This March 27, millions of people will gleefully splatter each other with brightly colored powders and water in celebration of Holi, a centuries-old Hindu holy day. The annual ritual, also known as the Festival of Colors, is observed mostly in northern India, but in recent years has been embraced by non-Hindu fans of multihued fun from Australia to Utah. Photograph by Poras Chaudhary ... Read More
Turns out fast-forwarding through commercials with your TiVo isn’t exactly a new concept. Irritated audiences have been looking for ways to tune out broadcast advertisements since at least the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, Professor Gleason W. Kenrick of what is now Tufts University developed a machine that could be attached to a radio to automatically “delete” ads. It also targeted excessive on-air talking, which was apparently just as irksome pre–Rush Limbaugh as it is now. The device was a clunky looking, dial-studded box, but the March 1934 issue of Radio-Craft magazine ... Read More
George Nickel was on the last can of a case of beer when it dawned on him that his dachshund was missing. He’d been drinking a lot since coming back from the military hospital to his home in Boise, Idaho. That was understandable. His tour in Iraq as a U.S. Army combat engineer had ended with a roadside bomb attack that killed the rest of the crew on his armored vehicle and landed him in the hospital for 11 months. To top it off, his wife, an army sergeant, was away in Texas awaiting her own deployment to Iraq. Nickel insisted to his friends that he was fine, but he knew he wasn’t. By that ... Read More
Listen to Life in the Data, Episode 2, featuring Daniel Duane: It all started with 229, 178, and 24.8, back in 2006. Before that, I thought of my health in words: surfer, jogger, farmers’-market shopper, nonsmoker, prudent father of two young girls. Put another way, I thought I lived too sensibly to worry about cholesterol. Then I discovered French cooking and home butchery, started buying whole hogs and keeping all those chops in a freezer. Plus, I turned 38. I’m not sure what it was about 38; maybe the view it provided of 40. I decided to get a checkup. That first number, 229, ... Read More
ON THE EVENING of November 18, in Mobile, Alabama, a young newspaper reporter named Robert McClendon sat through a performance by the Mobile Symphony Orchestra while quietly updating his Twitter feed. The program that night featured Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, a passionate work that put McClendon in a reflective state of mind. Exactly ten minutes later, at 9:58 p.m., the thought came to him: At 10:02, the orchestra plunged toward Beethoven’s finale, and McClendon leaned forward in his tweet: And finally, at 10:06, release: Those who prefer experiencing ... Read More
LAST JUNE, AUSTRALIA completed its twenty-first consecutive year of economic growth. That’s a record, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan pointed out, no other advanced economy can come close to matching. It’s even more impressive given that this performance has spanned the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, the dot-com boom and bust, and the international financial cataclysm triggered by Lehman Brothers’ fall in 2008. During each of these economic calamities, local and international doomsayers were quick to predict that, this time, Australia’s good run would come to an ... Read More
Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change By Andrew T. Guzman (Oxford University Press, 249 pages) A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis By William F. Hewitt (University of New Hampshire Press, 304 pages) I'M WRITING THIS a few blocks from Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, where business owners are still cleaning up after the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy in October. Walking down Van Brunt Street a few weekends ago, I stepped over mildewed Sheetrock and around piles of corroded electrical equipment: ... Read More
Imagine your car needs a new transmission. It’s going to cost $2,000. Can you scrape that together within the month? If so, you’re better off than nearly half your fellow Americans. We’re used to thinking of the nation’s economic woes in terms of unemployment. But even our sobering jobless rate masks a deeper economic sickness. In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that 44 percent of Americans say they would have trouble coming up with two grand in 30 days if they needed to. These “financially fragile” households—one medical bill or busted furnace away ... Read More
Elaborate greetings are the norm, I’ve found, when one enters a Central African village. So it was a surprise when I noticed that many people weren’t shaking hands the morning I arrived in Tiringoulou, a town of about 2,000 people in one of the remotest corners of the Central African Republic, in March 2010. I soon found out the reason: the day before, a traveler passing through town on a Sudanese merchant truck had, with a simple handshake, removed two men’s penises. As best I could reconstruct from witness accounts, the stranger had stopped to purchase a cup of tea at the market. ... Read More
