Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 989
July 26, 2013
Don't Hate on the Dust Jacket
What did the poor dust jacket ever do to deserve such scorn?
This morning, literary critic Michelle Dean penned an article for Flavorwire assailing the purpose and usefulness of dust jackets, those glossy outer shells of hardcover books. Not one to judge a book by its cover, apparently, Dean confesses, "Every hardcover that comes into my possession is desecrated, almost immediately, insofar as I automatically remove the dust jacket and often transport it directly to the trash." [image error]
Dean argues that her animosity towards the jacket is "just, reasonable, and true," and points to four major reasons why dust jackets are terrible (the Dean's List, as we will call it; see below). And she wasn't the only one angry at dust jackets' continued existence in this age of the e-book. "Am with Michelle. Stupid things they be," tweets author Vincent Holland-Keen. Others voiced the same sentiment:
Standing ovation! I, too, am against dust jackets: http://t.co/qUErAB6sAO cc: @flavorwire #united
— Mel Williscroft (@melwilliscroft) July 26, 2013
But Dean and the anti-dust jacket forces could not be more misguided in their criticism. Ending the use of dust jackets would be a massive mistake for an industry that has made all too many mistakes in the recent past.
First of all, half of Dean's argument relies on the notion that the name "dust jacket" ought to be taken literally:
1. Dust jackets don’t actually repel dust. ...2. Dust jackets are no easier or harder to clean than fabric hardcovers.
True, the dust jacket has nothing to do with its name. Which, well, okay. But so what? Dust jackets clearly don't actually protect a book from dust, and a quick skim of the Wikipedia page for dust jackets shows that they never did. Moreover, plenty of words name objects without accurately describing that object's function. That doesn't make the object itself useless.
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Dean also accuses dust jackets of being slippery and unnecessary; publishing companies could just make the hardcover binding colorful and put illustrations there. Dean's doesn't even mention the most practical part of the dust jacket: the inside-flap book summary and author bio, which together include far more information than a back cover alone ever could. And paperbacks with dust jacket-like flaps are just a weird hybrid that we can safely discount, much as we have turkey bacon and non-alcoholic beer.
Besides, as the blogger Jeff Wofford has noted, dust jackets do in fact protect books, if not actually from dust:
A dust jacket guards against scratches, scuffs, jelly, and other distortions unworthy of a book’s perfection. In this regard it resembles a tonsil, absorbing abuse on behalf of a larger, more important body of which it is a constituent.
Glossy, attractive and, often, brightly colored, the dust jacket reminds the reader that the book is very much a physical object, one that is to be treasured and protected. Take care of what's between these two covers, the dust jacket says, even as it tries to draw you in.
[image error]And it is also a vestige of the book's past, recalling more glorious times in the publishing industry. Look on rare-book sites like abebooks.com, and you will see how much, say, a signed dust-jacketed first edition of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms fetches (see left). To throw a dust jacket away is to potentially deprive future readers of the beauty of a book, not to mention its material worth.
The Guardian notes a slightly more pedestrian use for the dust jacket: disguising what you are actually reading with a cover for something perhaps more sophisticated or proper:
it's long been a favourite device to cloak some less respectable book in the cover of a much staider one. The diligent soul on your train purporting to be engrossed in The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification may in fact be secretly savouring the sex life of Fanny Hill.
Of course, you could do away with a dust jacket. And covers. And printed pages. You can just read on your Kindle. But where's the beauty in that?
(Photo 1: Jeff Muscato/en.Wikipedia)
(Photo 2: Elena Kharichkina/Shutterstock)
Thirteen Years of Wolverine's Claws
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:
There's a new Wolverine movie coming out today, which is cool, right? Here's a look back every single time Wolverine brandished his claws over the last four movies. Warning: not all claw scenes are created equal:
The Wolverine is getting (relatively) good ratings. That's good news, and gives us the perfect time to look back at the horribleness that was X-Men:: The Last Stand:
This flamingo is either drunk, or really loves to dance. Or it could be both. Either way, it is magical:
And finally, if you own this kitten, never ever let it grow old.
