| No Life on Mars |
[02 Oct 2015|11:26am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/book_review_the_martian_movie_gives_the_book_a_dose_of_wonder.html When Ridley Scott’s exciting and funny film of Andy Weir’s hit novel The Martian comes to theaters this week, it’s going to be wildly popular and make hundreds of millions of dollars. Or let’s be more precise: According to the Congressional Research Service there were 6.2 million scientists and engineers in the United States in 2012, and that workforce is growing at a compound annual rate of 1.5 percent, suggesting that in 2015, that number is about 6.485 million. Each of those scientists and engineers will see the movie twice. The average price of a movie ticket in the United States is $8.61, but that average includes children’s prices and 2-D movies; it’s safe to say that most scientists and engineers will pay a premium to see The Martian in three glorious dimensions. Set that average ticket price at a conservative $12, and that gives us a domestic box office gross of $155,640,000. That’s just an estimate, of course; I didn’t account for the preponderance of scientists and engineers in coastal states where ticket prices tend to be higher. Also, it’s possible that some nonscientists will see this movie.
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| Will Sandra Day O’Connor’s Legacy Live On? |
[02 Oct 2015|01:03pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/10/sandra_day_o_connor_s_legacy_supreme_court_rulings_on_abortion_affirmative.html For much of her tenure, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was so central to Supreme Court decisions that a book about her is called Queen’s Court. Not infrequently, especially after Justice Lewis Powell retired in 1987 and she became the swing vote, the Queen wielded her scepter on behalf of women. In 1992, she was one of the three “centrist” justices who held the dike against the ever more vociferous campaign to reverse Roe v. Wade and leave women’s reproductive fates to the tender mercies of the 50 states. When her sister in law, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined her in 1993, they formed a tag team on cases involving women: Ginsburg moved the equality ball forward while O’Connor played defense against an assault on women’s rights that had started long before.
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| How Does a Forensic Anthropologist Work? |
[02 Oct 2015|01:09pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working/2015/10/bradley_adams_on_how_forensic_anthropology_works_a_working_podcast_transcript.html We’re posting transcripts of Working, Slate’s podcast about what people do all day, exclusively for Slate Plus members. What follows is the transcript for Season 3, Episode 9 in which Arun Venugopal, host of WNYC’s Micropolis series, interviews Bradley Adams, a forensic anthropologist for the city of New York. Adams discusses the impact Sept. 11 had on forensic anthropology in the city, the different types of cases he investigates, and how there are no typical days in his line of work. Plus, Adams tells the story of an unidentified female body in Brooklyn and how he helped uncover a murder in the mafia.
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| The Cab Ride as Artistic Rebellion |
[02 Oct 2015|04:16pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/10/jafar_panahi_s_film_taxi_reviewed.html How much do movies matter to you? Director Jafar Panahi was thrown in jail by a harsh theocratic regime that then banned him from movie-making for the next 20 years. Since then he’s made three internationally acclaimed films in less than five years. Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker who first became known in the West for the 1995 art-house hit The White Balloon, has become an international symbol of the power of dissident art simply by continuing to find ways, even under the most restricted circumstances, to make art from whatever he has at hand.
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| The Affair Should Be a Sexy, Irresistible Stunner |
[02 Oct 2015|05:15pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/the_affair_season_2_on_showtime_with_ruth_wilson_and_dominic_west_reviewed.html In the late ’90s and early aughts, there might as well only have been two cable networks creating original content: HBO and its perpetual runner-up, Showtime. As the number of original content creators has swelled, HBO has maintained its predominance—or the perception of such—while the second tier, which Showtime used to have more or less to itself, has gotten crowded, with Netflix, FX, and AMC elbowing in, and occasionally making room for buzzy series from all corners of the TV universe, including PBS, Amazon, BBC America, Starz, Cinemax, USA, and Lifetime.
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| Will Republicans and Democrats Ever Stop Fighting Over Obamacare? |
[02 Oct 2015|06:04pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/obamacare_a_compromise_republicans_and_democrats_can_embrace.html Are the Obamacare wars over? The leading GOP presidential candidates have been spending all of their time sniping at each other over immigration, and talk of doing away with Obamacare has been largely relegated to policy briefs that hardly anyone reads. Granted, Republicans in Congress are currently putting the finishing touches on a bill that will repeal some of Obamacare’s more unpopular provisions, like the individual and employer mandates and the Cadillac tax on high-cost health plans. But no one really believes that President Obama will let the House undo his signature domestic policy achievement. Most Obamacare opponents appreciate that to repeal the law outright, you’d need, at a bare minimum, a Republican president and Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. To really get the job done, Republicans would probably need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. And that’s just not going to happen.
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| Homeland Didn’t Need More Nuance |
[02 Oct 2015|08:22pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/homeland_season_5_with_claire_danes_reviewed_showtime_s_thriller_didn_t.html Something is missing from the fifth season of Homeland, the Showtime thriller starring Claire Danes as a bipolar-savant CIA analyst that has lost and regained its footing more times than a gymnast with a charley horse. It’s not just the bit characters, like for-hire surveillers Max and Virgil, who often served as off-kilter foils to the show’s grim main cast, which has been narrowed this season to a core four. Nor do I mean last season’s delicious rogue’s gallery, which included a balls-out-malevolent Taliban commander and a Pakistani intelligence agent as brilliant and uncompromising as Danes’ Carrie Mathison; this year’s villains almost seem deliberately forgettable. No, the first thing that’s conspicuously absent, at least in the three episodes shared with critics, is Homeland’s opening title sequence, whose antsy trumpet runs and jittery gurgles of feedback placed viewers somewhere between a smoky café and a CIA black site. It was a chaotic, free-jazzy, attention-jolting table-setter to a show that often thrived—at least when it wasn’t completely bonkers—on Carrie’s chaotic, free-jazzy, utterly diverting spycraft.
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| Homeland Didn’t Need More Nuance |
[02 Oct 2015|08:22pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/homeland_season_5_with_claire_danes_reviewed_showtime_s_thriller_didn_t.html Something is missing from the fifth season of Homeland, the Showtime thriller starring Claire Danes as a bipolar-savant CIA analyst that has lost and regained its footing more times than a gymnast with a charley horse. It’s not just the bit characters, like for-hire surveillers Max and Virgil, who often served as off-kilter foils to the show’s grim main cast, which has been narrowed this season to a core four. Nor do I mean last season’s delicious rogues gallery, which included a balls-out-malevolent Taliban commander and a Pakistani intelligence agent as brilliant and uncompromising as Danes’ Carrie Mathison; this year’s villains almost seem deliberately forgettable. No, the first thing that’s conspicuously absent, at least in the three episodes shared with critics, is Homeland’s opening title sequence, whose antsy trumpet runs and jittery gurgles of feedback placed viewers somewhere between a smoky café and a CIA black site. It was a chaotic, free-jazzy, attention-jolting table-setter to a show that often thrived—at least when it wasn’t completely bonkers—on Carrie’s chaotic, free-jazzy, utterly diverting spycraft.
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