Zombies are supposed to be dead but still walking around. The horror is, among other things, an existential one: that our dead are coming for us, relentless in their pursuit to reduce us to their condition. We see these shambling, decaying bodies, and are reminded: on some level, that’s us. Inevitably. No matter how hard and how long we fight. A zombie is a particularly hideous memento mori.Of course, you can take that basic horror and ramify it with specific social/cultural/political points, as Romero and others have done, but you build on that base of existential horror.
The modern “viral” zombie is almost a complete inversion of this. The group doesn’t inevitably and hopelessly succumb; instead, there’s the excitement of watching them (some of them) defeat and escape from the plague. Modern zombie movies are fantasies of election – we identify with the survivors, and so become convinced that we would be like them. And these survivors seem so much more alive than we do – partly because they’ve escaped the constraints of civilization, but not only because of that. Since zombies are death, that fantasy of election is a fantasy of escaping death entirely – precisely the opposite of what a zombie is supposed to make us feel.
Jeff Atwood, answering the question, “What’s your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?”:Do not under any circumstances keep to-do lists or use to-do apps. If you can’t remember the most important things you need to do every day, you should work on that. And if you can’t remember something you “need” to do, it’s probably not worth doing in the first place.
Well … By this logic, shouldn’t you also refuse to keep a calendar? There’s a baby-out-with-the-bathwater element to this. No doubt, some people become obsessed with their to-do apps and project management software and life-hacking strategies, but for most of us these tools are simply helpful and don’t need to be treated as Enemies of Life. When I know that I’m going to have to turn in a form or finish a project by a certain day, or when on a Monday I sit down to think about the things that need to get done during the week, I write that stuff down for reference. Why exactly is that a problem? What is it interfering with or preventing or compromising?
Ramsay’s one weak spot, the chink in his mental armature? Silence. He can’t bear it. Chefs must always be badgering, exhorting, browbeating, insulting. Noise in the kitchen, at all times. Nothing unique here: Ramsay is a true modern man, living in dread that two seconds of silence will suck him beyond retrieval into the cold hell of himself. We all need the chatter, do we not? The twitter, the flutter. But Ramsay is particularly loud and naked in his fearfulness. At the Juniper Hill Inn, the executive chef reacts to familiar waves of Ramsay pressure (“Come on!”) by going half-catatonic: his eyes are dead, he won’t say anything. A terrible quiet descends over the kitchen. Ramsay crouches and raises his hands to his head. “It’s … so bleeping painful now!” he moans. Silently, sullenly, the chef works his skillet. Ramsay is close to panic. “Open up!” he begs. An abyss yawns and stretches: here comes emptiness. The brain-hum sharpens to a whine. So escalate, quickly. Fill the void with imprecations, boost the language until that robot locust squawks again. Hurry! Bleep.
Universities and their libraries have a special place in copyright law because they have a special place in society. Courts and even Congress have long acknowledged the essential role of copying in the educational process. That’s why the preamble to the section of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act that outlines “fair use” specifies “teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” as examples of “fair uses”—uses that, although they involve the copying of protected material, are considered noninfringing because they enable essential public goods.Universities are not copyright-free zones—far from it. But they do perform special services that often demand flexibility and liberties that enable them to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” the core mission of copyright as declared by the U.S. Constitution.
Sometimes, as the law professors Kal Raustiala of UCLA and Christopher Sprigman of the University of Virginia have demonstrated in their fascinating new book, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, the lack of intellectual-property rights or enforcement promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. That is often the case at universities.
But the faithful imagination can’t praise, can’t give thanks to a God who doesn’t judge, because our faith rests on the premise that God wrests justice from even the most horrible earthly circumstances. And this is our praise, that we align ourselves with the one true merciful, gracious, just God, even when pain presumptuously lays claim to our bodies, even when sin posts a writ declaring ownership of our souls. We turn to God in faith even when death’s chilling silence encompasses the good men and women of whom we can’t yet let go. We turn to God, because we know God will vindicate their suffering, their loss, their death — and our quavering confidence defies any powers that perpetuate poverty, any powers that neglect the sick and those who care for them. Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need, Remembering all the good hearts who have stood beside us, in sorrow or hardship, our faith defies even death itself — in the risen mercy of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Even with regards to the leakers, however, the situation is far more complex than Greenberg lets on. He draws elaborate comparisons between the cases of Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, arguing that digital technologies have expanded the scale and the speed of leaking and made it easier to cover the tracks. But have we entered a truly new era, in which technology provides a robust infrastructure for leaking — a common techno-optimistic view advanced in many books about WikiLeaks? Or is the whole Cablegate episode just a blip in the long institutional march toward even greater secrecy — perhaps an instanceof governments and corporations not taking their network security seriously but hardly a guarantee that they won’t adapt in due time?While the former view dominated most of the early responses to WikiLeaks, it seems excessively cheerful in retrospect. It’s true that one set of technologies has made it easier to release the leaked documents to the outside world, but another set of technologies is also making it harder to get them off the corporate or government networks. A pertinent recent case that Greenberg doesn’t discuss is that of Joe Muto, a former Fox News employee who, convinced of his anonymity, leaked some internal Fox footage to the popular blog Gawker. It took Fox less than 48 hours to out him — by analyzing who on their network had retrieved the footage in question. Likewise, just this past June, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, ordered that all employees at federal intelligence agencies who take lie detector tests also answer a specific question about their leaking practices. Very little about the heavily policed contemporary workplace suggests that leaking will become easier.
(thanks to Reihan Salam on Twitter)
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I want to go to the Rain Room. Actually, I’d like to have one in my house.