Identity Thief's Seth Gordon, even though this was a really serious crime. Because you just can't make a movie about a Canadian syrup heist and not have it be funny. You can't. Many have tried, and they have all failed. It's gotta be a comedy. Well, OK, Deadline says the movie will have "dramatic overtones," but it's still definitely a comedy. I mean, Bridesmaids had dramatic overtones, but you wouldn't call that anything but a comedy. So it's a syrup heist comedy, the one we've all been anticipating since this crazy story broke. [Deadline]

FX has renewed the border town mystery series The Bridge for a second season. The show gets consistently strong ratings, up near The Americans territory, and has done well overseas too. That said, you don't really hear people talking about this show much, do you? It's not one of the buzzed-about shows, it's just sort of... on. But, FX doesn't care so much about that as it does about numbers, and the numbers are good, so Diane Kruger, Demian Bichir, and the rest of the gang get to keep their jobs for another year. Felicidades to them all. [The Hollywood Reporter]

The lord giveth at FX and taketh away at Lifetime. That network has canceled its series Army Wives after seven seasons. The network tried to give the show a boost late in its run, adding Brooke Shields and Ashanti to the cast, but it still struggled. Which is bizarre. As anyone knows, if something's kinda sluggish or not working for some reason, you usually just have to add Brooke Shields and Ashanti and voila. Mind you that's Brooke Shields and Ashanti. Not Brooke Shields or Ashanti. It needs to be both of them for the magic to work. But it didn't work this time. Maybe because they also added someone named Torrey DeVitto? You can't add a third! This isn't Charmed. It has to be Brooke Shields and Ashanti and only them. Jeez, it's like people don't know anything anymore. Oh well. Too late now. [Deadline]

Emily Mortimer, who's already on HBO with The Newsroom, has successfully sold another show to the network, a comedy called Doll & Em. Mortimer will star in the six-episode series, which was commissioned by a British production company, as a British star in Hollywood who hires her best friend as her assistant while she's shooting a movie. So it's about British people in Hollywood, just like Episodes. Is this the first time that HBO has kinda copied Showtime? Maybe! You've made it, Showtime! [The Hollywood Reporter]

Gerard Butler might play the Egyptian god Set in an upcoming movie called Gods of Egypt. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones will play Horus, the god who's mad at Set for killing his dad, Osiris. So they'll beef off (that's what happens when big burly gods fight, they beef off) and probably Horus will win. Because Set sounds like the villain? Unless Osiris was bad, so it was good that Set killed him. It's unclear. Depends on your denomination of ancient Egyptian religion, I guess. I certainly wouldn't know, as I'm wholly devoted to my beloved Mithras. [Deadline]

       

North Carolina Students Will Get Free Copies of Banned 'Invisible Man'

[image error]Ban or no ban, high school students in Randolf County, North Carolina, will have easy access to Invisible Man. Thanks to a former resident, the novel's publishers will be giving away copies for free.

After the county's board of education banned Ralph Ellison's 1952 classic on black identity from school libraries, former Randolf County resident — and current New York-based Poets & Writers editor — Evan Smith Rakoff arranged for Vintage Books to donate copies of the novel, which local high schoolers can pick up for free starting September 25.

Rakoff, a culture and literature journalist based in New York, said he was "deeply ashamed" when he heard about the ban. "I follow news really closely and I often encounter these kinds of stories," he told The Atlantic Wire. But in this case he found the news on Facebook, where an old classmate had linked to the news reported by the local Courier-Tribune.

"This saddens me beyond measure. All should be ashamed," Rakoff tweeted on September 18. The next day Laura Miller of Salon suggested organizing a giveaway at an indie bookstore. "All we had to do was ask and Vintage Books was eager to help," said Miller of the novel's publishers.

[image error]And while teens will be able to get a hold of the book, that doesn't undo the ban, or the circumstances that allowed it. There's something sad and unsurprising about a Southern city, one where 90 percent of residents identify as white, banning Invisible Man, a book that actively explores the alienation of African-Americans in white society. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me," Ellison's narrator, an unnamed black man, says. Invisible Man, which won the 1953 National Book Award, has been called one of the books that shaped America by the Library of Congress. "I didn’t find any literary value," said one member of Randolph County's board of education. 

