Making Science Cool Again
Also under review: the best Iraq war film to date, the lame-ass newseum, Salvadorian food, and Fred Kaplan’s latest hit.
By Kay Steiger, Daniel Strauss, Emily Rutherford, Jake Blumgart, and Matt Zeitlin
July 17, 2009
Look at what science can do! (AP Photo, file)
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
Published: July 20, 2009
This week marked the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, but despite technological advancement, science is worse off today than it was back then. One of the few good things that came out of the Cold War was a strong emphasis on pushing scientific research. Today’s scientists must advocate science for science’s sake. Journalist Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science and Storm World) and scientist Sheril Kirshbaum, who blog together at The Intersection for Discover magazine, wrote Unscientific America about this very battle.
The book covers scientific education, the bickering over global warming, the intellectual deficits of media conglomeration, and even why Hollywood films suck so much in just 132 pages. Those unfamiliar with the scientific activist community should definitely read this book. Those who never stopped to wonder why at how Volcano was scientifically impossible and why that might be a bad thing should definitely read this book.
The big problem I had is that Unscientific America just doesn’t have that much actual science in it—more often it focuses on the political and cultural reasons that science has fallen off the national radar. I guess that it’s a gateway book, getting readers to peruse those science blogs regularly and think critically about the latest disaster flick. But as someone who reads The Intersection and other scientific blogs regularly, I found it somewhat lacking.
Still, Unscientific America is a book that makes an important point. Science lost a lot of ground under the Bush administration. Things are more promising under Obama’s leadership, but there’s still a long way to go. Making science “cool” is part of it. Federally funding good science through the National Institute of Health and at colleges and universities is another. Moving to more comprehensive scientific reporting and writing is sill another. But one piece, getting Congress to approach legislation with a scientific mindset, might be the most challenging part of all.
6 out of 10 not-so-mad scientists
-Kay Steiger
This film will definitely hurt your locker.
The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Summit Entertainment
Released: Oct. 10, 2008
The Hurt Locker is unique among the emerging genre of modern war films. It’s about the U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team—basically the Army bomb squad in Iraq circa 2004. There’s a minimal amount of corny heroic moments and a bearable amount of blood. Yet it helps illustrate that war is horrific.
The movie centers on Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a super calm, adrenaline addicted, bomb specialist who puts on a camouflage Michellin man-style bomb suit to disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs). His colleagues, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), act as James’ bodyguards.
Two elements drive this movie. One is its mastery of what makes the viewer tense, and there’s nothing more suspenseful than disarming bombs. The other is how the characters deal with their job. Quite simply they don’t. How could they?
Obviously this takes a toll on the film’s heroes who, well, aren’t really heroes. They’re just the boys down the street who somehow found themselves doing an extremely dangerous job in Iraq. Sanborn and Eldridge find themselves living in a constant state of fear while James becomes addicted to the rush of job. It’s a hellish way to live. That’s the triumph of The Hurt Locker: The desire for Sanborn, Eldridge, and James to survive, both mentally and physically. As a viewer, it becomes overwhelming. Any of us could be Sanborn, Eldridge or James, and that’s what’s truly horrific about war.
10 out of 10 defused IEDs
-Daniel Strauss
This museum is all style and no substance, depressingly like news today. (Flickr/ajstarks)
The Newseum
555 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, D.C.
Visited: July 12, 2009
Everyone I know who has been to the Newseum has given it rave reviews, so my expectations were rather high when I went there last weekend. I was a bit let-down by most of the exhibits, which were sensationalist and not enormously pertinent to actual journalism. The temporary "G-Men and Journalists" exhibit, displaying gangsters and mass murderers whom employees of the U.S. government had brought to justice, was particularly irrelevant. The media coverage tie-ins seemed an afterthought, as if the exhibit’s creators said to themselves, "Oh wait, this is going to be in the Newseum. How can we fit in news?"
The 9/11 exhibit was maudlin; the Berlin Wall exhibit, while really cool, would have fit better in a history museum exhibit about the Cold War. In general, the Newseum’s creators didn’t seem to have very close ties to the real-life world of journalism—I was particularly irritated by the fact that a display about new media didn’t mention blogs once, and its blurb on Twitter seemed to have been written by someone who had never used the platform.