How Marriage Is Defined Around the World
With the Oxford Dictionary changing its definition of "marriage" to now include the possibilities of same sex marriage (on the occasion of the brand-new gay marriage law in Britain), we decided to take a look at how other somewhat official state dictionaries* define the word. The first definition in the Oxford Dictionaries is "the formal union of a man and a woman" but it also now has "(in some jurisdictions) a union between partners of the same sex" tacked on to its listing. And the OED, in tiny letters below the traditional "condition of being a husband or wife" definition, has: "The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex (see gay marriage n. at gay adj., adv., and n. Special uses 2b)."
Not all countries, even ones that have legalized gay marriage, include same-sex unions in the official record book of language, however. Using the collective language skills of Atlantic Wire staff, we've compiled the official word on same-sex marriage in the map below. The pink countries have dictionaries that recognize gay-marriage and the grey ones don't. (This is also reference to how many languages the Wire staff knows, so if you know more, please let us know in comments.)
Spain, for example, legalized gay marriage back in 2005. The definition from the Real Acadamia Española, though, reads as follows:
1. m. Unión de hombre y mujer concertada mediante determinados ritos o formalidades legales.
2. m. En el catolicismo, sacramento por el cual el hombre y la mujer se ligan perpetuamente con arreglo a las prescripciones de la Iglesia.
3. m. coloq. Marido y mujer. En este cuarto vive un matrimonio.
4. m. P. Rico p. us. Plato que se hace de arroz blanco y habichuelas guisadas.
The first definition translates to "A union between a man and a woman with certain determined rituals or formal legalities." The second discusses the Catholic practice of getting married in a church, the third says "man and wife," and the fourth is a Spanish rice-dish. Italy, another Catholic country that does not recognizes these marriages, not-too-surprisingly excludes the idea from its Corriere dictionary.
The French dictionary Larousse got itself into a bit of trouble by including "solemn act between two same-sex or different-sex persons, who decide to establish a union" in its most recent edition. Anti-gay marriage advocates accused the dictionary of choosing sides. "It [the definition change] corresponds only to the factual record of the enlargement of the legal concept of marriage in a number of countries (six countries of the European Union) that now recognize marriage between persons of the same sex," argued Larousse. About a month later the country legislated in favor of same-sex marriages.
Even more curious, countries that don't formally and legally recognize same-sex unions, include the practice in the definition. Duden, the German dictionary, includes the phrase "gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensgemeinschaft," for same-sex unions in its defintion — even though the country hasn't legalized them. In America, where gay marriage is not completely legal, Merriam-Webster chose a "two-state solution:"
The state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law (2) : the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage.
That doesn't really get at the definition of gay marriage, linguist Goeff Nunberg argued on NPR. Gays and lesbians aren't claiming the right to a recognized relationship "like traditional marriage." "They're talking about marriage without an asterisk, which is one reason why public opinion has shifted so rapidly in their favor," he said. Nor does it reflect the law.
Synergy with the law isn't exactly the point, notes Peter Sokolowski the Editor at Large or Merriam-Websters. "It's important to note that we're not writing dictionary definitions to reflect the law; we write definitions to reflect the language," he told The Atlantic Wire.
*Not all countries have official dictionaries attached to official government run branches, like the Real Acadamia Española in Spain. For the countries that don't have state-run dictionary, we used the most legitimate language source on language for that country, like Duden and Merriam-Webster in Germany and the United States, respectively.
San Diego's Mayor Hopes Sex Scandal Therapy Will Help Him Keep His Job
Despite admitting that the allegations against him are true, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner announced on Friday that he still won't resign in the face of a sexual harassment scandal that just seems to get worse and worse. But don't worry. He's going to take two weeks off in August for "intensive" therapy to address his attitude towards women.
