The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea has a terrific discussion of the study on the Brainiac blog:

Giuliano and Spilimbergo made use of the General Social Survey, which has recorded political attitudes among the American public since 1972. The specific questions Giuliano and Spilimbergo explored were whether living through a recession in one's "impressionable years"—defined as 18 to 25—influenced Americans' views on the merits of economic redistribution; on whether financial success resulted largely from hard work or from luck; and on faith in public institutions. Attitudes were analyzed by region, to account for geographical discrepancies in American economic performance. And, because so many people have lived through at least one year of a recession, the study focused on the worst recessions: those in which GDP growth was -3.8 percent for at least one year.

In each case, a recession during one's impressionable years had a significant effect on political and economic attitudes. People with such an experience were more committed to redistribution, more inclined to attribute success to luck, and less likely to trust public institutions. In each case, having been through a severe recession accounted for 4 percent of the variation in attitudes. For the sake of comparison, in the case of income redistribution, that's about one-third of the effect of possessing a high school education—as opposed to a B.A. or B.S, the authors said. (People with college degrees are less amenable to income redistribution.)

Shea points out that if this study turns out to be correct, we can expect the generation coming of age in the next 10 years may have a more "European" attitude toward inequality.

What's heartening about this study is that it shows people who have suffered through hard times often come out wanting to help other people. Hence their commitment to "redistribution," whether through social spending, universal health care, or other programs aimed at redistributing wealth. Unfortunately, a side-effect of recession experiences is that people stop believing in the very public institutions that might - if reformed - be able to help with this redistribution.

via Boston Globe's Brainiac

Mr. Incredible's trip down memory lane.

Verdict: Worth it. The art on the Incredible magazine covers is absolutely frame worthy.

2012 had crazy Woody and his pull-down chart of conspiracy. Planning to write about climate change? Whoops, you're now dead — see, he put a line through each scientist's name.

Verdict: Worthless, the wall of clippings and the crazy person blog was overkill. But then again this is 2012, so at least it's staying in its wheelhouse.

Mulder's office is papered with clippings and UFO sightings in the last X-Files film, thus hitting us over the head one last time with the fact that he's a BELIEVER.

Verdict: Worthless. Anyone going to this movie already knew all about Mulder's beliefs. They didn't need the "crazy obsession" wall, but they can keep the wrinkled poster from the original X-Files show.

In The Children of Men you get a quickie recap, not only of the Jasper character and his comatose wife but of the present day situation as well.

Verdict: Worthless. If Jasper's wife was indeed tortured by the oppressive new government regime, would they really keep the giant reminder posted on their wall of that horrible experience? Go on down the line, lovely pictures of friends, interesting and telling news clips of something they probably worked on, awards explaining their characters — and then a giant full-page story detailing the brutal torture your wife, thus making her completely unresponsive. Ah, memories.

Here's another newspaper moment in Children of Men that wasn't really used to portray obsession or honor, but it was nice that the production crew made sure all the headlines were relevant to the story.

Verdict: Worth it, even if it was just an aesthetic.

Halloween! Michael will never die, and neither will his victim's memory of him.

Verdict: Worth it. It's a horror movie, it's expected.

The Hills Have Eyes remake had a quickie wall of foreshadowing, and filled us in that the Hills were definitely full of mutant kid eyes.

Verdict: Worth it, it was great build up to the horrible nuclear family reveal. That little girl haunted me for days, and I needed a little build-up to the character, cliché though it may be.

Whip Lash's lair in Iron Man 2 is all about obsession.

Verdict: Worthless, for now. Until we see more. We didn't need the clippings to prove that Whiplash wants to kill Tony, because all he literally does, from the looks of things, is try to kill Tony. But maybe it will flesh out some backstory , although it's highly unlikely as all those clippings are pretty modern.

Mr. Glass' wall of destruction in Unbreakable.

Verdict: Worthless and Worth It. Samuel L. Jackson was scary enough in this as is, but it did help catch you up if you hadn't already called him as the bad guy hours earlier. Also, I believe there may be some flaws in these clips.

Original Nite Owl's den was a museum to Watchmen.

Verdict: Worth It. This is the kind of thing director Zack Snyder excels at. And when it's good it's very, very good. Everything on this wall has a back story. Even with its other shortcomings, Watchmen did have a very well thought-out set. Even if it was ripped from the novel, it looked good.

Willy Wonka's pops reveals to the audience that he didn't hate his son at all, because he framed all his newspaper articles. This was actually more creepy than exciting, but then again it is the remake of Willy Wonka, where Depp gives pale death face smiles for half the film, so it least it fits the tone.

Verdict: Worth it, since it fits in with the crazy theme of the film.

