Search Results for: The Nation

A Brief History of Disney

Walt Disney, from the 1937 trailer for "Snow White," via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. Read more…

Oscar to Suicide in One Year: Tracing the ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ Director’s Tragic Final Days

Longreads Pick

After the death of Malik Bendjelloul, who directed the documentary “Searching for Sugarman,” a THR writer heads to Sweden to talk to his friends, who reveal the perfectionist’s quirks, and open up about his fear, doubt and their own surprise.

It was just the type of place that the young man, a 36-year-old Swedish journalist and Oscar-winning film director named Malik Bendjelloul, might have found intriguing. The Stockholm metro system is reputed to be the largest display of public art anywhere in the world — 68.3 miles of paintings, mosaics, installations and sculptures. The station was an artistic, humane endeavor, an urban fairy-tale landscape that might have piqued his curiosity and fueled his imagination. But on that day, as the train neared, the picturesque station was transformed into a devastating scene of the director’s final moments. With a crowd of Tuesday-afternoon commuters looking on from benches or standing against walls, Bendjelloul flung himself into the path of an oncoming train.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,928 words)

How To Catch A Chess Cheater: Ken Regan Finds Moves Out Of Mind

Longreads Pick

Ken Regan was a chess prodigy who earned a master title at 13 and is currently an engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. He’s developing a program that would detect cheating in chess, which has become more rampant in a world where button-sized wireless devices have made it easier to take down chess champions:

Regan is a devoted Christian. His faith has inspired in him a moral and social responsibility to fight cheating in the chess world, a responsibility that has become his calling. As an international master and self-described 2600-level computer science professor with a background in complexity theory—he holds two degrees in mathematics, a bachelor’s from Princeton and a doctorate from Oxford—he also happens to be one of only a few people in the world with an ability to commit to such a calling. “Ken Regan is one of two or three people in the world who have the quantitative background, chess expertise, and comput­er skills necessary to develop anti-cheating algorithms likely to work,” says Mark Glickman, a statistics professor at Boston University and chairman of the USCF ratings committee. Every time Regan starts an instance of his anti-cheating code he does not merely run a piece of software—he invokes it. The dual meaning of “invoke” conveys Regan’s inspired relationship to the anti-cheating work that he does.

Source: Chess Life
Published: Jun 1, 2014
Length: 29 minutes (7,381 words)

We Are More Dangerous to Sharks Than They Are to Us

In the Toronto Star, Sandro Contenta travels to the Bahamas to attend “SharkSchool” where a man named Erich Ritter teaches a one-week course on how to swim safely with sharks. Over the course of his reporting, Contenta learns that 63 people have been killed by sharks in the past decade, while scientists have estimated that 97 million sharks have been killed by humans during fishing-related activities in 2010 alone:

The scientists concluded that dozens of species of sharks were being killed at unsustainable rates. “The consequences of these unsustainable catch and mortality rates for marine ecosystems could be substantial,” they wrote. “Global total shark mortality, therefore, needs to be reduced drastically in order to rebuild depleted populations and restore marine ecosystems with functional top predators.”

Scientists warn of a “trophic cascade.” That’s when the disappearance of a top predator causes a cascading and dramatic impact on organisms at lower levels of the food chain until an entire ecosystem is transformed. The loss of sharks, for example, contributes to the death of coral reefs, because coral-eating fish that were part of a shark’s diet suddenly boom in numbers.

Worm and his colleagues echoed concerns by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, published in a landmark analysis by 23 leading scientists including B.C.’s Nick Dulvy, who co-chairs the union’s shark specialist group. Released in January, the 34-page report is based on the work of more than 300 scientists. It is the first systematic analysis of the global population status of more than 1,000 species of sharks, rays and chimaeras.
It found that one in four of these fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, either targeted or unintended, what the fishing industry calls bycatch. That amounted to 107 species of rays and 74 species of sharks, including angel and thresher sharks.

“There isn’t a part of the ice-free ocean surface that doesn’t contain a threatened shark,” Dulvy says. “That’s a lot of real estate with threatened biodiversity.”

As for what you should do if you ever found yourself being attacked by a shark? The answer is obvious: Fight for your life:

“In sharks you want to fight and fight like hell because they respect power,” Burgess says. “If you pop them in the nose, they veer off almost always, and then will come back around.

“I equate it to the neighbourhood bully: if you pop them in the nose first, more often than not they’ll back off because they weren’t expecting it. After the initial surprise wears off he’ll probably come back and beat the hell out of you, and you’d be smart to get out of the water while you’ve got your opening.

Read the story

Photo: Jeff

Why So Many Teams at the World Cup Have Players Who Share a Birthday

At BBC Magazine, an examination of the “birthday paradox” using the World Cup as an example.

