Yesterday I picked up my boy on his last day of school before the summer holidays. He caught my eye as he exited his building and his face lit up. Seven years old, eight weeks of summer ahead of him. As we walked home together, my bag filled with a year of exercise books of steadily improving handwriting, I caught him humming snatches of something familiar. Something, in fact, I had stuck in my head, too.
Nicolas Moulin’s vision of Sheffield:
And of Paris:
This stuff is absolutely amazing. It reminds me, in many ways, of Viktor Antonov’s work on Half-Life 2, in which inhuman architecture subverts the organic sprawl of an existing city. Chilling, thrilling.
For a brief moment in the early ‘80s, it looked as if the brave new world of Alien studies was going to splinter irreconcilably on the issue of Officer Ripley’s panties — the anti-panty camp accusing the pro-panty wing of uncritical phallocentrism, the pro-panty caucus accusing the anti-panty wing of repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism.
This is a fine literature review of studies on Alien, even if most of these works are over 20 years old. One hell of a series, considering three of the Aliens films are, let’s face it, pretty terrible. Grantland might have attempted to suggest that Prometheus is “better than good”, a radical position. But at least it gets it right when it says Aliens is the weirdest blockbuster series in history.
It’s easy to sentimentalize the mind of a child. We like to picture them as boundless imagineers who can pick up a stick and build a world around it. But kids, like us, need something to work from – a character, an archetype, a story, a weapon – and something to play with in their hands and in their heads.
Here, chum and esteemed occasional (as often as I can get him) colleague Chris Dahlen is so right about something that so many others are so often wrong. Read his piece - it’s about Plants Vs Zombies and child obsession, one that my own seven-year-old is also going through.
Happily, other people also hate some words that I hate.
I so much prefer the word ‘invention’ to ‘innovation’; it somehow implies that something might be made, rather than merely PowerPoint-ed – Ben Malbon
To me, ‘innovation’ seems to imply novel rather than clever - new for its own sake, rather than deliberate attempts to improve. ‘Invention’ brings to mind earnest boffins striving to better humankind. ‘Innovation’ brings to mind grasping businessmen striving to find their niches.
Magazine editorial man-at-arms David Hepworth forged his career on NME and Smash Hits, and launched Empire, Mojo and Heat. So when he writes about the fate of monthly magazines, it’s best to listen.
tl;dr: The rules of editorial are changing fast. The monthly cycle is no more, broken by the need to write as much for the insistent tempo of the web as print deadlines. And content must sit as effortlessly on a printed page as in an iPad app. Old-style magazine craft and broadcasting to a captive audience just don’t cut it any more.
This is a beautiful passage by mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist and inventor John Herschel in his A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), about the need for precision and clarity in scientific writing:
For example, the words - square, circle, a hundred etc convey to the mind notions so complete in themselves, and so distinct from everything else, that we are sure when we use them we know the whole of our own meaning. It is widely different with words expressing natural objects and mixed relations.
Bruce Sterling on ’the New Aesthetic,’ the nascent, swirling, London art-nerd movement that’s making stuff that sort-of brings the digital and physical worlds together. Stuff - kinda - like - these. Robots, machine-readable vision, Twitter bots; sitting at the interface between the humanistic and the mainframe.
Three years ago, The New Yorker published an article by Malcolm Gladwell called How David Beats Goliath, in which he traced the ways in which underdogs often manage to best their competitors.
His entertaining thesis, told in his typically layered and smartly paced manner, centres on the idea that underdogs, with nothing to lose, can break the rules and in doing so transform the terms of engagement in their favour. There’s David, facing Goliath not with a sword but a sling. There’s Lawrence of Arabia, not attacking the Ottomans directly but the railway that served them. And there’s a girls basketball team, which played aggressively to counter its lower skill levels.