In the last ten years, researchers have discovered thousands of species, both living and extinct. We got dino-eating crocodiles and killer kangaroos; a fish with a transparent head and a demon duck of doom; a bright pink millipede and giant spiders. And previously named species, such as the tongue-eating isopod and the alien-limbed Magnapinna, made headlines.

A few of these species were observed before 2000, but were only named or recognized as species in the last ten years. And each has some wonderfully monstrous quality, be it their incredible size, arsenal of offensive or defensive weapons, or knack for survival.

A Big Cat With Bite: The Bornean Clouded Leopard, which was found to be a new species in 2007 (though it had been observed long before), may not look like much at first. It may weigh in at a mere 55 pounds, putting it on the small side for a big cat, but it has the largest teeth of any known cat alive. It has even been described as the modern answer to the Sabertooth Tiger.
The Largest Snake to Slither the Earth: If South America's giant Anacondas make you quiver, be grateful that Titanoboa cerrejonensis has been dead for two million years. This prehistoric constrictor grew up to 50 feet in length and weighed in at a whopping 2500, the largest snake ever found. And its favorite food? Crocodiles. I can only imagine the digestive system on that thing.

Incidentally, this decade also saw the discovery of the smallest known snake, the Barbados Threadsnake.

Fanged Frogs: 2009 was a big year for frogs with teeth. Fanged frogs turned up in the Mount Bosavi crater in Papua New Guinea, where strange and wondrous new species are being discovered all the time. But even more monstrous are the Limnonectes megastomias, recently discovered in Thailand. This amphibian has been known to use its fangs in deadly combat, dismembering its froggy opponents. On top of that, when a bird swoops near, L. megastomias will snap and turn it into a tasty feast.

Sea Monsters of the Ancient Deep: Paleontologists digging in the Arctic Svalbard islands uncovered what they believe to be a new species of pliosaur, one with a skull twice as large as a Tyrannosaurus rex's. Its teeth were 12 inches long (with a bite four times as strong as T. Rex's), and is 15-meter-long body weighed an estimated 45 tons. That would make this Jurassic beast considerably larger than any pliosaur previously discovered.

Beware the Box: Giant jellyfish are a sight to behold, but it's the diminutive Malo kingi that you'll really want to avoid. The jelly gets its name, tragically, from its first known victim, Robert King, an American tourist swimming off the Queensland coast in 2002. Some researchers believe kingi venom is among the most toxic in the world.

A Rat as Big as a Cow: They just don't make rodents like they used to. Josephoartigasia monesi weighed around a ton — dwarfing the modern capybara — and had enormous incisors that rival a beaver's wood shredding teeth. Those incisors came in hand when fending off predatory birds and Sabertooth Tigers, though this largest of the rodents snacked on fruits and vegetables.

Mammal-Eating Plants: Pitcher plants are nothing new, but these large, rat-eating veggies added a few species in the last ten years. Naturalist David Attenborough was immortalized in Nepenthes attenboroughii, a new species found in the Philippines. Rodents are attracted to the liquid in the pitchers, then drown when they tumble inside.

A Bug Bigger Than You: In 2007, diggers found giant spiked claw belonging to Jaekelopterus rhenaniae in Prum, Germany. This sea scorpion, which lived 390 million years ago, was an estimated 8.2 meters long and ate anything it could get its claws on — including other scorpions.

Extreme Living, in Your Hairspray: Extremophiles can exist in environments that would kill lesser species — in extreme heat or cold, inside nuclear reactors, or in the void of space. Microbacterium hatanonis, discovered in 2008, chooses an odd environment as its home: in hairspray. It's not clear how the bacterium affects humans, but the discovery adds more information on where and how they can survive.

Bomber Worms: This year, a researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography discovered seven new species of sea worms that secrete small globs of fluid that act as biological flash bombs. These bombs glow, distracting predators while the worm slips away. It's only a shame that their defensive bombs can't be weaponized for bonus monster action.

Michael John Grist, who travels Japan and the rest of the world documenting modern ruins — places abandoned or destroyed — found this former strip club in Ibaraki. In addition to these photos, Grist also took video of his tour through the burnt ruins of the club.

Akeno Gekijo Strip Club Haikyo, Ibaraki [Michael John Grist via Atlas Obscura]

Any help translating would be wonderful, but what we can see is an exceedingly pissed-off Joseph Gordon-Levitt, backing a cab into...something. Ken Watanabe waking from his sleep, ready to shoot someone. In fact there are lots of people around beds, looks like the "people entering each other's dreams" theory of this movie's plot is holding up. Leo sits in a cafe while the world explodes around him, and doesn't flinch. More water imagery, and way more Leo freaking out scenes. Can't wait for the English version!

[via Making Of]

BibliOdyssey has even more of these Victorian infographics, including the Victorian view of the history of the world. Check out higher resolution versions of these infographics at BibliOdyssey's Flickr account.

