Reverse-Engineering a Genius →

Kurt Andersen, writing for Vanity Fair:

But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality. Five years ago, Jenison tried it out on the kitchen table. He took a black-and-white photograph and mounted it upside down, since a lens would project an image upside down. He put a round two-inch mirror on a stand between the photo and his painting surface. He immediately found that “when the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears,” and you’re through with that bit. Five hours later, he had painted a perfect duplicate of the photo, an astounding proof of concept by someone who can’t draw and had never painted a thing. Then he used his mirror trick to copy a color photo. Again, perfect. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says.

The real story here is the lengths that Tim Jenison went to in order to test his theory. Insane. Aside from, oh, you know, just reproducing the room in the painting, there's also this:

For his experimental purposes—using a device that Vermeer himself could have made—Jenison decided that modern lenses are too fine. So he learned how to make lenses himself, to melt and polish glass using 17th-century techniques. Jenison painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and learned to mix them himself, including grinding lapis lazuli stones (“they’re kind of poisonous,” he points out) to make ultramarine blue.

The World Behind A T-Shirt →

Planet Money has, for what seems like forever, been reporting on the process of creating a t-shirt. The project started with a simple enough thesis:

We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt.

The project has finally come together in this stunning five chapter multimedia presentation:

Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt

I really can't recommend this enough. It'll take you around twenty minutes or so to watch the videos and read the short articles for each chapter.

And should you want more about the story, visit this link for the associated podcasts and the explanation of the t-shirt design.

I'll never look at that on-sale stack of t-shirts in Target the same way again.

‘If you don’t fuck this up, son, you’ll be the first pick.’ →

Steve Fishman, writing for New York Magazine:

The largest drug scandal in the history of baseball started over $4,000. The money was a debt owed to Porter Fischer, a steroid user who was involved with the South Florida clinic known as Biogenesis, through which Rodriguez is alleged to have procured his performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). ­Fischer, well built and extravagantly tanned, possessed many large ideas about his future, which reality seemed determined to frustrate. He’d bounced around with little purpose, from managing a theme park to a couple of years at National Tobacco, until he was fired for selling samples on eBay. Lately, he had been describing himself as a freelance marketer and lived in a guesthouse in his mother’s backyard.

Then, one day in March 2011, Fischer’s luck changed. He was hit by a car, and not just any car—it was a Jaguar. Injuring his knee, he received a settlement of $35,000, after which he started telling people, “I came into a little money.”

As a Yankees fan, and former A-Rod supporter, this piece was more of the same—more of A-Rod's canned lines, more dopey, greedy, potentially lying testifiers, and Major League Baseball, simultaneously trying to keep making millions while going after their own product. So—depressing and infuriating.

But as a creator of stories, this is a real lesson—everything begins from some small, seemingly innocent, incident. No power or prestige or grand conspiracy needed. Just a small sum of money (compared to the millions, perhaps billions, at stake), an idiot who lucked into another small sum of money, and some hurt feelings.

You Are What You(r Mother) Eat(Ate) →

Kristin Wartman, writing for the New York Times:

“What’s really interesting about children is, the preferences they form during the first years of life actually predict what they’ll eat later,” said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and researcher at the Monell Center. “Dietary patterns track from early to later childhood but once they are formed, once they get older, it’s really difficult to change — witness how hard it is to change the adult. You can, but it’s just harder. Where you start, is where you end up.”

I often wonder how many social mores that we currently accept will look ridiculous in a hundred years, much in the way we look at turn-of-the-century thoughts regarding sanitation, germs, medical practices, etc. with horror now.

Along those lines—how long before we take child creation and rearing out of the hands of us humans, such flawed creatures? Or—is that the measure evolution has taken to ensure we don't wind up overpopulating the planet?

And what happens when we finally develop the scientific knowledge and the proper amount of patience to overcome such measures?

The Three Things That Matter in Writing: Sentences, Sentences, Sentences →

Susan Scarf Merrell, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the business of storytelling, the sentence is the perfect employee — no job too big or small, independent though part of the whole, pitching in as needed: star employees represent for the company and bring glory to the entire team.

Think of “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s much-mulled-over opening sentence to Anna Karenina is a marvelous set-up of parallel ideas — the repetition of sound and word and phraseology is bold in terms of language-making, and the idea itself stated so confidently that it is not until we are far into the novel (perhaps even finished with it) that we begin to doubt the original assertion.

This piece continues today's trend of "Writers I Know Writing Awesome Things." Earlier in the semester, I gave my 1000-level creative writing students this Stephen King piece on first sentences; In the future, should I teach some later stage writers, I will certainly follow-up with Susie's piece. The building blocks of any kind of prose deserve this kind of examination and the best way to start, of course, is to look to the past.

To be fair, I think the desire to dig this deep echoes throughout your artistic sensibility; I'm fairly certain that most of my favorite artists—Stanley Kubrick, Amy Hempel, The National, Joel Peter Witkin—would find some truth in Susie's thesis. Others might not be so interested in seeing how the sausage is made. Either way, just remember—sometimes, to build the best house possible, you have to spend some time examining each and every brick.

When Holiday Food Traditions and Life Choices Collide →

Megan Mayhew Bergman, writing for Salon:

This is not Donna Reed’s dining room table. For one, it’s an Irish Laying Out Table passed down to us through my husband’s mother’s family. In other words: Where our stuffing sits, a dead body used to lie for viewing, a perfumed corpse surrounded by flowers, orifices plugged, arms straightened. But that’s not the only unusual thing about our Thanksgiving table. On Turkey Day, there is no turkey.

