Noted


The Final Shot of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma

After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, [...]

Ted Hughes and the Classics

Ted Hughes and the Classics

Roger Rees (ed.), Ted Hughes and the Classics. Classical Presences. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 348. ISBN 978-0-19-922971-0. $135.00.
From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:
There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or [...]

The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations

The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
by Daniel Heller-Roazen
295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009
FORTHCOMING
from Zone Books:
The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As [...]

Memory/Trauma in Distant Voices, Still Lives

Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language [...]

Two Theories on How to Keep Your Job

In a CNN article on “How to keep your job” Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame) recommends that you approach your boss and preemptively volunteer yourself for a wage cut. So, even as money keeps flowing to the top, mass media outlets are now recommending that workers volunteer themselves for further wage cuts, all under the name [...]

Postcards and Text Messages

A Los Angeles Times article on “Why text messages are limited to 160 characters” reveals an interesting connection between old and new media: Friedhelm Hillebrand, the man more or less responsible for this figure, consulted postcards in his search for an ideal length for short messages.
Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that space, [...]

Privacy and death-scene photos of deceased relatives

Daniel J. Solove of Concurring Opinions recounts the legal difficulties surrounding “the tragic story about a family being harassed by the spread of death-scene images of their daughter, who was killed in an automobile accident. The photos of Nikki Catsouras were particularly gruesome — Nikki was decapitated in the crash. According to the article, soon [...]

Juan Cole on “100 miles from Islamabad”

Juan Cole debunks the Obama administration’s and the media’s Pakistani Taliban threat fantasy:
As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, [...]

Republicans Against Pandemic Preparedness

It seems that the GOP considers even pandemic preparadness a form of welfarism:
When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.
Obey and other advocates [...]

The first fully compostable snack chip bag

SunChips, Frito-Lay’s popular line of multigrain snacks, will introduce for Earth Day 2010 the first fully compostable snack chip bag made from plant-based materials. Packaging Digest describes the key design innovations behind SunChips’ new packaging:
Current snack food packaging has three layers: a printed outer layer with packaging visuals/graphics, an inner layer, which serves as a [...]

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