[via Metafilter]

Tableau d'Astronomie et de Sphère
Tableau d'Astronomie et de Sphère [detail]
Tableau d'Histoire Naturelle: Annelides, Crustaces, Arachnides, etc.
Chart of the World Exhibiting Its Chief Physical Features. Currents of the Ocean &c. Ethnographic Chart of the World Shewing (sic) the Distribution and Varieties of the Human Race
Geological Map Of The State Of Pennsylvania
Humboldt's Distribution of Plants in Equinoctial America
Tinted drawing showing the comparative lengths of rivers and heights of mountains worldwide. The first text page in this volume has the legend for this sheet.

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.

And Pandora is clearly supposed to be the rich, beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn't paved it over with concrete and strip malls. In Avatar, our white hero Jake Sully (sully - get it?) explains that Earth is basically a war-torn wasteland with no greenery or natural resources left. The humans started to colonize Pandora in order to mine a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source. But a few of these humans don't want to crush the natives with tanks and bombs, so they wire their brains into the bodies of Na'vi avatars and try to win the natives' trust. Jake is one of the team of avatar pilots, and he discovers to his surprise that he loves his life as a Na'vi warrior far more than he ever did his life as a human marine.

Jake is so enchanted that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na'vi to relocate from their "home tree," where the humans want to mine the unobtanium. Instead, he focuses on becoming a great warrior who rides giant birds and falls in love with the chief's daughter. When the inevitable happens and the marines arrive to burn down the Na'vi's home tree, Jake switches sides. With the help of a few human renegades, he maintains a link with his avatar body in order to lead the Na'vi against the human invaders. Not only has he been assimilated into the native people's culture, but he has become their leader.

This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member. But it's also, as I indicated earlier, very similar in some ways to District 9. In that film, our (anti)hero Wikus is trying to relocate a shantytown of aliens to a region far outside Johannesburg. When he's accidentally squirted with fluid from an alien technology, he begins turning into one of the aliens against his will. Deformed and cast out of human society, Wikus reluctantly helps one of the aliens to launch their stalled ship and seek help from their home planet.

If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he's been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien's child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

This is not a message anybody wants to hear, least of all the white people who are creating and consuming these fantasies. Afro-Canadian scifi writer Nalo Hopkinson recently told the Boston Globe:

In the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it.

She adds that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, "is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it."

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?

First, we'll need to stop thinking that white people are the most "relatable" characters in stories. As one blogger put it:

By the end of the film you're left wondering why the film needed the Jake Sully character at all. The film could have done just as well by focusing on an actual Na'vi native who comes into contact with crazy humans who have no respect for the environment. I can just see the explanation: "Well, we need someone (an avatar) for the audience to connect with. A normal guy will work better than these tall blue people." However, this is the type of thinking that molds all leads as white male characters (blank slates for the audience to project themselves upon) unless your name is Will Smith.

But more than that, whites need to rethink their fantasies about race.

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.

Dune image via leywad.

Uh oh, Pepper looks pissed. And Tony looks alone. What happened to all his friends?

Garry Shandling makes his big debut as Senator Stern, so Tony mocks him, naturally.

See Tony is alone. Empty chairs. Empty soul. It's lonely at the top.

But wait, it's Rhodey, he's back...and he looks pissed. And who's that to Rhodey's left? It's Sam Rockwell, as Justin Hammer. Did they walk in together? And where did Pepper go? Where's Happy?

Same sexual chemistry between Pepper and Tony, check. But then again I think RDJ is so charming he could have chemistry with a lamp post... lucky lamp post.

Iron Man is America, and a rock star. And look in the background — it's the Iron Man dancers, thus proving the slutty Halloween rule to be true: any outfit can be made whorish.

These gloves could very well be the best little party favors ever. Please hand these out at Comic Con!

Whiplash is obsessed. See? See? He has newspaper clippings. And newspaper clipping are to stalkers what glasses are to shy mousy girls with a hot girl dying to get out inside: stereotypical. But let's assume that since he's spent so much time cataloguing the family story, that this grudge may go way, way back. Since he's had time to make a scrap book.

Who hit Tony?

The garage is all cleaned up and stocked with new rich guy toys. Bruce Wayne who?

What is happening to Tony's neck?

Yikes it's spreading. Tony is literally turning into an Iron Man. Also, he could be turning into a human computer, which has happened in the Iron Man comics before.

More Justin Hammer, and in perfect timing with Whiplash's "shark" comment.

Nick Fury just wants to get motherfucking Tony onto the motherfucking team.

More Iron Man-ettes. I suspect this may be a banner year for the cosplay fans.

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff in her Black Widow "business casual" attire.

War Machine prototype!

Is the Black Widow working for Rhodey? Is that her in the background?

Black Widow in her ass kicking attire, is she beating up Happy? I bet Jon Favreau just loved that.

