In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the ...
What's the long-term future of spectator sports? With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they"re the athletic event for people who like watching ...
Imagine that you are a young fellow who likes being the center of attention as you spin around in the air. How would you choose among Olympic sports? The Winter and Summer Games offer events whose varying conceptions of masculinity are so encoded in their apparel that American twelve-year-olds ...
The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you"ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings: —The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the ...
As you"ve no doubt heard by now, leading Oscar nominees Avatar and The Hurt Locker are directed by ex-spouses: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who were married from 1989-1991. What you might not know is that traces of each can be seen in the other's movie. But first, the question of the ...
With James Cameron's Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas's original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron's own Titanic), it's a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film ...
You might think that James Cameron, the man who wrote and directed the two biggest global box office blockbusters in history, Titanic and technologically groundbreaking Avatar, hardly needs defending. Yet, amidst all the denunciations of Avatar by neoconservative such as John Podhoretz and David ...
Until the Underpants Bomber tried to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was widely assumed to be Up in the Air. Indeed, before the Christmas Day incident reminded everybody of how much they hate business travel, the dramedy"in which George Clooney plays ...
After The Dark Knight failed to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the Academy expanded the number of nominees for its top honor from five to ten. With luck, these improved odds will prod popcorn movies to aim a little higher and license Oscar-bait films to let themselves be a little more ...
The sharply contrasting careers of two Slavic-American artists who both died in 1987, the droll commercial illustrator Andy Warhol and the titanic sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski, illustrate much about how culture has changed over the last century. For over 40 years, Warhol (1928-1987) has been ...
