Salon.com > The Future

A brief history of the condom

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Bill Gates has already put some of his money toward building a better toilet, and now he’s turning his attention to another kind of bodily function. The Microsoft billionaire is putting up money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in hopes of spurring enterprising inventors to make a better condom.

Though condoms are cheap to make and fairly reliable both for contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, many men do not use them due to a perceived trade-off between protection and pleasure.

Al Gore: Fix the filibuster, talk about climate change, ensure privacy online

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

More than 1,800 years ago, the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, wrote, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” His advice is still sound, though soon after his reign the Roman Empire began the long process of dissolution that culminated in its overthrow 300 years later.

Arming ourselves with the “weapons of reason” is necessary but insufficient. The emergence of the Global Mind presents us with an opportunity to strengthen reason-based decision making, but the economic and political systems within which we implement even the wisest decisions are badly in need of repair. Confidence in both market capitalism and representative democracy has fallen because both are obviously in need of reform. Fixing both of these macro-tools should be at the top of the agenda for all of us who want to help shape humanity’s future.

Miranda July faces “The Future”

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:30:00 +0000

When I began working on this article about the artist, writer, filmmaker and actress Miranda July, I had a back-and-forth via email with several co-workers about whether or not she made our teeth hurt. It seems to be a universal problem, and by "universal" I mean that it preoccupies a very small number of people in the so-called creative classes. A lengthy profile of July by Katrina Onstad that ran as a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, while full of useful information and interesting anecdotes, was primarily structured as a defense against unsourced or anonymous charges that July is a twee and precious female Ur-hipster.

Let's put the whole thing more simply: You're willing to take a movie seriously that has a talking cat in it or you're not. And if you are, I have no hesitation in proclaiming "The Future," July's alternately hilarious and shocking second feature, as the best talking-cat movie in cinema history. July has been making videos and art projects, and writing short fiction, since the late '90s, but came to the notice of a much wider world with her striking debut film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," an ensemble comedy that won the Caméra d'Or (for best first film) at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. That movie's success propelled her to far more fame than she expected, inspiring an adulatory fan base and an inexplicably large legion of Internet haters (motivated, as far as I can tell, by old-fashioned jealousy).