Whiplash finally shows us what his lightsaber whips can do — which is break Tony's car.

Which he does.

I'm still not sold on the Whiplash outfit, but it does look pretty bad ass from behind.

Uh oh — will Tony be Whiplashed in half, or will the bad guy just show off some more? Answer: Show off.

Whiplash has nasty metal mouth.

What is this flying contraption? It looks like it's shooting at Iron Man? Multiple Mecha suits?

A first look at War Machine, and Tony's new suit, with a triangle chest plate. Is this due to the metal veins? Also the background is filled with power suits, almost like an Armor War...

War Machine and Tony fight other mechas and you get a faceful of War Machines shoulder gun, and Tony's fully reconstructed suit, Mark VI. Very nice. So who thinks they are filming the Armor Wars story?

Granted, I make this assertion not as one of those folks who saw the movie in the last day, just as someone who has seen the early footage from Comic Con and Avatar Day and the other clips released so far.

An interesting thing about seeing the footage at Comic Con: hours before the audience's first trip to Pandora, we got to see another 3D motion capture preview, scenes from Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. You can almost see the gears turning in Zemeckis' head when he introduces a new movie, the tweaks he made to try to improve his particular brand of mo-cap aided animation. Casting Jim Carrey, a man famous for being able to act beneath five pounds of makeup, in multiple roles was an inspired attempt to remedy the notorious flatness of his animated characters. But it proved impossible to forget that these characters were simply sophisticated digital puppets, with Ebenezer Scrooge nearly as ethereal as the ghosts he's scheduled to encounter.

While watching the Avatar footage, by contrast, it was so easy I was watching an animated movie. Certainly it's jarring to see a giant blue person standing next to humans when Sully is first connected to his Avatar body. But when the Na'vi step into their animated native habitat, it's easy to suspend that disbelief that so stubbornly hangs over Zemeckis' animation. Pandora and the Na'vi may be shy of photorealistic (although there are some incredible moments, especially during the Thanator chase and when Jake engages with his Banshee for the first time), but they do feel alive, the way their facial muscles move, the sometimes distracting way their ears twitch to convey emotion, the play of light in their eyes. At times, it almost looks like we're seeing actors in blue makeup rather than the motion capture mask. Cameron has very nearly crossed the uncanny valley and that's an achievement in itself.

But it's Pandora itself that's truly thrilling, thanks to a combination of multilayered 3D technology and Cameron's obsessive nature. Cameron has talked a great deal about how he and his army of concept artists and biologists designed every plant and creature on Pandora. It's an impressive feat (and I can't wait to see that bioluminescence again), but it's only a small component of what makes the planet seem real. Early viewers are describing Avatar as akin to a nature documentary on an alien world, and it goes far beyond glowing flora. When a Banshee lands on a tree or a Thanator runs through the forest, leaves fall. If a creature pounces on a stalk or branch, it splinters. These aren't small details Cameron and his team have inserted for the sake of realism; they're present throughout the early clips. More than that, in 3D, these components exist on different planes, each obeying the laws of physics independent of the others. When Sully first encounters Neytiri, the air is simply stuffed with bugs, embers, and bits of dust, and their depth is such that you imagine you could stick your hand in it and swirl it around. I've been fairly 3D-agnostic until this point; I enjoy the novelty of movies where the 3D reaches out and grabs you, but I've never found it adds much to the experience. Avatar's 3D, which pulls you in instead of reaching out, does create a special experience, that sense that you are actually present, looking inside an entirely invented world.

However, the technology, as amazing as it is, leaves us with a lot of questions. Is there a point to all this spectacle? Is this good filmmaking? Avatar is antithetical to the Hitchcockian mode of filmmaking, where the director carefully controls the audience's gaze. In Avatar, Cameron gleefully surrenders that kind of control, inviting us instead to look all over the screen and try to drink in as much as humanly possible as we go along. In fact, I imagine that a good deal of Avatar's repeat business will come from a sense that viewers missed a lot the first time around. I haven't seen the film in its entirety yet, but I can't help but wonder if all that spectacle distracts from other aspects of the movie. And, if it works well with Cameron's particular brand of filmmaking, will it work equally well with others'?

As for its purpose, Cameron has set it to worldbuilding — and the idea that you can create a global, digital set that you can return to any time. And you can extrapolate big things from that — incredibly detailed video games, franchises set and filmed on many worlds by many filmmakers. But it's important to remember that Cameron and his team built this technology as they went along. Early reviews indicate that Avatar stands up as a movie on its own, but it's also a proof of concept. I can't imagine that Cameron has found the exhaustive — or even the best — uses for his remarkable motion capture and animation technologies. I would love to see what happens when this technology lands in the hands of someone whose craft is animation. Avatar itself might not change all movies forever, but I'll wager that the technology that birthed it will give rise to something wonderful — and stranger than we could have imagined before.

