| Volkswagen’s Villains |
[01 Oct 2015|01:55pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/10/volkswagen_s_emissions_scandal_has_a_villain_and_it_s_the_not_the_people.html Every scandal needs a face, but the parade of drab German middle managers in the Volkswagen emissions-testing scandal has yet to produce the right one. It’s not Martin Winterkorn, who resigned as the company’s CEO last week after it was revealed that Volkswagen had installed “defeat devices” on more than 11 million diesel cars since 2009, causing them to “cheat” on emissions testing, producing acceptable admissions when tested before revving up to more than 40 times over that limit in real usage. With such a cartoonishly outrageous mission, the cheating device itself is more colorful and malevolent than any of the purported wrongdoers we’ve seen so far.
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| Saving Astronaut Watney |
[01 Oct 2015|02:41pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/10/matt_damon_in_the_martian_reviewed.html A few dozen days (or, as a rotation of the planet is referred to in NASA jargon, “sols”) into his lonely survival ordeal on Mars, the stranded astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) delivers a kind of mission statement into the video log he’s recording for posterity. Faced with the challenge of finding or creating enough food and water to survive the four years until the next mission is scheduled to reach the red planet, Mark decides, with the beleaguered optimism of a born survivor, to “science the shit out of this.”
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| You Should Be Watching The Leftovers |
[01 Oct 2015|07:58pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/the_leftovers_season_2_from_damon_lindelof_on_hbo_reviewed.html The first season of HBO’s The Leftovers was like television S&M—daring, painful for its characters, painful for its audience, immensely satisfying to a particular niche. No show has ever investigated anguish, in all its permutations, so relentlessly. Damon Lindelof’s drama, based on Tom Perotta’s book of the same name, is set in a world much like ours, except 2 percent of the population vanished one Oct. 14, with no warning and no explanation. Was it the rapture? Was it the apocalypse? Was it proof of God’s existence? Proof of his indifference? Would it happen again? Every human being on Earth was left to answer these questions for him or herself, reckoning with loss in an agonizing process only marginally less excruciating for the audience.
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| Thanks to the Land and Water Conservation Fund for These Parks |
[01 Oct 2015|08:01pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/10/the_land_and_water_conservation_fund_made_these_parks.html The Land and Water Conservation Fund expired Thursday at midnight. The fund helped create parks in all 50 states, including many national wildlife refuges, forests, rivers, community parks, and trails. The fund, created by Congress in 1965 to buy land for public use and protect these areas, uses revenues from offshore drilling of oil and gas to conserve land and water. Every year $900 million in royalties were paid by energy companies on the outer continental shelf. However, each year, Congress diverts much of this funding to other uses. Currently, the overall federal land acquisition needs are backlogged by more than $30 billion. There was bipartisan support for permanent or continued funding of the LWCF, but Congress allowed it to lapse on Oct. 1. These developments leave lands unprotected that could have been purchased for the public and protected from private development. Here are some of the beautiful lanscapes in areas that have been protected and funded in whole or in part by LWCF over the past 50 years.
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| The Empire Podcast, Episode 2 |
[01 Oct 2015|09:58pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/tv_club_podcast/2015/10/slate_tv_club_recaps_empire_season_2_episode_2_without_a_country.html “Without a Country” kept the Empire drama chugging along: Cookie, Hakeem, and Andre continued to mount their hostile takeover, while an angry Lucious rapped in prison about “snitch bitches” and contended with an antagonistic guard (guest star Ludacris). Is Rainbow Sensation quite possibly the greatest girl group name ever? And what was up with that weird flashback featuring Kelly Rowland? In this week’s Slate Plus–exclusive TV Club podcast, Aisha Harris and Katy Waldman discuss all these things and more.
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