“Researchers are learning that the heads — or to be more accurate, the brains — of pathological gamblers are biologically different from those of most of the estimated 73 million Americans who are able to play bingo, pull the arm of a slot machine or flip some aces and then simply stop. Not only does the research shed light on how this addiction is both similar and distinct from other addictive disorders, it also could contribute to new treatments.”
Tag: 08.08.05
Patriot Games
Why has American pro sports become so tied up with garish displays of patriotism? “In many cities, your average Sunday NFL game contains more patriotic overkill than a USO show in Kuwait. In addition to becoming a profitable form of mass entertainment, pro sports have become an effective means for the political and financial elite to package their values and ideas. This is why sports in this country reflect a distinctly US project, rooted in aspirations for greatness as well as conquest and oppression.”
Where Do The Movies Make Most Of Their Money?
“The best-kept secret in Hollywood, especially from Wall Street, is that the movie studios’ biggest profit center is not theatrical movies, or even DVD sales; it is TV licensing. If the details of the profits remain clouded to outsiders, it is no accident.”
The Mind-Reading Machine
Scientists say they have been able to monitor with scans what people are thinking. “Our study represents an important but very early stage step towards eventually building a machine that can track a person’s consciousness on a second-by-second basis. These findings could be used to help develop or improve devices that help paralyzed people communicate through measurements of their brain activity. But we are still a long way off from developing a universal mind-reading machine.”
The Summer Action Movies Ran Out Of Steam
Action movies – long a summer Hollywood summer staple – have been dying at the box office this summer. “In this year of the missing moviegoer, perhaps no genre has proven as perilous as the old stalwart of action, where the failures tend to be colossal, and the red ink runs in rivers.”
Why Bad Movies Are So Fun
“As far as I can tell, film is one of the few artistic mediums to rejoice in utter failure. No one revives hack 18th century opera or hangs paintings by Rembrandt’s butcher. But just try to rent a copy of “Battlefield Earth. The cult of bad movies doesn’t revolve around big-budget disasters so much as the penny dreadfuls of mid-century American cinema, the discreditable, low-budget horror movies peopled with attacking 50-foot women, killer shrews and aliens with zippers down their back. You’ve got to love any film in which Martians wear Timex watches. What makes these films so watchable?”
Rabbi: Boycott Klinghoffer
A Rabbi has urged a boycott of a production of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Edinburgh Festival. “The work has evoked anger ever since it first appeared in 1991, and its subject has made it almost unperformable in the US and Israel, where charges of anti-semitism, naivety and of giving a voice to terrorism have been levelled at it.”
The New Highrise – Homes, Not Offices
Los Angeles is seeing a boom in tall buildings. “In all, 32 towers are on the horizon for downtown, though some still need city approval as well as financing. Twenty are considered skyscrapers because they climb more than 240 feet, or about 20 stories. From 1986 to 1992, almost two-thirds of towers 20 stories or more built in the U.S. were for office use. But recently this has really flipped. “Between 2003 and June 2005, about 84% of new towers were for residential, multifamily use — an indication of investor and consumer appetite for multifamily condo development. Luxury high-rises are what’s being demanded.”
The Egyptian Museum’s Sorry State
“When the Egyptian Museum was built about 100 years ago, it was host to only 10,000 artifacts. The architecture was French colonial, with a lush, cozy garden and a Nile view. Today, the museum is surrounded by a concrete jungle of overpasses, skyscrapers, five-star hotels and an endless stream of cars. Moreover, it holds at least 150,000 antiquities from Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic civilizations. The rooms in the King Tut exhibition area were brushed up and supplied with air-conditioning a few years ago. But many others still lack ventilation and humidity control, and some even have their windows open wide, allowing the noise and smoke of the streets to pour in.”
Quills – Publishers’ Pawns
The Quill Awards were supposed to enjoy some populist panache. “Designed as a kind of People’s Choice Awards to the National Book Awards’ stuffy Oscars, the Quills promise to put readers themselves in charge, ‘to reflect the tastes of the group that matters most in publishing – readers.’ A closer look at the Quill Awards, however, shows that they are really designed to serve a different constituency: publishers themselves.”