The magazine quotes Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who identifies it as the failure-prone Bulava ballistic missile, launched from a submarine. McDowell said the Russian Navy is in the right geographical position to launch it. He added that Russia has denied that it was their missile, but "this could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

As for why the perfect spiral shape was created:

McDowell says the shape suggests the failure occurred well above the atmosphere. If it had occurred at lower altitudes, atmospheric drag would have caused the missile to fall quickly to Earth, creating a downward-pointing corkscrew pattern whose contrails would have been blown "this way and that" by wind, he told New Scientist.

The Bulava missile has three stages that fire in succession as it climbs up in altitude. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong," McDowell says.

He says the third stage's nozzle, which directs the rocket's exhaust plume, may have fallen off or been punctured, causing the exhaust to come out sideways instead of out the back. "The sideways thrust sends the rocket into a spin, spewing flame as it goes," he says.

"If thrust was terminated right away, then you wouldn't see the spiral," he continues. "The unusual thing this time is that the missile was allowed to carry on firing for a bit after it went wrong."

UPDATE: Jonathan McDowell writes in to say:

The Russians did send out a 'notice to mariners' in advance warning of a rocket launch, and they have now (Dec 10) admitted that there was a launch of the Bulava and that the third stage failed. Hope that answers some of the comments on your page.

via New Scientist

People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

Baccarin plays Anna, the leader of the alien Visitors (or Vs) who come to Earth professing peace and friendship and promising healthcare and advanced technology. And of course, it's all too good to be true. Some pundits have been saying her character is meant to be Barack Obama, and Baccarin seemed to be aware of the comparisons. So we asked her if she thinks she's playing our new president, and she says:

I don't think we're saying Anna is President Obama. But she is the leader of her people, and she is coming down to Earth and offering healthcare, and offering cures for diseases, and things that sort of clean out and give people hope, and there are definite parallels to be drawn and our intentions are to create a show that people relate to. And I think this is something that's been on people's minds, even before Obama... finding hope again, and healthcare, and finding a leader, and someone who can save us from the hole we've gotten ourselves into.

Don't expect Baccarin to play to the cheap seats. One thing Baccarin stressed over and over again, in our interview, is that she's going for a subtle portrayal of Anna, and she never plans to become as out-and-out sinister as Diana, the evil alien leader in the original miniseries.

"We're working with Anna being a little more subtle than in the original," says Baccarin. She wants Anna to be "creepy" and "scary" but also have qualities that the audience can relate to. That said, in the next few episodes, we'll get to see Anna "show her true colors a little more."

Baccarin says her goal is to make the audience feel drawn to Anna, even though they know they shouldn't be:

It's really true of all the characters on the show: We walk a fine line. It's way more interesting to question why they feel they want to follow this character. There should be qualities that [the audience] can identify with, that we see them in ourselves. People identify [with Anna] and feel compelled by her, and feel like they want to follow her... and can't understand why they feel drawn to her. [The audience should be saying,] "I don't know, this isn't right that I'm going for it."

This was something the producers had worked out early on, she adds:

We had discussed early on, when I auditioned, [that] she couldn't be robotic or alien. She had to be nurturing and human, to be allowed into people's lives, so that people would trust her... We created this character who's very calm and controlled and nurturing. You don't see her losing her cool, and you don't see what's behind her motivations. It's like having your neighbor turn out not to be who you thought they were.

This subtle approach means that you have to watch Baccarin carefully to catch the little cues she drops in. The way she flutters her eyelashes. The way she lifts one eyebrow, or looks straight at someone, or looks away. Says Baccarin, "Obviously, Anna lives in a very constrained space, in that she is very precise, but there is a lot of freedom of subtlety and nuances."

I asked Baccarin how she felt about playing a villain after playing the more sympathetic Inara on Firefly, and she responded: "It really is fun. I'm not going to call her a villain. I'm going to say that you said that." (She really is good at the slippery politician thing.)

From Anna's perspective, "she is is being the best leader she can be. And if it's at the expense of a couple of humans, so be it."

Baccarin admits she gets asked whether she'll be eating a live hamster — like, pretty much all the time. She says:

We haven't done it in these [first] four episodes, and I'm bracing myself. And so many people ask about it, I think it's imminent. I think we are going to pay homage to those moments, but not maybe do them the same way — so hopefully I won't have to put a hamster down my throat.

Finally, I asked Baccarin how, as an immigrant from Brazil, she feels about taking part in a show that promotes xenophobia and suspicion of visitors. She says you shouldn't read too much into V:

I think we should all be suspicious of aliens. We're not saying be suspicious of people from other cultures, I think we're saying be suspicious of people from outer space. So we're very safe there. There's a lot of ethnic diversity in our world now, and we're not commenting on that all. It's literally about people coming from another world.

