Salon.com > Christine Kenneally

Terrorist wannabes

Thu, 20 Sep 2001 19:00:00 +0000

The unnecessary evacuation of Grand Central Station began for Tom Petrella of Oren's Daily Roast at 9.15 a.m. last Thursday when a police officer ran into his store yelling, "Get the fuck out of the terminal. Now!" A few minutes earlier, Petrella realized that something was wrong when a crowd of 50 people surged up the subway stairs next to his coffee bar. At that time of day, he said, people should have been heading down. But the crowd moved up and out, making a sharp U-turn to take a nearby exit onto 42nd Street. Shortly afterward, police officers ran into the terminal to evacuate it. Petrella sent his frightened staff out straightaway, locked up and then joined the huge crowds on the streets outside. The terminal was later closed for the rest of the day. Petrella spoke to MTA police who said someone had placed a package on one of the platforms and immediately run away from it. "The motivations of these people," Petrella said, "are beyond comprehension."

Coma studies and jungle madness

Thu, 07 Jun 2001 19:00:00 +0000

In the form of elementary particles, black holes and other such nerdy delights, science in fiction has long been the province of Trekkers, computer programmers and clerks in secondhand-book stores. Indeed, much has been made of "The Real Science Behind the X-Files" and "The Physics of Star Trek," but the relative movement of time, just like sands through the hourglass, is a concept familiar to anyone who has watched "Days of Our Lives." Spurning the showoffy special effects and spaceship sets of other shows, "Days" does relativity on a domestic scale: Small misunderstandings last an eternity, pregnancies come to term in weeks and marriages evaporate faster than you can say "I made sweet love to the best man's twin brother the night before our wedding."

But gently flicking at the boundaries of space and time is child's play for "DOOL," which prefers psychosurgery to particle physics. In fact, the show sits firmly on the cutting edge of 21st century scientific research -- long before the completed draft of the human genome heralded the new sexiness of the biological sciences, "Days" was swapping brains, transplanting memories and shuffling identities galore. It was Stephen Hawking, clearly a "DOOL" fan, who said, "Today's science fiction is often tomorrow's science fact." Thus, here follows a brief guide to the real science facts behind the 35-year-old serial and its answers to some of the most important scientific questions of our day.

“The Making of Intelligence” by Ken Richardson

Wed, 09 Aug 2000 19:12:00 +0000

Intelligence may be hard to define, but there's one thing you can be sure of after reading Ken Richardson's "The Making of Intelligence": Whatever it is, psychologists don't have much of it. Psychology is a "backwards discipline," according to Richardson, who paints a picture of Laurel-and-Hardyesque psychologists who "seem to heave a sigh of relief when they feel they can attribute something to a genetic code ('Whew, I'm glad that that's off my mind')." Richardson outlines the confused, as he sees it, history of intelligence studies, from the early 20th century crackpots who explained poverty as a function of natural intelligence (some have it, some don't, tough luck) to developments in modern cognitive science such as the battery of new surgical and imaging techniques for exploring the brain. He advances an alternative theory that sidesteps the differences between individuals and focuses on the intelligence of the human species as a whole. Everyone is intelligent, he says; what a person scores on an IQ test is far less important than why the species has evolved the particular mental abilities it has. Not surprisingly, he makes an impassioned case for abolishing IQ altogether.

G'day, Caesar!

Tue, 16 May 2000 15:30:00 +0000

In the movies, accents of the ancient past are never easy. For "Gladiator," the Ridley Scott epic in its second week as box-office champ, Hollywood decreed that the lovely diphthongs (and sometimes triphthongs) of Australian English do not appropriately signal the stature and nobility of a Roman general turned slave.

So for his role as Maximus, Russell Crowe overlaid his native accent with a somewhat arbitrary mix of general American and formal British, known as British Received Pronunciation. But are his "I may be in the Colosseum but my heart is in Londinium" vowels any closer to the vernacular of Rome than his native Aussie? Well, notus exactlyus.

British, American and Australian varieties of English are, of course, equally distant from gladiator-speak, i.e., second century Latin. So how are decisions about accents made for a film like "Gladiator," in which the language of the characters is not just foreign but spoken only by small bands of classics professors and a dwindling number of oppressed boarding school students?

