A collection of articles you might take some time to read:
This Stanford Medical School journal article considers the question of at what point is a patient “dead enough” to ethically permit organ harvesting. Clinical standards of “brain death” developed in the 1970s and ’80s are giving way to a determination of death based on the cessation of cardiac activity alone as a way of procuring organs for transplantation very shortly after “death” to address the time-critical nature of transplantation, but it has met with resistance from medical ethicists and physicians.
It’s Opening Day at Fenway Park today, and thousands of Boston sports fans have suddenly developed all sorts of 24-hour illnesses that prevent them from going to work, but not from going to the baseball game, even though the Red Sox are off to their worst start since 1945. The Boston sports fan is a particular and peculiar beast, and this n+1 article about sports radio in Boston offers some insight into the nature of the animal. And I *do* mean animal.
If you’re a federal employee, you might just find yourself with plenty of spare time on your hands by the end of the day today. The Republican jihad on America continues full-blast, and just in case you haven’t been paying attention, they aren’t going to stop until they have destroyed everything in the middle, leaving a nation of serfs and super-millionaires only. Joseph Stiglitz, one of the economists who tried to warn us all about the economic collapse in 2008, has written a piece for Vanity Fair entitled “Of The 1%, By The 1%, For The 1%” that now tries to warn us about the perils of the wealth inequalities 30 years of Republican slash-and-burn economics have given us. You might also read this opinion piece at MarketWatch from a couple of weeks ago that sums it up neatly: “Tax the super-rich now or face a revolution”. (Personally, I am in favor of revolution)
The always-awesome “Beware Of The Blog” from ur-radio station WFMU recently had this piece about David Letterman’s early years as a performer, and how he developed his comedy through the 1970s equivalent of the old vaudeville circuit — radio DJ, local weatherman, late-night movie host, stand-up, bit performer, the works. It includes the stories of a number of other famous names from 1970s comedy, and revisits a lot of obscure TV shows from the era.
I also liked this Popular Mechanics article that’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to work at an Apple Store. There’s a lot of Kool-Aid you have to drink, apparently, and despite the casual appearance of the workers, it doesn’t sound like very much fun at all for what is essentially a glorified malljob. Better off sticking to the Playmobil version.
Finally, if you’re a student of television, you will immediately appreciate this Splitsider.com article called “In Defense of the Multi-Camera Sitcom”. As the very genre of the sitcom itself has waxed and waned over the years, the production format has similarly seen shifts in popularity. The multi-camera style features three or more cameras filming or taping what amounts to a live performance of an episode, played in front of a studio audience like a theatrical production. The single-camera style is shot more like a movie, with individual takes of every angle in every scene. Each has its advantages, both in terms of creativity and budget. The 1970s were a Golden Age of multi-camera shows like “All In The Family” and “Mary Tyler Moore”, while today’s sitcoms are predominantly single-camera.
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