V airs on Tuesday nights for the next three weeks, and then goes away until March due to some kind of sporting event.

The Road leads you to post-apocalyptic Hell on Nov. 25. [Yahoo! Movies]

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

It's not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It's the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we'd get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I've broken up the "human made disaster" into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

That's an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It's not that the moment of destruction is boring; it's that it doesn't even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don't bother to explain what happened at all.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

When the survivors wander around, they're looking at a burned-out shell of a world, but it's still a clean slate. A clean slate full of radiation and cannibals, maybe, but still. I think everyone's had that feeling of wanting to just heave everything out the window and start over. That's what is at the heart of apocalypse stories: the opportunity to rebuild the world in a radically different way.

During the pilgrimage through the wasteland, the survivors – and the readers – are left feeling ostracized from reality. The characters are probably more concerned with where their next meal is coming from, but the reader sees how they are cut loose from the anchors that previously protected us from being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence. The only way to fix it is to find new ways of looking, new patterns to create meaning in the new world.

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

This is hardly the final word; more a collection of observations and theories. I won't claim any more than that, because if there's one thing I learned while researching apocalypses, it's just how much humans like to see patterns in things – and that when patterns start getting too neat, you've done something wrong. There are still some things about the chart I don't understand – the three points where the natural apocalypse overtakes the human apocalypse, for example – and it doesn't take into account the effect that movies or television had on books. As will any discussion of a large genre, there are some necessary overgeneralizations. But it's a starting point – have at it.

Chanda Phelan just graduated from Pomona College, where she completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. You can read her blog at phnuggle.wordpress.com.

Chart by Stephanie Fox!

Let's get this out of the way right away: Jonze's Wild Things is only an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book in the loosest possible sense. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Jonze, whose Adaptation was a dissertation on the impossibility of adapting a literary work to film, has treated the Sendak book as a mere jumping-off point. There are only a handful of incidents in Sendak's book, but at least half of them don't appear in the movie. Instead of using the book's spare narrative as a framework and adding to it, the movie mostly creates a new story from scratch.

In a way, WTWTA is the polar opposite of Watchmen: Zack Snyder faced a 12-book magnum opus of graphic storytelling, and tried to distill it to three hours without losing anything essential or changing anything (except the ending.) Jonze takes Sendak's twelve sentences and expands them to 100 minutes of incidents. And yet, both films wind up feeling lovely but a bit empty, triumphs of gorgeous imagery over substance.

This review is not going to tell you whether Wild Things is good, or whether you'll like it — after talking to tons of people who've seen the movie, I've come to the conclusion that this is such an idiosyncratic, strange movie that it's impossible to predict whether you'll like it or not. So far, everybody I've talked to has either loved it or hated it — and I have a feeling that sharp divide will be the norm. It also may be the sort of movie that you'll only fully appreciate on a third viewing, with the right substances in the mix. (If you want to read an unreservedly rave review of the movie, check out Entertainment Weekly's.)

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilerating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Max, who's around ten, lives with his divorced mom, who's slowly failing at her job and barely making ends meet thanks to her shitty absentee ex-husband. She's dating a new guy, whom Max hates. Meanwhile, Max's older sister, Claire, who used to be his friend, has stopped hanging out with him because she's trying to get in with a cool crowd at school. Max acts out, trying to get people to pay attention to him, but it only makes matters worse — so finally, Max screams "feed me, woman!" at his mom, in front of her new boyfriend, and then actually bites her. He's sent to his room, but he runs away from home, until he finds a boat, which takes him to the land of the Wild Things.

Whether you love or hate this movie will depend most on how you feel about the Wild Things, who are sort of weird and totemic. They look like the creatures in Sendak's book — until they open their mouths.

What comes out of the Wild Things' mouths is a stream of complaints and bitter observations, punctuated by moments of extreme, shining whimsy. It keeps you off guard: The monsters, one and all, seem miserable, upset and perennially disappointed by life, but then they come out with cute, occasionally hilarious lines. While the monsters serve to amplify the conflicts, anxieties and destructive glee inside of Max, they don't really feel like aspects of a child's psyche to me — they come across more like emotionally stunted, narcissistic middle-aged people.

I didn't realize the main monster, Carol, was voiced by James Gandolfini until after I saw the film, because i saw a super-early screening and hadn't read much press before hand. So to me, Carol just sounded like a cranky, neurotic old guy with anger issues. At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

On the other hand, other people I've talked to who've seen the movie found the Wild Things much more convincing, and compelling, as aspects of Max's inner life, made real and massive. So your mileage may indeed vary.

