The Sentinel News Feed

Ever take a closer look at all the tiny old man baby stills from David Fincher’s new backwards aging tale The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button? Did you find yourself remarking at how the little old man resembled the younger (looking) bigger and taller version that Brad Pitt plays? That’s because new special effects technology allowed the filmmakers to put Pitt’s face on that wrinkled, baby body.

11.04.08 | Holiday Movies - ‘Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ - From Old Age to Cradle - NYTimes.com

“Mary Shelley created a monster out of her “waking dream,” but how much of the original “Frankenstein” was actually written by her husband, Percy? A new edition of the earliest recoverable manuscript of this much-altered novel shows his writing and editing were substantial.”

10.31.08 | Who wrote the original Frankenstein? Lynda Pratt TLS

“Why do so many evangelical teens get pregnant? The New Yorker looks at what “no sex before marriage” actually means in the Bible Belt. Abstinence, it turns out, is not 100 percent effective.”

10.31.08 | Dept. of Disputation: Red Sex, Blue Sex: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

“I thought I had seen enough “Obama has great design” stories, but Michael Johnson has put together a terrific summary of the ways that art and graphics have been used by the candidates and their advocates this US election season. Especially impressive is the roundup of Shepard Fairey homages.”

10.30.08 | Democracy, designers and Obama - the johnson banks thought for the week (Via DesignObserver)

A science fiction Web site produces a graph suggesting that the number of zombie movies rises in periods of war or unrest. Is there a causal connection? We don’t know, but we are definitely in the age of “Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!” right now. Not to mention “Zombie Strippers.”

10.30.08 | Chart Porn: War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production

“Top sushi chefs who serve only what they want how they want it are the new Soup Nazi. Don’t scrape the wasabi off your sashimi, and don’t order the California roll - these sushi chefs have very sharp knives.”

10.27.08 | Sushi Bullies - WSJ.com

“A journal publishes for the first time a speech by Leonard Bernstein given 22 years ago to a small group at Harvard — one that “feels eerily current.” It’s about cultures of fear: ‘This is the way the world lives, is practiced in living—existing in terms of an enemy.’”

10.27.08 | The American Scholar - Something Called Terrorism - By Leonard Bernstein

Facebook is in the living room. ”A consumer poll done in the second quarter found that 75% of Internet users participate in some form of social media, up from 56% in 2007.”

10.24.08 | Forrester: Social Web Now Mainstream

“The 151-year old general interest magazine The Atlantic is known for championing the “American idea” in all its diversity and for exhibiting a curiosity for topics ranging from politics to design. The result can range from Andrew Sullivan’s prescient and influential essay “Why Obama Matters” to Corby Kummer’s 2,300-word treatise on apples. When Pentagram undertook a redesign of the Atlantic — the eighth in its history — the goal was to establish an intelligent and striking framework for the magazine’s wide-ranging editorial voice. Working with the magazine’s editor James Bennet, publisher Justin Smith, and art director Jason Treat, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman embarked on a quest to discover what Bierut called “the right visual analogue for a distinctive editorial voice.”

Here’s a look behind the scenes at the redesign of an icon of American journalism.

10.24.08 | New Work: The Atlantic | New at Pentagram | Pentagram

“We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.”

10.24.08 | Op-Ed Columnist - Rebranding the U.S. With Obama - NYTimes.com

The British Library on Thursday releases for the first time recordings of 57 British and American literary icons. Marvel at Arthur Conan Doyle “battily explaining” telepathy; Gertrude Stein “incomprehensibly explaining how she writes”; and Raymond Chandler “drunkenly slurring his way through an interview with Ian Fleming.”

10.23.08 | Now on CD: library’s treasure | Books | The Guardian

“Time photographer Callie Shell has snapped an entire collection of candid shots of Barack Obama, some grand and sweeping, others mundanely human. ”Senator Obama was doing press interviews by telephone in a holding room between events. Sometime later as he was getting ready to begin his event, he asked me if I was photographing his shoes. When I said yes, he told me that he had already had them resoled once since he entered the race a year earlier.”

10.23.08 | Callie Shell - Obama - Digital Journalist

“As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could say in the game only by borrowing.  When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”

A quote from FRD’s former FED Chairman, Marriner S. Eccles (in 1951) summed up the factors that contributed to the depression of the 30s in a  way that illustrates the current economic climate better than most of the reasons I’ve read of late.

A critic decries the global “sugar-rush appetite for architectural icons.” As in Norman Foster’s Peace Pyramid in Kazakhstan and Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television building. They’re part of “the commercial stampede to produce cheap thrills” rather than “more engaging, humane, and affecting buildings and places.”

10.21.08 | Empty vessels: eye-con architecture - Features, Art & Architecture - The Independent