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| Four essential tips for extending the battery life of your computer, cell phone, and every other gadget.
October 30, 2009 at 9:31 pm
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| Whether they're in our computers, cell phones, or cars, the only time we think about batteries is when they're almost dead and we need to find some place to charge them—and then we're not thinking nice things. Batteries are an old-school technology. We stuff them into gadgets that are always getting smaller, faster, and cheaper, but battery technology doesn't yield to Moore's Law. What we know about batteries today is pretty much what we knew about batteries back when ENIAC was invented. As a result, batteries remain a primary limiting factor in our machines; they're the reason we don't have better cars, why your smartphone won't play a two-hour movie, and why your otherwise perfectly functional three-year-old laptop is useless on a plane trip.
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Sponsored Topics: Technology - Battery - Mobile phone - Laptop - Smartphone |
| Saving Face: A chick-lit novel written in real time. With your help.
October 30, 2009 at 9:24 pm
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| The candles have guttered down into two puddles, and Ellie is fighting sleep as she melts deeper into Cole's lap. Marina's two girls and Sam are piled up in front of the television in the other room in various states of wakefulness. People have had so much beer and wine and dessert, they are now telling backyard chicken stories. Of which there are more than one might expect here in the 21st century.
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Sponsored Topics: Beer - Wine - Television - Food - Drink |
| Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.
October 30, 2009 at 4:37 pm
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| Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship.
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Sponsored Topics: Hannah Arendt - Nazism - Martin Heidegger - Politics - Philosophy |
| A TV critic journeys through the cheerful hell of exercise shows.
October 30, 2009 at 3:57 pm
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| Flip the channel and feel the burn. The history of exercise on TV stretches to 1951 and The Jack LaLanne Show. Amazingly, despite the advent of home video, LaLanne's successors are still on the air, lifting and thrusting and smiling too hard. By way of seeing what kind of shape the genre is in, I subjected myself to its rigors, devising along the way a weeklong regimen: The TV Critic Workout. It guarantees flatter abs in seven days, partly by way of stomach crunches, partly by way of promoting tummy-straining laughter at both one's own foolishness and the sillier programs.
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Sponsored Topics: Television - Physical exercise - Jack LaLanne - Video - Fitness |
| Paranormal Activity reviewed.
October 30, 2009 at 3:37 pm
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| The surprise success of the microbudget indie horror film Paranormal Activity (Paramount Pictures) constitutes one of those pop-culture moments when you realize that mass taste is sometimes better than you give it credit for. This may not be the horror movie of the year—that crown still easily goes to Sam Raimi's similarly themed Drag Me to Hell—but it's good enough that its unexpected popularity is heartening. In a genre where a fresh mutilated corpse every 15 minutes has become a reasonable expectation, this slow-paced but relentless spooker is refreshingly un-extreme. It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.
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Sponsored Topics: Sam Raimi - Paranormal - Drag Me to Hell - Horror film - Paramount Pictures |
| Why couldn't we tell that the balloon boy's parents were faking their distress?
October 30, 2009 at 2:54 pm
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| Shortly after authorities announced that 6-old-year Falcon Heene had been found safe and sound, ending speculation that he had been aboard a flying saucer that escaped from his family's backyard, his father Richard appeared before an encampment of cameras to share a few words of relief. "He says he was hiding in the attic," Heene said, his voice swelling on the last two syllables as he half-shrugged and looked at the ground. "And, um, because I yelled at him." He took a sharp breath, voice faltering. "I'm really sorry I yelled at him."
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Sponsored Topics: Flying saucer - balloon - Recreation - Aviation - Arts |
| What Jonathan Nossiter's Liquid Memory gets wrong about wine.
October 30, 2009 at 1:34 pm
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| Who said there is no disputing taste? For many oenophiles, half the pleasure of wine is arguing about it. In recent years, the vinosphere has seen a contentious debate over what can be called, for lack of a less ponderous phrase, First Principles. What defines quality in a wine? How about authenticity? Is it ultimately more important for a wine to taste good or to taste true to its origins—to exhibit goût de terroir, as the French say? And if the end result is agreeable, does it matter how a wine was made? With much of the wine industry fixated on branding and marketing, and technology increasingly giving vintners the power to bend nature to their will, these questions have taken on added urgency, and the discussion of them has grown ever more acrimonious.
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Sponsored Topics: Jonathan Nossiter - Wine - Terroir - Winemaking - Food |
| Why Halloween can be an organizational nightmare for pagans.
October 30, 2009 at 1:33 pm
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| For most people, Halloween represents candy, costumes, and scary movies—a diversionary, tongue-in-cheek day of miming sin and deceit. But for pagans, the holiday is a time for ardent ritual, a celebration of the thin line between the living and the dead. As Lee Ann Kinkade writes in this "Faith-Based" from October 2008, planning and performing rituals doesn't come naturally for witches and warlocks. Fiercely independent and eager to question authority, their freewheeling nature can make celebrating Samhain a hassle. The article is reprinted below.
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Sponsored Topics: Halloween - Samhain - Horror film - Nature - Holidays |
| The surprising beauty of portraits on gravestones.
October 30, 2009 at 11:08 am
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| When I visit urban cemeteries, I always document the photographs and relief portraits on gravestones. Portraits of the deceased add more of a personal touch to headstones than traditional funerary symbols such as crosses, resurrection angels, or stars of David. Images of the deceased on gravestones show the passage of time and exposure to the elements. Photographs fade, carvings are worn by the harsh weather, and some portraits are even vandalized.
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Sponsored Topics: Cemetery - Headstone - Death - Star of David - Cemeteries |  |
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