"Let me be absolutely clear: the behavior I have engaged in over the years is wrong," the mayor said at a press conference on Friday, adding that his conduct was "inexcusable." Arguing that he's "spent [his] whole professional life" working for equality for everyone, the mayor went on to say that he "must take responsibility for my conduct," by taking 2 weeks off as mayor to attend a clinic, where he'll get "intensive counseling" as the first step in an "ongoing" process to correct his behavior. "I must become a better person," the mayor said, indicating that he hopes he'll "one day be forgiven" for his behavior. The mayor will be in therapy from August 5 through August 19.
For the past two weeks, Filner's faced mounting calls to resign as an increasing number of women (the tally stands currently at 7) came forward with accusations ranging from sexual comments to unwanted touching and kissing. So far, he's standing by his initial refusal to resign when his conduct became public earlier this month.
In addition to apologizing (again) to the women he's harassed, the mayor also apologized for his initial excuse for his misconduct, that he wasn't aware his actions were offensive until it was pointed out to him by a friend. The mayor, who is 70, had previously gone the Paula Deen route and framed his behavior as a remnant from a "previous generation," implying that he believes his treatment of women was, once upon a time, acceptable. But the details of the mounting Filner scandal makes one wonder why the bulk of America's collective sex scandal outrage this week was directed at New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. The LA Times has a rundown of the allegations, all by prominent women in the San Diego community.
For instance:
Filner's former director of communications, Irene McCormack Jackson, filed a lawsuit in San Diego County Superior Court seeking unspecified damages for Filner's treatment of her. The suit alleges that he frequently put her in a headlock, made sexual comments and, on one occasion, said she should work without her panties on.
Here's another:
Veronica "Ronne" Froman, a retired Navy rear admiral who became the city's chief operating officer under Filner's mayoral predecessor, Jerry Sanders, said that during a meeting with Filner while he was in Congress, Filner "stopped me and he got very close to me. And he ran his finger up my cheek like this and he whispered to me, 'Do you have a man in your life?' "
Froman said she rebuffed Filner but was so rattled that she told two men who were at the same meeting to "never leave me alone in a room with Bob Filner again."
And another, from San Diego State University Dean Joyce Gattas (as reported by KPBS):
"Where he's held me and held me too tight, kiss on the cheek which is inappropriate, hand on the knee that lasted too long," Gattas said. "Moreover, I've been in the environment where he has made those sexual comments to others." Gattas helped create sexual harassment policies at SDSU.
"I've seen the interaction from others when they cringe when he's had those interactions," Gattas said. "I've experienced his sexual innuendoes with me at various events that, again, have left me in that strange feeling of -- this is inappropriate, this is un-wanted and this shouldn't be happening."
And those stories are just some of a handful emerging, covering just Filner's short time as San Diego mayor, about eight months. His career in politics, however, spans decades:
The amazing thing about the Filner scandal is that he was in Congress for TWENTY YEARS and none of this came out.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 26, 2013
Given the stories of the women who have come out so far, it is perhaps less surprising that one of Filner's long-time friends brought up his sexual conduct publicly in the first place, asking the mayor to resign weeks ago. The specifics of his interactions only began to emerge after the mayor declined to do so. In the past few days, however, local Democratic officials have demanded his resignation. Even DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, saying she was "personally offended" by his conduct, demanded his resignation on Friday.
How Much Further Can the Government Take Fair Housing?
The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 didn't simply prohibit discrimination in an era of starkly segregated cities. The law went one step more, requiring the government to also "affirmatively further" fair housing—to, in other words, proactively enable integration. In the four decades since, overt discrimination has clearly declined. But this second objective has remained much more elusive.
MORE FROM THE ATLANTIC CITIES The Persistent Geography of Disadvantage Now We Can Actually Count and Track the 'Familiar Strangers' in our Lives Even in Big Cities with Light Pollution, the Moon Influences Our Sleep Cycles
In part at least, the obstacles to integration are harder to detect than the culprits behind discrimination. They take the form not of malicious real estate agents or red-lining banks. Rather, integration is stalled or blocked today by exclusionary zoning that keeps lower-income people or new affordable housing out of many communities. This means that furthering the goals of the Fair Housing Act in 2013 is a complex problem of planning and land use that goes far beyond rebuking anyone who won't offer a black family a home.
Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published a long-awaited proposed rule that it believes will bring the Fair Housing Act and this still unachieved promise "into the 21st century." Speaking earlier this month to the NAACP, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan admitted that the requirement to enable integration had "proven largely to be a meaningless paper exercise without any teeth."
To change that, the new rule refines what "affirmatively further fair housing" really means and how HUD grantees should document their progress to achieve it. The big news, however, is that HUD is now planning to help them do that by publishing extensive local data on patterns of integration and segregation, discrimination, poverty, access to good schools, jobs and transit, among other things. The tool will for the first time map all of this data for every neighborhood in the country. As Donovan put it to the NAACP:
Make no mistake: this is a big deal. With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream.
All that data is designed to make it possible for local communities to recognize obstacles and opportunities to fair housing in the planning process, while also arming families with the information to find the best places to live. But for some reason, the idea of the federal government mapping neighborhood diversity has been received by hysterical critics as something quite different: a renewed ploy for "forced racial integration," for "tyranny," for 
Alleged Attempted Rapist Tells the Ultimate Rape Joke
Saul Alvarez pleaded not guilty to first-degree attempted rape in Manhattan on Thursday, saying he was just joking when he knocked a Central Park jogger to the ground, covered her mouth, and tried to pull her off the path. Alvarez is testing the absolute limits of the rape joke. The joke goes like this: I knock you down and pretend I'm going to rape you. What? It's funny! Don't be so uptight!
This is what actually happened in court, according to the New York Daily News' Shayna Jacobs. "My prank was supposed to be to scare her by grabbing her from behind and taking her down to the ground," Alvarez said in Manhattan Supreme Court. He said he jogged behind the woman for 5 or 10 minutes, because "her eyes made me think that she had a good sense of humor and she was a good person to play the prank on." She did not, and after she broke free she went to the police.
On Thursday, Patricia Lockwood posted a poem on The Awl which pretty much for good put an end to the idea that rape jokes are funny. It starts:
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
...
Read the rest here.
(Above, an anti-harassment mural in Cairo.)
John Boehner's Gonna Get Tough This Time. For Real.
House Speaker John Boehner has been attacked for being a little too chill in recent months, with Politico saying he looks "weak" and limited by "shrinking power," The Daily Beast's Peter Beinert saying Boehner's job is "virtually impossible," the obviously-not-objective Nancy Pelosi calling him "the weakest speaker in history." Slate's John Dickerson defend Boehner by saying he's just "leading from behind." But Boehner is going to shake off that wimpy reputation this fall. He "plans to assume a more aggressive posture" this fall, when President Obama and Congress negotiate over the debt ceiling and the budget, National Journal's Chris Frates reports. How his new aggressive strategy is much different from past ones is not yet clear.
"GOP lawmakers and aides say Boehner plans to assume a more aggressive posture in the upcoming fights to fund the government and raise the debt limit than he’s displayed so far on immigration," Frates repots. "Deadlines, politics, and the enormous consequences of inaction all make the stakes much higher in the coming fiscal battles." Of course, Boehner faced that combination – deadlines, politics, and consequences of inaction — during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, during the fiscal cliff in December 2012, when his fiscal cliff Plan B failed, and when the sequester's consequences turned out not to be scary enough to convince Congress not to let the deadline pass in March 2013.
Will Boehner be able to make House Republicans do what he wants this fall? So far, it's not looking great. There's a split between Republicans who want to shut down the government unless Obama agrees to defund Obamacare and Republicans who think that's crazy. A dozen Republican senators have signed Sen. Mike Lee's pledge to "not support any continuing resolution or appropriations legislation that funds further implementation or enforcement of Obamacare." On the other side, you've got Sen. Richard Burr, who told Public Radio International on Wednesday, "That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of... As long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be the law." Sen Tom Coburn told Politico, "My feeling is if you want to make sure that the Democrats take control of the House, run that strategy."