And I feel guilty about it. I sense my husband and father-in-law scanning the table, wondering which dish I’ve smuggled gray, lifeless faux meat into. Sure, they accept the onslaught of lentils and tempeh on weekdays, but Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving. There are expectations. Traditions to honor.

An exquisitely-crafted piece of writing that, like all good writing, doesn't seek to definitively give a "yes" or "no" conclusion, and instead, chooses to further think-out some important thoughts. And before you attempt to pass the piece off as pro-vegetarian propaganda, consider the fact that the author clearly admits to being an imperfect practitioner.

The power of tradition is fierce; I find it ludicrous (and borderline hypocritical) that, as an atheist, I celebrate Easter with my family. And I'm troubled by the fact that I will present such a conflicting message to my daughter. I'm not even 100% sure how I'm going to get our Christmas celebrations past her. But at a time when, even on Facebook, the trend is to consider what we are thankful for, I think Megan hits the nail on the head—the real gift is that, as a society, we are even able to consider such matters.

'Less about particular recipes than about the ideas behind those recipes.' →

By Genevieve Koski, writing for The A.V. Club:

That medium-before-message genesis accounts in part for Good Eats’ singular sensibility: Brown was an expert in the medium (television) before he was an expert in the message (food). His interests expanded well beyond cooking—he dabbled, but it was always more hobby than profession—and would end up imbuing the show he eventually made as much, maybe even more, than the subject at its center. The first words uttered in “Steak Your Claim”—“I think it’s safe to say, John Wayne ate steak”—are indicative of the love of pop culture that’s built into the show’s foundation. The theme song, which threads throughout every episode in any of hundreds of permutations, is inspired by music from Get Shorty, and a glance at the list of episode titles evidences Brown’s love of movies, television, and groan-worthy puns: “Pork Fiction,” “The Egg Files,” “Fry Hard,” “The Big Chili,” “There Will Be Oil,” and so on and so on.

Koski illustrates exactly what made Good Eats such a perfect show—dead simple recipes that always emphasized how and why the end results were attainable. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I will say this—I miss Good Eats.

Personhood In The Womb: A Constitutional Question

NPR:

Should a pregnant woman whose behavior has been deemed dangerous to her fetus be legally punished or forced into medical procedures against her will? A study released earlier this year found hundreds of cases across the country where pregnant women were arrested and incarcerated, detained in mental institutions and drug treatment programs, or subject to forced medical interventions, including surgery.

The study, conducted by the group National Advocates for Pregnant Women, found 413 criminal and civil cases where law enforcement intervened in the lives of pregnant women between 1973 — the year the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade — and 2005.

Fresh Air's Terry Gross speaks with the group's executive director, Lynn Paltrow, who says the legal claims used to justify some of these actions rely on the same arguments that are made in support of personhood measures that would grant the fetus full constitutional rights independent of the pregnant woman. Gross also speaks with Jennifer Mason of Personhood USA, a leader in the personhood movement.

And she speaks with Dr. Barbara Levy, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' vice president for health policy, about related medical issues.

Terry Gross, doing what she does best—asking all three sides of this debate direct questions that get direct answers.

Aningaaq (The Other Side of Sandra Bullock's 'Gravity' Distress Call) →

Seth Abramovitch, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:

During a pivotal scene in Gravity, Sandra Bullock's character Ryan Stone, trapped inside a Russian space capsule with little hope of survival, makes contact with a male voice speaking via radio in a foreign language. What unfolds on the other end of that fractured conversation, complete with a barking dog and a crying baby, is the subject of a short film by Jonas Cuaron, son of director Alfonso Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay for Warner Bros.' $500 million-grossing awards contender with his father. That seven-minute companion piece, titled Aningaaq, was financed by Warner Home Video, which initially envisioned it as a unique extra feature for Gravity's Blu-ray edition. But the stark, contemplative Aningaaq has developed a life of its own via festival screenings at Venice and Telluride. Now Warners has submitted it for Oscar consideration in the live-action short category; should it snag a nomination alongside its sure-bet blockbuster companion, they are poised to make Academy Awards history as the first feature and spinoff short drawn from the same material to be nominated together in the same year.

What an interesting experiment. To be able to see another orbiting body (no space pun intended) and how it connects to something we're already familiar with in a fictional universe is one thing. But for it to be an artistic success in its own right? Pretty impressive.

Oh, and, uh—spoiler alert.

/via WIRED

How Many of Your Memories Are Fake? →

Erika Hayasaki, writing for The Atlantic:

“What did you eat that morning for breakfast?”

“Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You've Got Personality’ was playing as on the radio as I pulled up for work,” said Healy, one of 50 confirmed people in the United States with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, an uncanny ability to remember dates and events. “I remember walking in to work, and one of the clients was singing a parody to Jingle Bells, ‘Oh, what fun it is to ride in a beat up Chevrolet.’”

These are the kinds of specific details that writers of memoir, history, and journalism yearn for when combing through memories to tell true stories. But such work has always come with the caveat that human memory is fallible. Now, scientists have an idea of just how unreliable it actually can be. New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

There are several childhood memories that I have and I've always wondered if I really remember them—or if I've constructed them out of photographs I've seen and basic details that I now know about the situation. Turns out the answer is probably the latter.