Links gone wild!
Lost in the spasm of environmental consciousness that accompanied Earth Day earlier this week was the fact that for some environmentalists, the best thing that could happen is a global disaster, with the hoped-for effect being the reduction of the human population down to a few — you guessed it — green-minded souls. (Apparently, it’s a given that investment bankers and oil executives wouldn’t survive.) This essay from Slate and this one from The New York Times Book Review offer nice peeks into that odd corner of the eco-movement, and the novels that imagine life in the future. But from reading the descriptions of those post-apocalypse books, it seems that the men will be virile and manly, while the women will be like this. That’s progress?
I’ve long been an admirer of Christopher Hitchens, but there has always been a healthy dose of wariness beneath that admiration. Clearly, he bites; Hitchens is like a rottweiler whose affections you’d be wise to never take for granted. Or to put it another way, he’s a fellow you’d love to sit across the table from at a dinner party — but not next to, lest you become the evening’s entertainment as he decides to verbally disembowel you. This profile of Hitchens from London’s Prospect magazine confirms my belief with this sentence, a quote from the man himself: “The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can’t get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them.” (Caution: It’s a very long article, so it’ll take a while to finish it.)
This video is a marvel of — what would I call it? Live-action animation? I’m sure there’s an industry term for the technique, but whatever you call it the result is a short film that is alarmingly like some of my dreams. Let the psychoanalysis begin.