We bring you our five favourite links and articles from around the internet this week.
Playing with your food
Ernie Button really, really loves cereal. He’s spent the past decade working on a series of photographs that ‘explore the texture, color and marketing wrapped up in these niblets of nourishment’. Takes playing with your food to a whole new level. Maybe it’ll catch on for kidults? ‘The landscapes were often influenced by the Arizona desert that surrounds him, but other times he let the shape of the cereal guide the project.’
How Hurricane Sandy reminded us that science is real
There’s a terrific (if ominous) article in the New York Review of Books about the inevitability of Hurricane Sandy in an age of global warming. Bill McKibben points out that researchers had been warning of a disaster just like this, and had even produced documents describing the exact risk to the New York subway system. Seas are rising faster in the northeastern United States than almost anywhere else on the planet.
The same researchers who predicted events like this week’s horror have warned that unless we cease burning coal and gas and oil the planet’s temperature – already elevated by a degree – will climb another four or five. At which point ‘civilization’ will be another word for ‘ongoing emergency response’.
Wearable literary fashion
No, we’re not talking about black-framed prescription glasses for hipsters, berets for poets or lots of black for all publishing folk … the Guardian has some examples of book-based fashion wear. Want the Anna Karenina look? Banana Republic has a clothing range inspired by the movie. How about some Catcher in the Rye sneakers? And one fashion designer, Carlos Campos, has created a whole collection inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
Barack Obama, David Simon and the death of normal
David Simon (creator of The Wire and former journalist) has written about what the re-election of Obama, and the coalition of disparate voters who returned him to the presidency, means for a changing America. His conclusion: white men are no longer the definition of normal. ‘There is no normal.’
America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions.
Hitchcock: The Movie
A new movie about the making of Psycho stars Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock, Helen Mirren as his wife, Alma, and Scarlett Johanssen as Janet Leigh. Judging from this trailer, it looks promising.
Hitchcock will be released in Australian on 10 January 2013.
Speaking about filming that famous shower scene, Scarlett Johanssen said:
You have got to be brave, get into the shower, and face Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock jabbing you in the face with a 12-inch kitchen knife. As much as Anthony Hopkins is a pussycat, he’s terrifying. Maybe I watched Silence of the Lambs too many times when I was a kid. Maybe I was having some flashbacks. So I didn’t need too much preparation for the scene.
