The Offensive Marketing of Modern Warfare 3

December 30th, 2011

Over at The Atlantic, I throw rocks at the marketing efforts for Modern Warfare 3.

There is a television advertisement for a video game called Modern Warfare 3 that is so base and strident that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberately offensive. It begins with two Hollywood buffoons in (for whatever reason) MultiCam taking heavy fire during an apparent New York City terrorist attack. The men calmly walk into a hailstorm of bullets, and return fire with rifles, pistols, and submachine guns. Most disturbing is that the depicted maelstrom seems designed to carefully hover in the uncanny zone. Clearly it’s not Black Hawk Down, but neither is it Starship Troopers. On some level—perhaps it’s the intensity of the actors—the commercial wants its action to be taken seriously.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Dual Shockers

The Biggest Little Diplomatic Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of

November 11th, 2011

Image Credit David Brown

Over at The Atlantic, I meddle in the affairs of Kiwis:

Next week, President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard are set to announce a new U.S. military presence at Robertson Barracks, an Australian base in Darwin. This will require a major expansion of the facility, and according to Mike Green, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, allow U.S. Marines “to be able to fly helicopters, drop out of planes and shoot at things.” Max Fisher has listed several reasons why this is a smart move for everyone involved, and the Obama administration deserves credit for anticipating distant threats in the region both obvious and abstruse. Australia is a stalwart ally of the United States, and has fought alongside U.S. troops in every major military campaign of modern times. Because of the UK-USA Agreement, the ANZUS Treaty, and fundamentally aligned goals in defense and foreign policy, setting up shop in Australia must have been as easy, diplomatically, as building a Walmart in Arkansas. The real question might be why it didn’t happen sooner, but that question is offset by the relief that it didn’t happen too late.

Read the rest here.

Is a Ghost War Really War?

October 21st, 2011

Image Credit: San Francisco Sentinel Over at The Atlantic, I throw rocks at Predator drones.

Humanity can be found and understood in the best and worst of war. But drones change the equation. It’s the worst kind of war, a frightening new enterprise that we’ve embraced, celebrate, and laugh about. But there’s something dishonorable about it. It’s the aerial equivalent of roadside IEDs. It’s the only kind of war America seems willing to fight anymore, and that is what we’re leaving behind in Afghanistan. To be clear, “fairness” should never be an objective of war. But almost by definition, this is not war. Once our soldiers leave the theater, all that will remain is a clinical and codified policy of assassination writ large, with virtually no public scrutiny. It won’t be front-page news when drones vaporize innocents, and it won’t be front-page news when drones vaporize al-Qaeda operatives, because we’ve got no skin in the game. It’s just robots hunting ghosts.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: San Francisco Sentinel

In Praise of Bad Steve

October 6th, 2011

Steve Jobs

Over at The Atlantic, I talk about Steve Jobs.

Last year a former Apple employee related his favorite Steve Jobs story to me. I have no way of knowing if it is true, so take it for what it’s worth. I think it nicely captures the man who changed the world four times over. When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.

The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.

“Those are air bubbles,” he snapped. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Seattle Weekly

Gordon Ramsay, Drill Sergeant

July 18th, 2011

Over at The Atlantic, I cut open Hell’s Kitchen and find it well done.

This week the show enters its ninth season. For the uninitiated, Hell’s Kitchen is a reality show featuring 16 restaurant professionals competing for an executive chef position at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants. It’s American Idol for food, where each week Ramsay eliminates a contestant.

Chef Ramsay, standing six-foot-one with a solid build, cuts an intimidating figure. For all his multimedia success–20 books, two documentaries, six television shows, and an iPad app–he is a genuine master chef, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed in the world. He holds 12 Michelin stars. (Just ask. He’ll tell you.) As proven on his soft-spoken but frank restaurant turnaround show, Kitchen Nightmares, he’s got the business acumen to match his culinary skills. He is a chef if the word has any meaning, and it is fair to say that he is among the best at what he does.

And he has a temper.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Fox

Sara Gran and the City That Care Forgot

June 22nd, 2011


Over at The Atlantic, Sara Gran talks literature, New Orleans, and her latest novel.

