| Buzz Off? |
[11 Sep 2015|12:08pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/09/drones_in_sports_they_can_help_coaches_and_athletes_but_also_create_major.html The website Deadspin has a rubric called “Idiot on the Field,” under which it chronicles the antics of those cheerful inebriates who like to disrupt sporting events by unexpectedly running onto the field of play. If this past weekend is any indication, Deadspin might soon have to inaugurate a rubric called “Idiot Above the Field,” to track the increasingly common sight of people creating chaos by flying unmanned aerial systems—better known as drones—into sports stadiums. The most recent idiot-above-the-field incident happened Saturday, when a student spiced up the pregame festivities at the University of Kentucky’s home football opener by crashing a drone into the side of the press box at Commonwealth Stadium. Two days earlier, a New York City high school teacher allegedly sent a drone careening into Louis Armstrong Stadium, in Queens, where it buzzed a U.S. Open tennis match between Flavia Pennetta and Monica Niculescu before crashing into some empty seats. “I thought ‘OK, it’s a bomb,’ ” said Pennetta afterwards. No, just an idiot.
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| The Real Joe Biden |
[11 Sep 2015|03:10pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/09/stephen_colbert_s_emotional_interview_with_joe_biden_the_vice_president.html As the father of a son, it was hard to watch Vice President Joe Biden talk about his son with Stephen Colbert. Biden talked about whether he’s emotionally ready to commit to a campaign after losing his son Beau in May. He told the story of the unexpected grief that ambushed him recently while in Denver. “I landed at a military base and I met a whole group of military families. ... And I was talking about them being the backbone and sinew of this country. And all of a sudden—it’s going great—and a guy in the back yells, ‘Maj. Beau Biden, bronze star, sir, served with him in Iraq.’ And all of a sudden I lost it.” I understand why.
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| The Art of Packaging |
[11 Sep 2015|03:41pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/09/can_i_go_now_biography_of_agent_sue_mengers_by_brian_kellow_reviewed.html The first round of storytelling and myth-making about the wave of American filmmaking that temporarily conquered the culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, often called the New Hollywood or the American New Wave, focused mostly on the stories of men. The Rosetta stone of this type of scholarship is Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which elevated a dozen or so men into the pantheon of tortured geniuses, reinforcing the cult of the director who makes incredible work and leaves a trail of destruction in his path. Though Biskind interviewed plenty of women, including ex-wives and former collaborators such as Polly Platt (divorced from Peter Bogdanovich) and Marcia Lucas (divorced from George Lucas), the female experience of this era is pushed to the margins of Easy Riders, and since its publication in 1998, no nonfiction book has emerged to balance the scales—to tell the story of this period in a way in which the many women who were involved are protagonists rather than secondary players. The sexism of the era (which is not that different from the sexism of our era, to be fair) kept many women from defining themselves on their own terms, as their own personalities and creative talents, apart from the work they did in service of movies credited to men. There were few female filmmakers, producers, or actresses in the 1970s who were famous enough on their own terms and who had the biographer’s dream combination possessed by someone like Francis Ford Coppola: a body of work encompassing historical importance and fascinating failure, and a force-of-nature personality to match.
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| Unlearning to Write |
[11 Sep 2015|03:47pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/09/ursula_le_guin_s_writing_guide_steering_the_craft_reviewed.html The first thing you learn when you set out to teach writing is that you will never teach anyone to write well. It’s a cruel joke universities play on humanities grad students. As you’re preparing to step into a classroom, they assign you an impossible task, one they cloak with a label like “Introduction to Rhetoric” or “Expository Composition.” Here are 20 undergraduates, they say. Show them how to make their prose sing. Staring your new charges down, you begin to speak. Your voice cracks. They see the fear in your eyes.
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| How to Write a Roger Federer Think Piece |
[11 Sep 2015|05:45pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/09/roger_federer_think_piece_how_to_write_one_for_the_2015_u_s_open_or_any.html It has been a bit more than nine years since David Foster Wallace delivered “Federer as Religious Experience,” the Magna Carta of what has become one of the most popular genres in sports journalism: the Roger Federer think piece. The now-classic essay, penned for the short-lived New York Times sports magazine Play, inaugurated a run of dominance virtually without parallel in modern sports writing. As the 2015 U.S. Open closes, Federer’s place as the most artfully described tennis player in ATP history is secure; his long career has inspired many, including such luminaries as Tom Perrotta, L. Jon Wertheim, Calvin Tomkins, and Julian Barnes, to exquisitely articulate his physical presence. He’s even inspired multiple acclaimed books: In addition to Wertheim’s Strokes of Genius—about a single match Federer played against Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008—William Skidelsky, the former literary editor of the Observer, released a well-received book in Britain this past summer, Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession. (It will be published in the United States by Simon & Schuster in the spring.)
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| Two Kinds of Goodbyes |
[11 Sep 2015|08:47pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2015/09/two_kinds_of_goodbyes_while_dropping_off_my_son_at_college_i_think_of_the.html When we embrace, his is the same face I remember from when he walked through the doors of his school on the first day of kindergarten and turned to wave. Now he’s entering his junior year of college. After we say goodbye, my husband and I get in our car parked by the side of his freshly painted dorm building. The hard maple trees are in full bloom. Birds call. The air is clear. Before we pull away, we watch him walk toward his dorm building. It’s a walk I could pick out in a crowd, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
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