The Newseum redeemed itself a bit with the "Story of News" exhibit, which presents key events in American and world history from the 16th century to the present, as told through newspaper and magazine front pages. The diversity of events and of sources is impressive, and I could have spent twice as long as I did reading each and every front page. I would have been happier if the Newseum only included this exhibit (and the stunning room of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos), and then maybe charged me half the admission.
Ultimately, the Newseum is a disconcerting metaphor for dying industry. The story the museum tells is overly flashy, attempting to bring in a new audience. It is so over-the-top, in fact, that it obscures the core of good content that sadly only generates interest from a very select group.
4 out of 10 flashy high-resolution displays
-Emily Rutherford
Joan Didion’s still got it. (Flickr/ joeywan)
Pupusas
Washington, D.C.
Eaten: Summer 2009
One of the best parts about living in a major American city is the diverse array of tasty treats available at your slightest whim. The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area is home to a particularly toothsome morsel I’ve yet to find anywhere else: pupusas.
Gridskipper gets the description exactly right when they wrote, “For those gringos not in the know, [pupusas are] the quintessential Central American comfort food: fried cornmeal patties stuffed with grilled-cheese goodness and piled high with curtido (pickled cabbage), then sprinkled with vinegary hot sauce.” Other filings include pork, beans, and squash (yum). I tend to forgo the hot sauce, but the pickled cabbage tastes much better than it sounds: think coleslaw without the mayonnaise.
Pupusas are a staple of the Salvadoran diet, although their popularity has spread across the isthmus. During the brutal civil war that plagued El Salvador throughout the eighties (helpfully funded by former President Ronald Reagan) millions of Salvadorans fled the country. Many settled in the Washington, D.C. area which accounts for our unusually large Salvadoran population—and our unusually large number of pupuserias to choose from.
There has been spirited commentary among afiscidados as to where the best pupusas can be found. My top three picks, in no particular order.
1. Pupuseria San Miguel. On Irving Street in Mt. Pleasant, a couple blocks down from the Columbia Heights metro.
2. La Casita. This wonderful pupuseria and market is Silver Spring also serves delicious tacos (well under $2).
3. Irene’s Pupusas. Literally the only reason to go to Wheaton.
Lastly, pupusas are damn cheap. I’ve never purchased one for over $1.75. So when you feel the drunk hunger take you this weekend, go get one with the change left over from your Steel Reserve.
9 out of 10 soft-tortilla, biscuit-like things stuffed with yumminess
-Jake Blumgart
By the end of this book, 1959 will own you.
1959: The Year That Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan
Published: June 15, 2009
Although the late-1960s is an era generally considered to be the time when America truly changed, the mid-to-late 1950s deserve a lot of credit. The Supreme Court ruled on Brown v Board of Education in 1954, Alan Ginsberg published Howl in 1956, and Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. These events served as catalysts for the Civil Rights Movement, the Beat Generation, and the Space Race, respectively. But Fred Kaplan argues that 1959 was “the year that everything changed.” It was then that a documentary by Mike Wallace about the Nation of Islam aired, the Soviets launched the first satellite to go into heliocentric orbit, and William Burroughs published Naked Lunch. These events each marked milestones in their respective cultural or political movements, but hardly the most crucial or important ones.
Each chapter is a short cultural history which range from the opening of the Guggenheim to Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue to the first American military deaths in Vietnam. Of course, one does not come away thinking that 1959 was really The Year Everything Changed, but it doesn’t really matter. Kaplan’s book helps us recognize that the mid-to-late 1950s were a time when American culture was changing rapidly, and most important, paved the way for the truly tumultuous, disruptive change that would later occur in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Kaplan is equally deft writing about geopolitics as he is about jazz. (Kaplan happens to be both a jazz critic and Slate’s foreign policy columnist.) It’s best to look at the book as more of a compilation of things Fred Kaplan finds interesting, and even better, an opening to actually read Naked Lunch or Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself or to view the de Koonings and Pollacks that adorn the walls in Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum. If you do all that, 1959 won’t be the year that everything changed, but it could end up being the year that changed you.
8 out of 10 cultural and political movements Fred Kaplan thinks are cool
-Matt Zeitlin
Kay Steiger is acting editor of Campus Progress. Daniel Strauss, Emily Rutherford, Jake Blumgart, and Matt Zeitlin are staff writers at Campus Progress.
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