Category: ideas

What word best describes 2005? On-Demand? Podcast? Sudoku? Truthiness? (Yes, Mr. Colbert, we see you waving.) The debate will rage today at the annual gathering of the American Dialect Society, as America’s wordsmiths attempt to pinpoint, in a word or two, everything that 2005 was about. “In 2003, the word of the year was metrosexual, which seems to have stuck. The year before, it was weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, or maybe, in retrospect, it wasn’t.” Nominees for 2005 include “intelligent design,” “blogola,” and “muffin top.” (That last one is the bulge of flesh that results when low-rider jeans are worn by non-rail-thin individuals.) And no, Wonkette fans, “Abramoffakkuh” is not eligible, having emerged after the New Year.

“Imagine looking at a map of the United States that is divided not into states but into dialects — a map that doesn’t tell you what a state’s capital is, but how a region’s residents pronounce their vowels.” That’s the aim of the newly released Atlas of North American English, a hefty tome that also comes with a multimedia CD-ROM and retails for over $600. “The atlas identifies about 16 dialects across the U.S. and southern Canada. Not all of them are unique, but each has distinguishing characteristics. The atlas is a monumental achievement in the already distinguished career of co-author William Labov, who is considered the founder of sociolinguistics, or the study of social influences on language use.”

“Does political cinema mirror life? How much impact can a movie have on its audience? To what extent is it able to influence the way we think about politics? The relationship between cinema and politics, often troubled, has recently become far too distant.”

“The Acropolis in Athens made it, as did Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, China’s Great Wall, the Colosseum in Rome, the Inca temple of Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge and the Moai – the Easter Island statues. Less immediately obvious choices in a final shortlist of 21 contenders for the New Seven Wonders of the World, announced in Switzerland yesterday, included the Kremlin in Moscow, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.”

“The figures on the ethnicity of students at higher education institutions for 2003-04, provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), reveal a deeply worrying racial divide among British universities. There are 53 institutions with less than 5% ethnic minority students. About 20 institutions have more than 40%.”

“Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical “cat” currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein’s spooky embrace now known as “entanglement.” At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once.”

We here at ArtsJournal like to think of ourselves as people who pay close attention to news of the cultural world. So we’re somewhat embarrassed to score only 15 out of 20 in this year’s Guardian cultural literacy quiz…

Ever since the photographs of prisoners at Abu Ghraib being abused by American service personnel emerged into public view, the U.S. has been embroiled in a hot debate over the use of torture, and whether it can ever be justified. Strangely, although all available research indicates that torture doesn’t actually work if the goal is to extract information, many Americans seem to believe that it can be a highly effective method of interrogation, and furthermore, that it is somehow morally justifiable if lives might be saved. Where are we getting these ideas? Probably from every cop drama, spy film, horror flick, and suspense movie released in the last 40 or so years.