The first few episodes feature some pretty conventional plot devices, but the characterization and dialogue have a loose, awkward, and very human quality to them.
I was one of the girls waiting to get to late meal. I was the one sitting on the couch, watching, completely unimpressed, as four boys sat around me fixated on a flat screen TV. They swore left and right, pressing buttons on the game controllers they gripped. My requests for them to please get up so we could leave and beat the crowds at Frist were ignored. Instead, they were busy whacking the shit out of each other in a virtual world.
Five months ago, I fell in love with a nine-year-old boy. His name was Oskar Schell, and he was cheeky, and he was perceptive, and he was caring, and he wrote to Steven Hawking thinking he would get a personal response, and he was a pacifist, and he was in an incredible amount of pain. I knew I loved him when he said, “Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place…Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone would be safe…”
Back in Chicago over intersession, doing a stint at home, I had the opportunity to visit the fall-term Student Projects Exhibition at the Institute for Design. One of the leading design schools in the nation, the Institute grew out of … Read More
Many fine newspapers have recently lamented over the future of our beautiful planet. We are told that polar bears grow hungry in the Arctic, oceans threaten to drown skyscrapers, and that we—poor, frail humans—must swelter as Earth becomes Furnace.
Most articles on music this summer did not trumpet ambitious musical endeavors but rather the continued floundering of tour and album sales. Like the movie industry, this season was set apart by sequels and unexpected sophomore successes.
What The Choice suffers from is a machine-like lack of imagination, its plot twists as predictable as mathematical calculations. In 2008, the scientist P. M. Parker claimed to be the first person to code a book-writing formula, which can churn out novels at the flip of a switch. Apparently he never heard of Nicholas Sparks.
If you were to do a Google search for “Asians Sleeping in the Library,” you would come across a blog that features, well, pictures of Asian students across the globe asleep in libraries, meant to pay homage to their hard … Read More
“Joanna Newsom and the New Weird America.” That is the title of the BBC web site’s feature on Miss Newsom, a singer and songwriter who’s our age and, like many of us, sounds much younger.
