number 61

The Cherry Blossom Front

From Japanese writer Yoko Tawada, a rumination on snowless winters in Tokyo.

Stafford's Moment

Anybody who is familiar with NFL Films knows the only thing greater than the gripping narrativization is the gratuitous slow-mo footage

In that spirit, here’s Detroit’s Matthew Stafford digging his team into a hole against Cleveland, injuring his shoulder, eluding team trainers to get back on the field and, finally, throwing the game-clinching touchdown at the last second. It’s better than the movies.

Auto Everything

Cargo rockets, auto-driving cars, color-coded freeway lanes, never walking anywhere: Magic Highway USA (or, the future of American infrastructure as imagined by Disney in 1958).

Chomsky & Trivers

Originally published in Seed Magazine in 2006: Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers sit down for a lengthy discussion about deceit, self-deception and denial.

Here’s the transcript. Have at it, nerds!

Like a Boot Stamping on a Human Face—Forever

Matt Taibbi, ever a favorite writer of mine, wrote last week on what has become a favorite subject of mine: the media’s endless takedown of Sarah Palin.

It’s worth reading—even (and, it pains me to write, perhaps especially) if you’re of the opinion that Sarah Palin would make a competent political figure.

Papercraft

Speaking of stop-motion animation: here’s a seriously cool video created in the spirit of Maurice Gee’s Going West.

Can’t help but marvel at this bizarre new trend of movie trailers for books. See also: Death Troopers and Inherent Vice.

Via Book Bench

The Tedious Mr. Fox

You may have heard about how members of Wes Anderson’s team allegedly took exception to his ‘sociopathic’ directorial style during the extremely tedious production of The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Making Of has a short featurette on how the workflow actually worked.

It’s all pretty brilliant, but I still think It’s amazing that they got anything done this way.

Three From Buñuel

The Auteurs—a site that I can only describe as a sort of streamable, pay-per-view Criterion Collection—recently added three films by Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel: L’Âge d’or, Death in the Garden and Un Chien Andalou.

They’re all free to watch. For now.

You should check them out (but only if you like your movies old, French and unsettling).

So You Know

From Foreign Policy: how to beat your uncle in a foreign-policy debate at Thanksgiving dinner.

Gadhimai

NEPAL – A provincial Hindu festival during which some 250,000 animals are ritualistically slaughtered for Gadhimai, a goddess of power, began today in earnest.

Midnight in Dostoevsky

Don DeLillo‘s got a new short fiction piece in next week’s New Yorker.

Eureka?

The Large Hadron Collider finally worked.

Granted, it was only a low-power calibration run—pure bush league stuff. Stay tuned for the real, reality-ending stuff.

On a semi-related note, here’s your required viewing for the weekend: The Quiet Earth.

Yes, there will be an exam.

The Cat Piano

I imagine you might hear about it at the Academy Awards in March—it’s on the shortlist of Oscar contenders for Best Animated Short Film—but you should check out Eddie White and Ari Gibson’s The Cat Piano immediately.

Dear People:

After Kurt Vonnegut was rescued from a Nazi prison in Dresden, Germany—an experience that served as the basis of the final portion of Slaughterhouse-Five—he wrote a letter home to let everyone know where he had been.

Letters of Note has the whole thing.

Via 3quarksdaily