But whatever you think they are, it's made clear that the Wild Things form an utterly dysfunctional family, one where you sense the same arguments have been going on for decades and will continue for decades more. Carol is upset because another one of the monsters, K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) has decided to leave the group and go spend time with her new friends, who turn out to be weird owls that you have to hit with rocks before you can talk to them. Carol is bursting with resentment and neediness, and when we first meet him he's trashing the other Wild Things' houses like an alcoholic, abusive dad. K.W., meanwhile, just acts like she's sick of everyone's shit.

Then there are two other Wild Things, Judith and Ira, who constantly feel neglected and marginalized within the group — Judith complains every few moments that whatever activities the gang of monsters does, she and her companion are pushed to the side. Nobody cares what they think, nobody pays attention to them, etc. There's also a big bull, who's sort of bull-like.

Here's the scene where we get introduced to some of them, and Judith is like "Oh, you don't need to know me, I'm kind of a downer." The tree-destroying thing is cute, though, as is the tongue thing:

So, yeah... dysfunctional family of losers. Who are depressed. A lot.

But it's not all anhedonia — a big point of the film is that Max shows up and shakes up the monsters' dreadful staleness, becoming their King and giving them a whole bunch of new games to play. "We'll take care of each other, and sleep together in a real pile," Max says. Unlike the people in Max's real life, these monsters pay attention to him and are curious about him, and sort of become his minions.

When Max convinces the Wild Things that he's a King, and that he was a King among the Vikings for twenty years already, it's a brilliantly whimsical scene. Max Records, as Max, shines the most in these quirky moments where's spinning a line of amazing B.S., talking about his crazy super-powers and his amazing leadership skills. The "let the Wild Rumpus begin!" sequence is severely fun and insane, culminating in a crazed puppy pile. And later, when Max concocts a crazy scheme to build a huge fort, with a crime lab and spy gadgets and all sorts of other weird superhero/scifi touches, he's the total nerd-kid avatar, with a team of monsters doing his manic bidding.

But you sort of know, all along, that this whole "king" thing will not turn out well — and that's the biggest departure from the book. Forget the fact that the movie dispenses with the book's "bedroom turns into wild jungle" sequence — the biggest change is that it's much clearer that Max is a failed king, and the monsters end up hating him. This happens partly because Max decides to split the monsters into "good guys" and "bad guys," drawing them into a war fought with dirt clods, which quickly turns ugly. Max makes Judith and Ira into "bad guys," exacerbating their persecution complex, and you can just see in this clip the beginning of things going South:

Sorry to give away so much of the movie's plot — this really isn't a movie you'd go see for the plot, though. It's much more about the weird little touches and character quirks, the lush visuals, and the blaring-loud, wordless score by Karen O. and Carter Burwell.

As I said in the beginning, this movie offers the coldest comfort of any film in Spike Jonze's career. It feels like a journey into sheer dysphoria — Max's home life is unrelentingly horrendous, and when he escapes to a fantasy land, it turns out to be even worse. The film's message seems to be that life sucks, growing up sucks, and most of all, any attempt to escape into wildness or fantasy will only turn out even suckier.

I don't think WTWTA is too scary for small children — but I suspect it may be too nihilistic. Teenagers and tweens, though, may love it.

The film reinforces its dark message with an unblinking stare aimed at blank landscapes. When we first meet Max in the "real" world, the world is blanketed with snow, and Jonze's camera zooms in on the unrelenting whiteness. Max builds a snow fort and hides inside, and he appears to be in a blinding snow tunnel. When Max travels to the land of the Wild Things, at first he's in that famous forest/jungle setting, but the film quickly moves to the blank dunes of the Melbourne area, where Jonze filmed. The landscape is meant to reflect the moods of Max and the Wild Things, which grow increasingly joyless and unrelenting.

Here's a bit where Carol and Max walk through a desolate landscape, and Carol talks about how the landscape used to be rocks, and now it's sand, and soon it'll be dust, and who knows what comes after dust? And then Max says the sun is going to die, and Carol tries to put a brave face on that piece of info:

(The film's visuals, it must be said, really are incredible — the film has brilliant design, from the monsters to their weird circular wicker-like buildings.)

If you think of this as a kids' movie, you'll be sadly disappointed. If you think of it as an adventure film, you'll be puzzled. But think of it as a continuation of Jonze's first two movies, and it makes perfect sense. Like Malkovich and Adaptation, WTWTA is about someone who's uneasy in his own skin — Max literally seeks liberation by donning his wolf costume, and this leads him to his adventure — and like the heroes of Malkovich and Adaptation, Max discovers, the hard way, that being someone else is no solution to his problems, but also that it's a kind of trap.

The main difference is that Wild Things feels much more surreal than those first two films, thanks to the weird Jim Henson/CG creatures. And it's about a kid, rather than a thirtysomething or fortysomething guy. In a sense, Wild Things does for the coming-of-age tale what Jonze's first two movies do for the midlife crisis/second chance story: strip away the candy coating on the fantasy to reach the pure existential crisis beneath, and show how insoluble that crisis really is.