There is no chance Obamacare will actually be defunded, The Washington Examiner's Byron York reports. Senate Republicans would need 67 votes to override a presidential veto — that means 21 Democrats. But the goal is to win by losing, a Republican Senate aide tells York. "We have to try," the aide says. "Having this fight will show the people who sent us here that we are a party of principle. And after we lose this fight, all of our guys are going to have an issue that we can run on and win."
In a Wednesday House GOP leadership meeting, Politico's Manu Raju and Jake Sherman report, participants discussed passing a bill to fund the government for two months, because they'll have just nine days to come to a budget agreement when they come back from recess in September. "But Republican leaders are growing concerned by the fervor with which some members are demanding that Boehner defund the health care law as part of the government funding talks," they write. In the House, Rep. Mark Meadows is circulating a similar letter to the one in the Senate calling for a shutdown unless Obamacare is defunded. It has more than 60 signatures. Boehner hasn't said whether he'd try to use the government funding bill to defund the law.
Inside the New Museum's Vast, Beautiful, and Totally Insane Digitization Project
On a recent Wednesday in July, I discovered Queen Latifah performing on the fifth floor of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on what had until recently been a grim stretch of the Bowery.
Actually, she was on a grainy television screen surrounded by media conversion equipment. The footage itself was two decades old, from a Yo! MTV Raps performance filmed in 1993 or 1994—with the stage outfits to prove it. And of the 15 or so staffers and visitors muddling around the exhibit, only two were paying attention to the streaming video: Walter Forsberg, the audiovisual conservator in the process of digitizing the footage, and Gabriel Tolliver, a former associate producer on the show who had brought the battered VHS tape to the museum. It contained the best of the Friday afternoon performances, Tolliver told me. "This was before hip hop got really corporate and the access got cut off," he recalled.
Welcome to "XFR STN" (that's "transfer station"), the New Museum's daunting new project, eight-week exhibit, and transfer lab all in one—an overwhelming attempt to digitize, present, and preserve artistic materials on obsolete formats, however obscure or unremembered. Three transfer stations sprawled across the Fifth Floor gallery, accompanied by television screens labeled for the three different sources of material: the New Museum's own archives, the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club's archives, and public submissions. A small team of technicians huddled over the equipment, while found footage streamed on a projection screen on the opposite wall. There was more to see on the TV screens, too, free of context or identification: fuzzy black-and-white footage of a jazz pianist crooning, an artist's home videos, a clip of a man I didn't recognize being interviewed by another man I didn't recognize.
The public submissions category offers what its name suggests: throughout the duration of the exhibit, members of the public are invited to submit their own moving image or born-digital materials—whether VHS cassettes or floppy disks or U-Matic tapes or Betacam—to be transferred and archived online. (The only requirement is that its content be artist-produced or somehow relevant within the arts—in other words, not your stash of baby videos.) In so doing, the museum aims to "produce an archive at once chance-driven and yet, we suspect, revelatory."
But the most esoteric category—the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club archives—is the key to the exhibit's genesis. As the Museum's literature explains it, MWF was a "co-op 'store' of the artists' group Colab, directed by Alan W. Moore and Michael Carter from 1986–2000, which showed and sold artists' and independent film and video on VHS at consumer prices." By last decade, the collective's archives had been reduced to 800 videotapes piled in a storage bin on Staten Island. So Moore approached the New Museum, seeking a partner to digitize the vast data collection, and the Museum opted to expand the scope of the project to encompass a larger, vaster concern: "how to preserve the possibility of discovering works, especially those contained in obsolete formats, that are not already written into versions of the canon."
I spotted a glass case displaying the differently sized floppy disks, each representative of a different year or decade. The disks as they would normally appear sprawled across the lower body of the case; their insides filled the top row. Seeing them displayed this way, museum-style, it was hard to tell if the technology was from the 1980s or the 1880s.