Gran charges at literary genres with a knife between her teeth. Her novels are possessed of such confidence that the words seem nailed to the page. Among scribblers and readers alike, few inspire such excitement, not only for what she’s written, but also for what she’s yet to write.

With Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Gran elevates the detective story as literature and brings together a sophisticated mystery, a witty, antagonistic private eye, and a city she knows too well. “New Orleans has an edge of violence and nastiness,” she says. “After all the graciousness and kindness and hospitality there’s a certain brutality.”

Read the rest here.

The Case for Crime Fiction

May 31st, 2011


Over at The Atlantic, I get to write about my favorite subject and some of my favorite authors.

Police stations are dirty. Not morally, though such a deficiency is not always entirely alien. They are dirty in a very real, very physical sense. Tables, chairs, desks, pens—in a police station, everything has a certain squalid grit to it. You can feel it between your teeth. Even when a station house is new, when coats of paint have yet to dry on cinderblock walls, and floors are freshly tiled and sealed and mopped, there’s a honeymoon period of a day or so before the building ages a decade. It’s almost as though crime manifests as grime on the wall. This is because police stations aren’t where a day’s work is conducted. It’s where the work ends. Those so unfortunate to cross the threshold had too much too drink or too many pills. Threw a few punches or lost a few teeth. Definitely sweat, possibly ran, and if so, probably found asphalt or curb. The business of crime does not lend itself to clean hands, or manicured nails.

Television gets it all wrong. There, every office is dark and moody, with a barometer lamp at an odd angle and a flat-panel computer monitor projecting WordPerfect blue. Shadows dance across faces lit with absurd dedication or sinister undertones. On television, every police station is furnished by an IKEA 50 years in the future.

Read the rest here.

On Memorial Day

May 31st, 2011

Over at The Atlantic, I offer remembrance for comrades lost.

Only one thing really stands out in memory from the days before my deployment to Afghanistan, in 2006. It was an aside by a prior-service civilian instructor. You can’t stay in the Army forever, he said. Whether you come home in a box or reach retirement age, one way or another, you’re getting out. He advised us to look around the room. This feels like your family, he said. Band of brothers. You’re going to do great things, and if you’re lucky, lie about them over beers for another fifty years. But the Army doesn’t want you forever, and one way or another, you will be forced out. His message: While you’re in the combat zone, call home as often as possible. Tell your wife or mother that everything is fine. Because when the war and the Army are through with you, your family will still be there.

Read the rest here.

Can Classical Music Save the World?

May 31st, 2011


Over at The Atlantic, I argue that classical music remains a force for social change.

Ludwig van Beethoven so admired the ideals of the French Revolution that he wrote a symphony for the man who most embodied it. Few composers could push the boundaries of music and sway the passions of the listener as much as Beethoven. That piece would be to the concert hall what the Revolution was to society. There is a famous story, however, that upon learning Napoleon had declared himself Emperor of France, Beethoven reached for his pen and struck the dedication from the piece. “Bonaparte” — Symphony No. 3 in E flat major — became known simply as “Eroica.” The second movement, a funeral dirge inspired in part by Beethoven’s deteriorating hearing, might well have symbolized the deterioration of the Revolution’s egalitarian promise. When Napoleon died in 1821, Beethoven sneered, “I composed the music for that sad event some seventeen years ago.”

Read the rest here.

Photo credit: Joe Portnoy

Citizen Kane at 70

May 5th, 2011

Over at The Atlantic, I write about the greatest film ever made.

As Times film critic A.O. Scott recently remarked, “Citizen Kane shows Welles to be a master of genre. It’s a newspaper comedy, a domestic melodrama, a gothic romance, and a historical epic.” And it is still considered the best film ever made. In 1998, the American Film Institute polled 1,500 film professionals. The result was “100 Years… 100 Movies,” and Orson Welles’s masterpiece lorded over the list. Ten years later, the AFI commissioned another poll. Citizen Kane retained the top spot. As noted by the late, influential critic Kenneth Tynan, “Nobody who saw Citizen Kane at an impressionable age will ever forget the experience; overnight, the American cinema had acquired an adult vocabulary, a dictionary instead of a phrase book for illiterates.”

Read the rest here.

UPDATE: Thanks to Roger Ebert for promoting the essay on Facebook and Twitter.

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