And yet Rakoff, who was born and raised in Randolph County, said the board's decision doesn't reflect the hearts and minds of his hometown. "People are very friendly," he said. "I'm of the place and I know that people don't feel that way." He shared a similar sentiment in a press release issued to promote the giveaway, noting that "the people of North Carolina want their children to have expansive, open minds."

The board may not feel confident in their decision either. On September 25, the same day donated copies of the novel will be passed out to high schoolers, the board will meet to reconsider. Rakoff said he was confident they would reverse the decision, and he though the original verdict was well intentioned but ill-conceived. "They know is cast them in a bad light," he said, referring to all the high profile media coverage in the last week, "and it doesn't reflect what's in everyone's hearts." 

(Photos of Ralph Ellison winning the National Book Award, Ellison portrait, via AP Photo.)

       

Listen to Marcus Mumford's Amazing Song on the 'Inside Llewyn Davis' Soundtrack

In the flurry of Oscar-caliber movies which opened in Venice and Toronto, you may have forgotten that we're still anticipating the Coen brothers' latest, Inside Llewyn Davis. This song via off the soundtrack will make you remember. Thanks for posting this, The Playlist.

The song, which has appeared in trailers for the film, is a rendition of "Dink's Song," which has been previously recorded by Dave Van Ronk, whose memoir served as inspiration for the film. It is here by the movie's star Oscar Isaac and Mumford and Sons' Marcus Mumford. (Mumford is the associated music producer on the film and is married to Carey Mulligan, who co-stars.) Seriously, forget any ill will you have toward Mumford and Sons, this is worth a listen as the promotional push begins for the soundtrack with a concert this coming weekend. 

 

       

Celebrate National Punctuation Day with Thousands of Years of Punctuation History

Keith Houston is not a writer by profession, nor is he a trained historian, grammarian, or linguist. Frankly, the Edinburgh-based software engineer is as surprised as anyone to have written a book charting two thousand years of punctuation.

But he has. Titled Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, the account is out today via W. W. Norton—just in time for National Punctuation Day. And like any great twenty-first century literary endeavor, it began with a blog, which shares a name with the book.

"I think it was 2009, [and] I was a software engineer," Houston told The Atlantic Wire in an interview. "As a software engineer, you deal every day with invented languages." Plus, he'd developed a casual interest in typography while typesetting promotional materials for his band. So his friends recommended him a few books.

"One of them was called The Elements of Typographic Style—a play on Strunk and White. It really is amazing," he gushed. The other was Eric Gill's An Essay on Typography, through which Houston became fascinated with the pilcrow ( ¶), an antiquated paragraph mark. Soon he began digging into the histories of the ampersand (&), the cruelly unnamed @ symbol, and the interrobang (‽), a little-used exclamation point/question mark hybrid.

[image error]"By I think the end of 2010, I'd written a few chapter-length drafts," recalled Houston, as if nothing could possibly be easier. "I wrote them with some vague idea that I'd do something with them." Not knowing quite what else to do, he threw them on a blog, recruiting a friend for some editing assistance. "Shortly after that, I got a couple of emails from agents who were like, 'Would you be interested in turning this into a book?'"

He said yes—and so an anonymous engineer writing medical imaging software for Toshiba became a published expert on centuries-old items of punctuation.

Houston describes the result as "a sort of popular history of writing," which is about right. To tell the stories of punctuation, it turns out, is also to tell the stories of the myriad technological advances that have facilitated—and continue to facilitate—language in its written form.

The asterisk (*) and dagger (†), for instance, grew largely out of the symbols the grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace placed in the margins of works of Homer to note lines of questionable origin; the em dash (—) nearly drifted into neglect when typewriter keys forced typists to turn to the double-hyphen (--) instead, but was subsequently validated by modern word-processors. And the Internet plays a tremendous role in the drama as well: the octothorpe (#), for example, fell into obscurity before Twitter resurrected it as the devilishly popular hashtag.

In other words, Houston's Shady Characters covers a tremendous amount of historical and topical ground—veering from ancient Greece to a 1960s Madison Avenue exec seeking to jumpstart a new punctuation mark, from the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses played a minor role in the development of the asterisk) to online communities, where numerous would-be pioneers have proposed an irony or sarcasm mark. (A huge success, obviously.) Naturally, the writer's research took him all over.

"You start with the Internet, you start with Wikipedia, and you wind up going through all these rabbit holes," he said of his process.