The birthday paradox goes like this: Mathematically, in any group of 23 people there is a 50% chance that two people will share a birthday. At the World Cup, there are 32 squads with 23 players on each team. Does the birthday paradox prove true there? It does:

“People think it’s an amazing coincidence that two people in a class of 30 share the same birthday,” he says. “Actually, with 30 people it’s a 70% chance.”

Or consider your favourite social media site. If you’ve got 70 friends, you’ve got a 99.9% chance that at least two of them will share a birthday.

But perhaps the best data-set of all to test this on is the football World Cup. There are 32 teams, and each team has a squad of 23 players. If the birthday paradox is true, 50% of the squads should have shared birthdays.

Using the birthdays from Fifa’s official squad lists as of Tuesday 10 June, it turns out there are indeed 16 teams with at least one shared birthday – 50% of the total. Five of those teams, in fact, have two pairs of birthdays.

Read the story

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Tony Gwynn: 1960-2014

“The best thing for me has just been the passion of wanting to play. The challenge of stepping in the box, the challenge of trying to be successful. When I started out, I guarantee you nobody figured I would be where I am today. Nobody. Not even myself. Maybe there’s something that makes you want to go out and prove people wrong, but for me, it’s just the passion of loving to do what I do.”

-Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, in Sports Illustrated, 1999. Gwynn died of salivary gland cancer June 16, at the age of 54.

Read the story

See also:

Sports Illustrated’s First Profile of Gwynn (1984)

(via Howard Riefs)

New Wave

Longreads Pick

French Jews making aliyah go from one conflict zone to another.

In a conference room at the Ramada Renaissance hotel on the western edge of Jerusalem, a group of 60 French Jews are about to become Israelis. They sit in softly cushioned metal-framed chairs set in two rows across the red-and-gold hotel carpeting. At the front of the room, delegates from the Jewish Agency stand before a dark blue table arranged with ID cards and a stack of heart-shaped pink chocolate boxes. A thin, dark-haired woman in a grey minidress holds a microphone and calls out the names of these new Israelis, serious-looking Orthodox families, retired couples on their way to the Francophone beach communities of Netanya and Ashdod, and twentysomethings headed for Tel Aviv. As they take their bounty, the new citizens pose for photos and thank their delegates, kissing them once on each cheek. Everyone stands for “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem. As she sings along, Nora De Pas, a girl I met yesterday, puts an arm around my shoulder, linking me to a chain of people who were strangers a week ago.

Source: Tablet Magazine
Published: Jun 12, 2010
Length: 23 minutes (5,961 words)

Is Nothing Sacred?

Longreads Pick

Every culture looks for creative inspiration to other cultures, but is there a point when this is just outright theft?

I committed my first act of cultural appropriation when I was three years old. I was given a keffiyeh, the checkered scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. My grandmother had more important things to worry about than Middle Eastern politics, and keffiyehs were readily available in the markets in Dubai where she lived. It became my comfort blanket when my mother took me there on a long visit. I brought it with me when we returned home to suburban London and I dragged it around for a few years, occasionally using it to dress up as a shepherd for school nativity plays. Towards the end of the second intifada in 2004, a cousin came to stay and spotted it at the back of my wardrobe. She was desperate to borrow it because, she said, ‘terrorist scarves’ had become ‘all the rage’ at school.

Source: Aeon
Published: Jun 9, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,862 words)

The Subconscious Cues That Guide Visitors Through The World’s Busiest Airport

In a recent blog post for The Atlantic, David Zweig spoke with wayfinding expert and airport-sign designer Jim Harding about his work on the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson. According to Hartfield, the highest mark of success in Harding’s work is invisibility: if his job is perfectly executed, “you will never think of him or his work.” In Harding’s work, no decision is arbitrary; even the tiniest aesthetic choices are part of a carefully orchestrated ballet, subconscious triggers that point the visitor in the right direction without them even realizing that they are being guided. Even something as seemingly minor as the shape of a street sign takes on great weight:

When undertaking a major wayfinding project like the one at the Maynard Jackson Terminal, as the ripple effect on the maps shows, everything outside the core area must be tied in to the master plan. On the roads encircling Maynard Jackson the top of every street sign related to the terminal has a slightly curved edge, echoing the gentle undulating aesthetics of the terminal’s roofline. It’s a subtle, likely subconscious wayfinding cue, letting you know you are in the vicinity of the international terminal. Many of the interior signs share this shape as well. This distinguishes the area from the domestic terminal and concourses, where all the signs are a standard rectilinear shape. If you are ever in an airport or campus or hospital or other complex environment and suddenly something feels off, you sense you are going the wrong way, there’s a good chance it’s not just magic or some brilliant internal directional sense, but rather you may be responding to a subconscious cue like the change of shape from one sign system to another. “Signage isn’t only about consistency in terminology and typefaces,” says Harding, but also about placing the overall ecosystem in a particular frame. It establishes a sense of place.

Read the story here

More stories on design

 

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…