The New Yorker Blog

October 29, 2013

Interview: Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think”

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You’ve written a book about how technology is “changing our minds for the better.” Have readers been agreeing or disagreeing with you?

I’ve had a lot of positive feedback to my discussion of “ambient awareness”—which is the deep, rich, intellectual, and social connections we develop with each other via short-form status updates. Most people have been trained—via a parade of gloomy op-eds in their newspapers—to think of their online utterances as mere “narcissism”; that there could be no conceivable value in tweeting or using Instagram or using Facebook, apart from a sort of constant shilling of the self. So when I point out the interesting social science that underpins some of the pleasures and values of persistent connection to each other, I’ve found that people are really excited about that. It resonates.

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October 29, 2013

Can an Argentine Animated Film Rival Hollywood Blockbusters?

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On a Friday afternoon in September, Vicente Canales’s iPhone began to vibrate with messages almost immediately after a private screening at the Toronto International Film Festival of an Argentine film called “Metegol.” Three film distributors in South Korea wanted to buy the rights from the firm run by Canales, a rumpled Spanish rights agent.

It was a big turnaround for the movie, an animated feature about the table game known as foosball (or, in Argentine Spanish, metegol). Two years earlier, when the film’s producers were pre-selling the rights based on a script and a teaser—a common practice—a Korean group had offered two hundred thousand dollars, far below the five-hundred-thousand-dollar asking price.

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October 29, 2013

The Majesty of the “Star Wars” Blooper Reel

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Do you remember the first time you met Darth Vader? If you were lucky, you were about seven years old. It was 1977, and you’d been taken to the theatre. Or it was 1991, and you were on a couch, with the VCR rolling. From that sweet spot of innocence, the original “Star Wars” movies could appear as unimpeachable and monolithic objects of awe and delight. The martial music, the dizzying space shots, Vader’s singular menace—all of it seemed thunked down from on high, more Biblical revelation than fictional invention. And, despite all the discoveries (other movies, better acting, improved C.G.I.) and disappointments (Jar Jar Binks, a warlike Yoda) that would follow, part of that wonder stayed intact.

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October 29, 2013

Wheeldon’s Anti-Sentimental Cinderella

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I just caught Christopher Wheeldon’s “Cinderella,” at the end of San Francisco Ballet’s two-week season at the Koch Theatre. The first thing you want to talk about—forget the story, the steps!—is the sets and costumes, by Julian Crouch, an Englishman now headquartered in Brooklyn. Crouch has been working in opera lately, and that may account for the magnificence of the decors: a stage full of chandeliers, a tree that grows and waves and billows, occupying almost the whole upper stage. Actually, that tree was the work of the great puppeteer Basil Twist, who was brought in for special duty. Twist was also responsible for the carriage that takes Cinderella to the ball. This was just four huge green wheels, drawn by horses, as a wind machine (I guess) lofted Cinderella’s golden train above her and gathered it into a great, glistening cupola—the most amazing sight of the show. But Crouch was responsible for many sights. I especially loved the sixteen Louis XVI-style chairs that the local women sat in as they tried to fit into the fatal shoe and then, once the ladies vacated them, rose on wires into the air, to form a kind of crown over Cinderella’s family’s parlor. I don’t know what this meant—perhaps it was a premonition of the coming triumph—but it was simply wonderful.

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October 29, 2013

Papiness

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Boston wins, 3-1, Lester tops Wainwright once again, and the Sox head home ahead by a game, with a chance to wrap up baseball for the year in Wednesday night’s Game Six. That’s the short line, in an account perhaps shrivelled by the welcome tautness and economy of last night’s pitching duel, in a game without errors (the teams had together committed eleven in prior play) or base-path melodrama, that got itself over with in a brisk two hours and fifty-two minutes. Big Papi continued to astound, with a run-scoring double on his first pitch of the evening, two singles, and a line-drive out. He is batting .733 for the series—as against a cumulative .151 for the rest of the Boston hitters—and now sometimes gives the impression that he is stopping by to play in these little entertainments, in the manner of a dad joining his daughter’s fifth-grade softball game. When he came up to bat once again in the sixth, Cardinals’ starter Adam Wainwright essayed some uncharacteristic little pauses and stutter steps on the mound, trying to throw off that implacable swing. It was like trying to disconcert winter.

