Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2579

Poem For Saturday

by Zoe Pollock

From "A Place for the Bees" from Virgil's Georgics, by David Ferry:

And there should be a limpid spring nearby,
Or a moss-edged pool, or else a little brook,
Almost unseen, making its way through the grass,
And a big palm tree or oleaster shading
The vestibule of the place where the bees have settled,
So when the kings of the hive lead the swarm forth
In the welcoming season, and glad to be free at last,
The youthful bees are capering and playing,
There'll be a stream bank or a pond...

An Algorithm For War

by Zoe Pollock

Ron Rosenbaum makes a convincing moral argument against drone-porn war crimes:

Drones mean you don't need to win hearts and minds if you're allowed to blow away the bodies of "the enemy" without risking U.S. lives. But at what cost? Few of us have wanted to scrutinize too carefully a program that holds out the tempting promise of "victory" and thus the withdrawal of large numbers of troops from Afghanistan sooner rather than later. Or to look at the downside: that drone...

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. Country first, then city and/or state. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@theatlantic.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, courtesy of Blurb. Have at it.

Country music - Web Design and Development - View From Your Window - Operating Systems - X11

About My Job: The Baroque Countertenor

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Being a sort of lower level, highly-specialized professional classical vocalist is really fun (I sing mostly in smaller pro choruses and as a soloist in local concerts), but can be annoying. For example, whenever I tell anyone what I do, they try to helpfully summarize by declaring I'm an "opera singer," which I'm absolutely not. Then when I tell people that countertenors sing in their falsetto voices, they also helpfully summarize, "like a castrato?" No...

World Weird Web

 

 

by Zoe Pollock

Web Urbanist has pulled together a tour of some of the more bizarre virtual and real museum collections, including the Delphion Museum of Obscure Patents and the Moist Towlette Museum.

(Pictured: bags from The Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum)

Museum - Air Sickness Bag - Military - History - Delphion Museum of Obscure Patents

"Quentin Tarantino Crossed With Bill Gates"

by Zoe Pollock

Scott Foundas has early praise for The Social Network and captures why Facebook is perfect fodder for a director like David Fincher:

It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. ...

The Social...

The View From Your Typeface

by Zoe Pollock

This week I finally got around to watching the documentary Helvetica, and now I can't stop seeing the font everywhere I go (Atlantic coverage of the film here). Paul Shaw over at Imprint challenged readers to guess the reasons behind his list of the top 10 most important typefaces of the last decade - not his favorite or the prettiest - but the most important. Spoiler alert: he reveals his rationale in the comments section.

(Image of History typeface; designer: Peter Bil'ak...

Against Naked Shilling

by Zoe Pollock

Matt Zoller Seitz is proud of Jean Luc Godard for staying incognito and not responding to the Academy's invitation to accept an honorary Oscar in November:

I love this. Normally the academy says, "Jump," and almost any director alive says, "How high?" Godard can't be bothered. In fact he can't be found. ...

And what about you, reader? Right now you're probably reading this with two or three other windows open on your computer screen and your cellphone on. When a new e-mail or...

Smart Home

by Zoe Pollock

Nathan Yau reviews the eerie experiment that is Happylife, a smart-home machine that can monitor a family's moods by reading facial expressions with a thermal image camera. Eventually the system would be able to predict different emotional states, having accumulated data over various years. From a series of vignettes by a family with Happylife in their home:

We installed Happylife. Not much happened at first: an occasional rotation, a barely appreciable change in the intensity...

About My Job: The Community College Professor

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I believe the assumption is that instructors are the product of a liberal-biased education and then we decide to join that liberal bastion and are just going with the established flow. For those of us in the junior college ranks, however, I think there is a more concrete reason for the lean left, rather than the abstract leftism offered in certain courses we took as students.

When I hear friends and family offer specific illustrations of why they list in a...