In one instance, he set about researching the Interrobang and, unbeknownst to him, ended up chatting with the widow of its creator, "a sort of old Manhattan socialite lady" who is "still is as much of a champion of the interrobang as anyone else is." ("I think that was just a really nice example of the kind of people I talked to," Houston laughed.) Not long after, he received a massive pile of photocopies pertaining to the symbol from a museum of corporate history in Delaware.

Houston has already written a proposal for his next book, which is confidential (though "not entirely dissimilar to this," he confessed). But he's not quite done yet obsessing over punctuation marks, obscure and ubiquitous alike.

"Just today I was writing about irony marks—there's a Dutch one, and just looking at it, it's just a lovely little mark," he said. "I've been emailing the guy who designed it, and he seems like a nice guy. It's just a pleasing little mark. And it's kind of a shame that it probably will never catch on."

Photo of Houston: Cate Gillon for W. W. Norton & Company

       

Which Silly Names Are Real and Which Are Fake?

Between comedy videos, Internet contests, and AP news breaks, silly and ridiculous names are dominating the news cycle. Take our quiz to find out — Can you tell which crazy-sounding names are of actual people and which are from a comedy skit?

Last week, the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele debuted their third season on Comedy Central with a rousing second iteration of their beloved "East/West College Bowl" skit. The videos mock the increasingly bizarre real-life names of football players by putting forward a series of the actors in disguises spouting off fake names, ranging from the phonetically-pleasing "Hingle McCringleberry," to the absurd "X-wing @aliciousness." The ideas were, perhaps unsurprisingly, created
    

Kermit Gosnell Usurps the Vogons as the Universe's Worst Poet

Kermit Gosnell, convicted of murder, involuntary manslaughter, and more than 200 counts of violating Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act for his stomach-churning abortion clinic, is now a poet. The infamous doctor is trying to convince the world of his innocence through verse, according to a new interview with Philadelphia magazine journalist Steve Volk. Gosnell sent the writer 12 letters, more than 50 emails, dozens of phone calls, and "several" poems over the summer as fodder for a long profile. And, well, the poetry is awful.

Putting aside his technical weaknesses as a poet, the man's reframing of his own crimes as some sort of noble act — one worthy of jail cell poetry — makes even the short sample available below about as painful to read as the lines from Douglas Adams's Vogons: 

Abortion Providers
Are Labeled Killers!
Horrendous, Exploitive
Barbaric, Inhumane
Not Physicians, Oathed To Heal
Lest We Forget,
What Chance Have Those?
Those Without The Support
Of Their Parents
Their Families
Their Communities
Their Societies …
So Many
Without Sufficient Support
Stumble Into Drugs
Into Crime
Into Mental Illness
Into Institutions … And …
Languish in Jails …

Gosnell also told Volk that he believes his conviction was the result of a  religious conspiracy: “ Were you aware that Seth [Williams, Philadelphia’s district attorney] was an altar boy? " he said, adding, "Did you know of the strong Catholic presence in the homicide division?” And as evidenced by his poetry, that he believed he was fighting a "war against poverty." He said: 

In an ideal world, we’d have no need for abortion. But bringing a child into the world when it cannot be provided for, that there are not sufficient systems to support, is a greater sin. I considered myself to be in a war against poverty, and I feel comfortable with the things I did and the decisions I made.

But Gosnell's decision to proclaim his innocence by invoking a "war on poverty" will do no good for the cause he says he supports. Gosnell was not convicted because he provided abortions to women of little means, although many writers have pointed out that the women who sought his care due to their poverty, probably had no other options. He was jailed because of the deaths of adult patients, for killing babies born alive, and for numerous violations of state law, including state health codes. Over the past few months, anti-abortion activists and legislators have inaccurately portrayed Gosnell as a typical abortion-providing doctor, invoking his case again and again in support of restrictive laws aimed at barring access to abortions and shutting down the facilities that provide them. Despite the deepest wishes of the anti-abortion movement, Gosnell was not a typical doctor. This was a man who kept the feet of fetuses in specimen jars, without any plausible medical reason. This is a man who, after victimizing desperate women, writes his own heroic poetry. 