How the other half eats

Thu, 30 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Twice a year in New York, the doors of haute and hallowed eateries such as
Aquavit, the Russian Tea Room and the Gotham Bar and Grill are thrown open
to the hoi polloi in a gesture of seasonal goodwill and P.R. savvy. The bearer of a mere $20 note (tax and tip not included) can whip out a Zagat guide, choose the place he or she has always dreamed of going to and, if it is one of the 86 participating restaurants, lunch on delights usually reserved for one's CEO
friends.

I sampled five of these restaurants during Winter Restaurant Week (Jan. 31 to Feb. 4) -- Istana at the New York Palace (new and relatively unknown), the Gotham Bar and Grill (sort of new and famous), Aquavit (slightly newer and famous), the Russian Tea Room (old and famous) and Tavern on the Green (very old, and famous enough to secretly replace the fine coffee it normally serves with Folger's instant). The prix fixe menus offered three entrees (with the
exception of Gotham, which offered only two) and at least two appetizers
and two desserts. Without exception, all the meals offered crazy value.

Throw another stereotype on the barbie

Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Have you ever eaten roo? Not many Australians have either, but we Aussies
do insist on serving it in any restaurant we open overseas. You can try it
with salad in downtown Manhattan at the newly opened Eight Mile Creek,
recently praised by the New York Times for its fabulous food and restrained
decor. Or you can order it from the joey menu at the Outback
Steakhouse in the form of a "Grilled Cheese-A-Roo" or the inexplicably
hyphenless, "Mac A Roo 'N Cheese." To compare the two restaurants is also to
compare different conceptions of Australia, from the sophisticated to the
crass, from the real to the fake. The carefully prepared culinary
exotica at Eight Mile Creek is without doubt worth the trip, but is it
really any more Australian than the American food with funny names at the Outback Steakhouse?

It's a bird, it's a plane — it's SkyMall!

Tue, 21 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

It's like one of those whacked-out '60s psychology experiments, where
researchers who have burnt through all their LSD funding force scared baby
monkeys to suckle from wire mothers. But these ain't monkeys, baby, they're human beings, and they've been hermetically sealed into a metal container that tilts upward and downward, shakes violently without warning and makes very loud roaring noises. They've been locked in with hundreds of other humans; they don't know each other, they smell funny and they're
literally strapped into the seating pattern of the wedding from hell.

The
talkers are next to the misanthropes, the kids are next to the people with
mononucleosis, and the vegetarians are sharing an armrest with the Sausage
King from DeKalb. They have been deprived of all normal stimulation, and they are all aware that their metal box is 30,000 feet up, and nothing is
actually holding it there.

But they don't want to think about that, don't
want to think about that, don't want to think about that; a little
distraction would be just great. And what's this in the little pouch in front of them? It's not an in-flight mag, it's not a sick-bag It's SkyMall! The dream come true of all mad retailers and direct-sales henchmen everywhere -- the "Clockwork Orange" of gifting.

Do what you want and the identity crisis will follow

Wed, 30 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Is my notion of what constitutes success and failure in a career flawed or is following one's heart the short road to hell? I used to be pretty sure about the answer to this. Seven years ago, I embarked on a Ph.D. at Cambridge; funded by a scholarship to live and study in England, I began to make friends with people who not only thought I had an accent but found it charming. Success was a simple state in which personal satisfaction and social approval were the same thing. I thought I was doing OK. Actually, I was pretty pleased with myself. People seemed to think I was doing OK. So OK then, no problem. I planned to: a) finish my thesis, b) get a good job at a great university, c) do some brilliant research and d) make some money. Simple. Brilliant!

It wasn't that I didn't have a philosophy of failure, but I just didn't think about it. Since finishing with graduate school and moving from the fens of England to the cornfields of Iowa, however, I have had ample time to reflect upon its many grubby nuances. Initially, failure was pursuing an academic career when I no longer wanted to. Failure was betraying my heart's secret dream and never admitting to another soul that I wanted to write a novel or, worse, never putting creative pen to paper. Most of all, failure was not admitting that my dissertation topic was mindfuckingly boring and should not be inflicted on a dog.