Then, a technician pointed the way to a corner room exhibit displaying fliers, press clippings, and other promotional ephemera from the 1980s heyday of the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club. "SEX & VIOLENCE NIGHT," screamed narrow black lettering on one particularly sordid-seeming flier. "LOVE JAM," cried out another, scrawled above a grainy image of a nude man on hands and knees. I spotted advertisements for a John Cage documentary, a Where Evil Dwells screening, and a collection of works by the artist Mitch Corber. It was, in brief, the most vivid time capsule of the mid-'80s SoHo artist community this side of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, rescued from neglect in a Staten Island storage bin.
Alan Moore and Michael Carter could not have imagined, back in 1986, finding their materials and videos housed in a New Museum exhibit and stored in perpetuity on some vast online archive. But thanks to their idea, countless fellow artists and homespun New York historians will have their own audiovisual and digital documents hoisted out of obscurity and into the public domain.
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Forsberg, the conservator eying the Latifah video, was brought into the project to manage the team of transfer technicians. After several years as a filmmaker in Canada and then research fellow at NYU, he was inspired by the exhibit's ludicrous scope.
"It was so outrageous that the museum would offer this service to people," Forsberg told me behind tortoise-shell glasses and a thick mat of wavy brown hair. "Museums spend a lot of money to offer this service in-house. The New Museum does it all for free. It was just so ballsy."
I asked about the strangest submission he had received so far.
"It's more the juxtaposition of it all," he answered, pointing at the MTV Raps tape. "Like, seeing Queen Latifah next to Vector II graphics from 1982." Phil Sanders, a digital and interactive artist who ran an experimental East Village gallery in the '80s, had recently brought in vector animation from an early Apple computer, I soon learned. Forsberg showed me bits of it. Sanders would soon be in again to share old floppy disks and computers from his gallery.
"It's also a very weird experience when people bring in home videos," Forsberg said. "We're both strangers to each other, but you get to see them at these different periods of their life." Forsberg, fittingly, has hosted New York's Home Movie Day, which is exactly what it sounds like: anyone can bring in old home videos to be screened in a theater.
Tolliver found a more permanent repository for his. I asked him how he came across "XFR STN."
"I saw it on—was it Flavorpill, I think? I consider myself a video-maker, and I saw this opportunity," he said. "I was just like, 'Oh, man. These are just moments in time in New York pop cultural history.'"
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Filing again past the three television streams, I was introduced to Ben Fino-Radin, a self-described "media archeologist, archivist, and conservator of born-digital works of contemporary art" whose bracingly clever personal website only reaffirms his passion for media preservation in the digital age. A recent graduate of the Pratt Institute, Fino-Radin now works as Digital Conservator for Rhizome in between managing the Digital Repository for Museum Collections at the Museum of Modern Art. His experience grabbed the attention of the New Museum's Johanna Burton, who brought him aboard her team to oversee the "XFR STN" digitization efforts.
Speaking excitedly as a decontextualized stream of black-and-white footage chugged along on the projection screen behind us, Fino-Radin rattled off the list of formats being transferred in the museum: "We're doing 5.25-inch floppy disk, 3.5-inch floppy disck, then there're zip disk, jaz disks, IDE hard drives, and with the video: U-Matic, VHS, Betacam, MiniDV, Hi8..." Reflecting on the exhibit as a whole, he pitched "XFR STN" to me as more of a timely public resource than an artistic project.
"The reason everyone involved in this is so passionate is realizing that there is really, really a need for this kind of resource," the conservator said. "Artists have all this aging material laying around, and the fact is, in 20 years we will not be able to do this. Anything on VHS is as good as dead."
Behind us, meanwhile, a recorded voice struck up from the projector: "It's 1981," a TV announcer loudly intoned. "The tape we're about to see is a copy—" Just as quickly, a technician flipped it off and apologized. Fino-Radin didn't flinch. The multisensory digital clutter bombarding him at all times seemed to be his natural working environment. It has been for some time. Though he's only at the New Museum for "XFR STN," he's been involved with digital preservation since receiving an undergraduate degree in fine arts and "realizing all of our cultural heritage today is born-digital."
"We truly are in the last two decades where this kind of work is even going to be possible," Fino-Radin predicted, his certainty unwavering.