       

Peter Matthiessen Says He Is Writing What May Be His Last Book

Author and Zen Buddhist Peter Matthiessen announced the coming release of his newest novel In Paradise today, and it sounds like he'll be taking a somber tone it what could be his last book. "At age 86, it may be my last word," the Paris Review founding editor soberly wrote in a statement.

That death-is-coming approach probably accounted for some of the motivation for writing In Paradise, which will be released in Spring 2014 and is his first production since his National Book Award-winning Shadow Country, which he completed in 1999. In Paradise covers the emotion-filled tales of a group of people reflecting on life and death at a Holocaust concentration camp, a plot point influenced by Matthiessen's three Zen retreats to Auschwitz. As the press release explains:

In Paradise tells the story of a group of men and women come together for a weeklong meditation retreat at the site of a World War II concentration camp, and the grief, rage, bewildering transports, and upsetting revelations that surface during their time together. 

Matthiessen added in the statement that he has wanted to write about the Holocaust for some time. Now, he is finally doing so, intent on conveying the "great strangeness" that he felt while visiting the site. A feeling that — based on his track record — we'll be able to experience next spring, if only vicariously.

       

Look at This Terrible Hipster Eating Ramen Out of His Beard

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why, every day, The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

We live in a world of ramen burgers and beards. We also live in a world where there are some people who can eat ramen out of their beards:

Listen to your elders. Seriously. This guy has some pretty good tips to make it look like you're working (when you're really not): 

This is a baby eating ice cream for the first time. This is also how addictions begin:

And, finally, here are a bunch of cats sitting like humans:

       

Why One Trader May Have Bet Millions on a Romney Win

A single trader lost at least $4 million dollars in two weeks by placing favorable bets for Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections, according to a recent paper. The mystery trader was possibly trying to manipulate the Intrade odds for the candidate single-handedly: his bets accounted for a third of all the bets placed on Romney in the two weeks before election day. Over the entire course of the elections, the trader lost up to $7 million — possibly making that trader the biggest single loser in the Intrade election bets.. 

According to economists Rajiv Sethi, of Barnard College and Columbia University, and David Rothschild, of Microsoft Research, the mystery trader "could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout." Or, of course, he could have simply thought the odds were good. In any case, the authors explain to the Wall Street Journal, the trader was "not someone who was dumb or stupid," and that the betting pattern didn't match up with irrational betting behavior. Possibly because of that, the paper seems to lean towards the assumption that the trader was attempting to manipulate the markets. The authors also speculate that it's possible the trader was "expressing a price view" on Romney (i.e. he thought Romney was underpriced). But given Intrade's status as one of "the most closely watched indicators of campaign vitality," manipulation seems to make the most sense — especially since, as much as he lost, the cost of manipulating the visible Intrade odds would probably be cheaper than buying a bunch of primetime commercial spots. 

The veracity of Intrade was widely debated in the lead-up to the 2012 elections. The site predicted, correctly, an Obama win, yet its ups and downs became fodder for those looking for excuses to discuss campaign momentum. In August of that year, for instance, Nate Silver explained why he didn't trust the Intrade rally following the announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate — at the time, the "bounce" was below average for previous Vice Presidential nomination announcements. In other words, even Mitt Romney's built-in bounce didn't soar impressively high. One can begin to see why some suspect the big spending mystery trader, assuming he did actually support Romney, was interested in trying to do something to change that impression.

       

On a Hot Mic, Obama Jokes He Quit Smoking Because 'I'm Scared of my Wife'

President Obama was caught off-guard on Monday at the U.N. General Assembly, chatting with Maina Kiai, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for rights to freedom of peaceful assembly on what he apparently didn't know what was a live microphone. And while its no mean girl moment with former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the president did say that he didn't smoke anymore "cause I’m scared of my wife.” As not-ready-for-primetime as that joke is, however, it also turns out that the president exaggerated the length of his time as a smoke-free man. 

According to most reports, including that of his wife. Obama was still sneaking cigarettes in part of 2010, but had quit by his 2011 annual check-up. His decision to quit, reportedly, was one of Michelle Obama's conditions for him to run for office in 2008. His struggle to do so over his first years in office was widely reported, even though Obama more or less quit smoking in public as a presidential candidate in 2008. On Monday, however, Obama told Kiai that he hasn't "had a cigarette probably in six years." Scandal! 

According to a 2011 interview, Michelle Obama said that her husband's main motivation to quit in his last years as a smoker was for the sake of his daughters.