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October 29, 2013

What We’re Reading: “Low Life,” Domestic Zoology, and Philip Roth on a Honeymoon

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Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week.

To get some perspective on my hometown during election season, I’ve been reading “Low Life,” Luc Sante’s history of New York’s lower classes in what he calls the city’s adolescence and early adulthood, 1840 to 1919. Sante is quick to point out that his book is a mythology, “a pool of tales and cautions and ornaments and shibboleths,” not an academic study. Actually, “Low Life” is a hybrid beast, the learning and archive-combing of a scholar dressed in the fabulist’s perfervid prose. Sante’s New York is a city in love with flux, free from the traditions of a Rome or a Paris that might slow its forward charge. To dodge the clogged roads, nurses and clergy pick their way across the tar roofs of flophouses to visit the poor; reformers tear down slums and put in parks, but the city’s squalid pulse beats on. “Hellhole” is a favorite word of Sante’s, used lovingly. His city is full of noise—the rattling of the El train down Second Avenue, the drunken shouts from the pubs lining the Bowery, the snores from the next bunk over in the packed rooming house, the soft voices of the male prostitutes at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club—and full of stink. Those concerned about congestion in Times Square and inadequate bike lanes might do well to note that, at the turn of the last century, horses left 2.5 million pounds of manure on the streets a day, and sixty thousand gallons of piss.

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October 29, 2013

Making Money: Pumpkin Carvers


“People don’t always realize that pumpkin carving is a business,” says Marc Evan, the co-founder of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, who carves hundreds of pumpkins every fall with his partner, Chris Soria. Evan and Soria started out etching pumpkins for local bars and clubs in 2008; word spread, and their clients now include big brands like Dos Equis and the New York Botanical Garden.

Evan and Soria, artists by trade, say that it was a challenge to turn their love of pumpkins into a successful business. Early on, they charged a flat rate of fifty dollars a pumpkin, even if they were spending many hours on a single piece. Now they have a small support staff and a pricing scheme that accounts for their time and materials, allowing them to turn a profit: pumpkins now cost between a hundred and fifty and five hundred dollars, depending on the level of detail of the design.

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October 29, 2013

My Big Sister, Janis Joplin

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Since Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate. “I was twenty-one when she died, and Michael was four years younger than that,” Laura said recently. “We didn’t know anything about the music business.” Their responsibilities include looking over royalty statements (Joplin is big in Argentina and Brazil) and condoning such projects as “A Night with Janis Joplin,” a bio-concert that has just opened on Broadway, starring Mary Bridget Davies, who sings the bejesus out of “Cry Baby” and “Piece of My Heart” and has the unkempt hair to match.

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October 29, 2013

A Wedding Dress in Za’atari

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One evening earlier this month, Iman, a sixteen-year-old Syrian refugee, was sitting in a makeshift salon in the Za’atari refugee camp, in Jordan, getting her wavy waist-length medium-brown hair permanently straightened. She was being prepared for her wedding, which would take place in ten days. Salon Cham, as Samira, its owner, calls it (the name evokes Syria) is set up in a trailer, with an N.G.O.-issued gray-wool blanket covering the entrance; Samira also rents out wedding dresses. Iman sat in the salon’s only styling chair, blankly staring at herself in the mirror, and then down at the pink phone resting in her lap. She still looked like a child, with skinny jeans that hung off her loosely and a tight orange sweater secured with a black belt just below her small bust line.

The groom, Ihab, was a twenty-year-old Syrian refugee who lived outside the camp and worked in an auto-repair store. They’d both been in Jordan for about eight months, and hadn’t known each other in Syria. They met at the camp, where Ihab briefly lived with his family before they moved elsewhere in Jordan.

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October 29, 2013

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, October 29th

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