Just as "XFR STN" can be envisioned as an aid to the artists seeking to have their data transferred, it's also a service for those viewing the materials, a work of multi-technological media capture and preservation on an unprecedented scale. But the New Museum does not have the capacity to store terabytes upon terabytes of uncompressed, newly digitized data, and as its exhibit FAQ notes, "the act of digitization or data recovery itself is not preservation, but only the first step in a responsible plan." So the Museum has partnered with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit aiming to offer "a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form."
Rino-Radin described it as "the only repository that is willing to take material of that size."
"By opening this up to the public, we’re saying, 'This is the great effort entailed in preserving this history,'" he said. "We’re not talking about stone tablets anymore."
All photos courtesy New Museum, New York.
Get Ready for Lance Armstrong Movie Overload
The movie market is soon going to be over-crowded with Lance Armstrong's cringe-worthy story. While we have mentioned that J.J. Abrams and his production company were involved with an Armstrong movie, now Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. reports that Stephen Frears, the man who directed The Queen, is working on yet another project about Armstrong, this one starring Ben Foster. That brings the grand total of non-documentary Armstrong movies in the works to three, with Warner Bros. also involved in a project set to be directed by Jay Roach. That's a lot of Armstrong.
Of course, there are many facets to Armstrong's story. Fleming points out that Warner Bros., for instance, has the life rights of doping whistleblower Tyler Hamilton, Armstrong's teammate. Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk's Bad Robot have with Paramount acquired the rights to New York Times reporter Juliet Macur's to-be-released book Cycle of Lies. It's not too clear where Frears' Armstrong story is coming from.
The strange thing about the case of the multiple Armstrong movies is that each project seems to be coming from a good team. Frears showed a flair with the recent past with The Queen and Warner Bros.' movie is going to be directed by Jay Roach of Game Change and Recount. Roach clearly understands how to make a story to which we know the ending compelling. Basically, it doesn't seem like we have Jobs situation on our hands. Abrams may have Bradley Cooper on board, which is pretty good casting.
Fleming points that all these movies may not eventually get made—in his words "make it to the start line"—but it could be an interesting, shall we say, race to watch. With news that Foster is in "final talks" it looks like Frears may have the head start.
Photographic Evidence That Brazilians Love Pope Francis
South America's first pope made his first trip back to South America and it sure looks like everyone had a lot of fun. Pope Francis's first overseas trip since being elected earlier this year was a visit to the Catholic Church's annual World Youth Day is Rio de Janeiro, which is also gearing up to host both the World Cup and the Summer Olympics in the next three years. Even though he is from neighboring Argentina, the Brazilians welcomed him with open arms and plenty of fanfare.
The five-day trip wasn't totally without its glitches. The subway broke down one day, stranding thousands of worshippers who were hoping to get to the Pope's massive seaside Mass. Demonstrations that roiled the city in recent months continued after his arrival, and the people who normally follow around the pope to protest organized religion could be found too. But in general the crowds were friendly, enthusiastic and huge. An estimated two million people came out for the Youth Day event and the Pope's Mass, despite heavy rains that soaked the city during the week.
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Photo: AP Photo/L'Osservatore Romano
In fact, they might have been a little too enthusiastic. Pope Francis — who visited a Rio slum on foot during his visit — has eschewed the heavy security that has typically accompanied his office in recent decades, and has even swapped out the tank-like "popemobile" used by his predecessor for a more open-air model that puts him closer to the people. Closer than his security team would probably like, unfortunately When his non-popemobile motorcade got stuck in traffic on Monday, the car was swarmed by onlookers trying to reach in the open car window to touch him.
All things considered, though, the trip has mostly been a success. It's also proof, once again, that Pope is a big star no matter where he goes. Check out some more pictures from the trip below.
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A man holds a sign with a message urging faithful to break with organized religions (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)
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AP Photo/Felipe Dana
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AP Photo/Felipe Dana
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AP Photo/L'Osservatore Romano
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AP Photo/Felipe Dana
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