New York

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Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

After the District 9 roundtable and a one-on-one with director Neill Blomkamp, we found out a lot about what went on behind the scenes while making the alien feature. And some of the District 9 fact we uncovered may shock you, all quotes are from Blomkamp:

One actor plays all of the talking aliens.

It's only one actor who plays every alien, it's Jason Cope. He plays every single alien.

Most, if not all, of the alien interaction and dialogue with Wikus during the eviction scene was improvised by Jason Cope or the actor Sharlto Copely (Wikus).

So we would film the two of them and then we would go to a different shack. And he'd pretend to evict a new alien. Then we'd go somewhere else and somewhere else. So it was just the two of them. It's the conversations between those two, the actual dialogue and what actually came out of them was totally improved. Any details in words and the language between the two happened right there on the day of shooting. That what makes it feel like they are really communicating...

But stuff like when he walks up in to the shack and says, "this is a gang sign, we're in a gang area right here," we would draw the sign on the wall and he would randomly say it's a gang area. And that meant because he's walking up to a shack that has an alien in it with a whole story that we've written with those guys distilling their fluid and I'm like, "that's interesting you just said that the supporting alien character is a gangster." But if it works, we keep going.

The District 9 alien homes were actually shot in a recently evacuated area of impoverished housing. The homes you see the aliens getting evicted from were homes that humans had recently been kicked out of, for real.

There was a very weird cross over between the film and the reality of filming. We filmed in an area called Chiawelo, which is a suburb of Soweto, which is sort of a suburb of Johannesburg. And there is this thing in Africa called RDP housing, which are government-subsidised housing. Where they will build you a brick house in a different area of the city. And you get put put on a waiting list if you're a South African impoverished resident, until you are able to get one of these houses. So the area we filmed the movie in, what plays as District 9, every single resident in that area was being removed to be put into RDP housing. Although not all of them had been given the green light on the RDP housing, most of them had, but all of them were going to be moved, whether they liked it or not. So we ended up with this open piece of land with all these shacks on it...each day we came to set, there were fewer and fewer people.

As you may know, District 9 was inspired by Neill Blomkamp's short film Alive In Joburg. But what many people don't realize is that he created Alive In Joburg's footage of people being interviewed about aliens, by using real interviews.

I was asking black South Africans about black Nigerians and Zimbabweans. That's actually where the idea came from was there are aliens living in South Africa, I asked "What do you feel about Zimbabwean Africans living here?" And those answers — they weren't actors, those are real answers...

The "Prawn" are from the Andromeda Galaxy.

I think that they [the Prawn] do have a home planet, it's pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they'll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there's much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.

The Year Of The Flood is not quite a sequel to Atwood's acclaimed novel Oryx and Crake, as I mistakenly wrote before. Rather, it's a thematic continuation of Oryx, with a lot of the same elements. Here's the book's official description, from the new website:

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners – a religion devoted to the melding of science, religion, and nature – has long predicted a disaster. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women remain: Ren, a young dancer locked away in a high-end sex club, and Toby, a former God's Gardener, who barricades herself inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived? Ren's bio-artist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy policing force of the ruling powers… As Adam One and his beleaguered followers regroup, Ren and Toby emerge into an altered world, where nothing – including the animal life – is predictable.

The new website includes T-shirt designs promoting her made-up brands like Chickie-Nobs, Anoo Yoo Spa (which promises "Total reskinning"), God's Gardeners, and ScalesAndTails. And there's an excerpt, which shows us the novel starts with a fairly pastoral view of the world (mostly) without people:

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, so if she slips and topples there won't be anyone to pick her up.

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it's been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.

There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there's no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier? Toby has no idea. Unlike some of the other Gardeners – the more wild-eyed or possibly overdosed ones – she has never been under the illusion that she can converse with birds.

To promote this new novel, Atwood is planning something bigger than just your usual book tour. Rather, she wants to do a giant theatrical piece, featuring three actors and a choir:

Margaret Atwood has written a one-hour theatrical performance based on the book.

The piece will include three actors and a choir, with Atwood serving as narrator.

The author is scheduled to present the show in six Canadian cities, as well as in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Sweden.

"There have been many challenges, but it's a chance to break free from the traditional structure of a book tour," Atwood said in a statement.

"I felt this particular novel deserved a more complex presentation. It's also a great chance to work with other creative minds and see their interpretation of the story come to light."

Local actors and choirs will be used for each performance, a move the author's publisher says is designed to reduce "the carbon footprint of a travelling cast."

But that's not all — on her Twitter stream, Atwood mulls over the idea of selling stuffed animals of the weird creatures in her book:

Thinking about Boston Biblio's sugggestion — plushies of the genespliced animals in YOTF -tx! Good thought!