I admit I noticed this article about the development of "black silicon" because my wife's name is on one of the patents from her time in the Mazur group. But it's a perfect example of how unpredictable cultural creativity can be.

creation, engineering, fruitfulness, imagination, natural sciences, physics, technology

Andy

:

Black silicon was discovered because [Eric] Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces.

“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why.” And even though there wasn’t an immediate practical application, he received the financing.

It was several years before he directed a graduate student to pursue his idea, which involved shining an exceptionally powerful laser light — briefly matching the energy produced by the sun falling on the surface of the entire earth — on a silicon wafer. On a hunch, the researcher also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.

The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.

At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.

“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.

Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.

My method for remembering which pages of Gilead contained not just great and thoughtful narrative but Culture Making-worthy quotes was this: I remembered a phrase from the Psalm of the particular page's number. So I thought, "you have searched me and you known me," and was thus able to find this quote again. I don't know what I would have done if I'd wanted to excerpt something that came after page 150 ...

community, discipline, iowa, least of nations, leviticus, literature, parents, traces of god

Nate

:

What the reading yields is the idea of father and mother as the Universal Father and Mother, the Lord‘s dear Adam and His beloved Eve; that is, essential humankind as it came from His hand. There is a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky and stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.

I share Alberto Manguel's guarded optimism about the endurance of print and books in a technological age (I wrote one, after all). But I also share Larry McMurtry's sense that something beautiful is being lost in our culture's disregard for the book—and that all culture is far more fragile than we can ever imagine.

books, failure, innovation, technology and change

Andy

:

Larry McMurtry, in his just-published elegy, Books (2008), evokes the narrative of decline and fall: “How did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only fifty years, to be mostly unwanted?”

For such people, the bookstore is more than a business. “We always wanted not just books but a shop,” writes McMurtry. He laments the disappearance of secondhand bookshops, and concludes with a list of booksellers, many of which are marked, simply, as “gone,” the way 19th-century newspapers used to list the casualties of the battlefield as simply “dead.” “The complex truth,” McMurtry writes, “is that many activities last for centuries, and then simply (or unsimply) stop.”

The most eloquent reflection I have found on the future of books is Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night (2006), which strikes a balance between romanticism and realism, nostalgia and foresight. His reflections on books and technology emphasize complementarity rather than conflict: “The birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader’s desk.”

And, it may be that electronic technology is even more fragile than books. “There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness,” Manguel writes, “like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul.”

A famous broadcasting hoax reconsidered: it turns out it wasn't particularly easy to convince a gullible public that aliens were invading; what was easy, though, was to convince a gullible public that lots of other people were taken in by "War of the Worlds."

fear, horizons of the possible, media, orson welles, radio

Nate

:

The “War of the Worlds” broadcast remains enshrined in collective memory as a vivid illustration of the madness of crowds and the deeply invasive nature of broadcasting. The program seemingly proved that radio could, in the memorable words of Marshall McLuhan, turn “psyche and society into a single echo chamber.” The audience’s reaction clearly illustrated the perils of modernity. At the time, it cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists — or incendiary demagogues — could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation. It remains the prime example used by media critics, journalists, and professors to prove the power of the media.

Yet the media are not as powerful as most think, and the real story behind “The War of the Worlds” is a bit more complex. The panic was neither as widespread nor as serious as many have believed at the time or since.

Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast. Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. Ben Gross, the radio columnist of the New York Daily News, later remembered a “lack of turmoil in front of CBS” that contrasted notably with the crowded, chaotic scene inside the building. Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn’t handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine.

One man's dedicated quest to alter the horizons of the possible in his home region. I like his description of how the project (or how he and his neighbors saw it) changed over time.

animals, books, colombia, horizons of the possible, literature, reading, south america

Nate

:

In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon. Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond. His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings. “This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

Of all the statistics in this generally fascinating summary of recent research on religion and consumerism (in Adweek, of all places!), these are the ones that really make me say, Yikes.

consumption, entertainment, families, generations, shopping

Andy

:

In a pre-Christmas poll last year of religious Christians with kids age 2 to 18, 78 percent said they’d bought DVDs of movies or TV shows for their teenagers, and 87 percent said they’d bought these for kids 13 and under. “However, one-quarter of those adults (26 percent) did not feel comfortable with the DVD products they bought.” Likewise for music CDs: “About six of 10 parents bought these discs for their kids, yet one out of every three of those parents (33 percent) had concerns about the content.” As for video games, 39 percent of the parents of pre-teens were concerned about the content of games they’d bought, as were 46 percent of parents of teens.

For lots of good reasons, we don't link to a lot of "cultural critique" here. But every once a while, when a big fat target presents itself, and when the critic isn't just a critic but someone who's actually creating something pretty cool with his 100 Thing Challenge, why not?

advertising, affluence, consumption, kitchens, marketing

Andy

:

KraftMaid makes cabinetry for various rooms of your house. I found an advertisement for their products in Southern Living magazine. The advertisement read, “Everyone has a personality. Shouldn’t your kitchen have one too?” You can see the TV commercial for this advertising campaign on their site.

Let’s shelve the moral question: Is it ever right to spend overindulgent amounts of money on a home kitchen? Instead let’s ask about the cost of any of the kitchens shown in the KraftMaid advertisements.

Of course, if we are honest, we should not only ask about the cost of the cabinetry, but also inquire into the cost of the whole package. The kitchens are “personalities” that reflect the personality (lifestyle) of the people featured in the ads. That hot woman in the skimpy dress eating that huge bowl of ice cream, well, obviously she has an expensive gym membership. And notice how she has enough fancy plates to serve everyone in her home owners association. The other couples are much the same. . . .

The cost of the kitchen cabinetry alone is beyond the financial means of most poor, middle class, and upper middle class Americans. But the cost of the lifestyle associated with the cost of the kitchen cabinetry - the whole cost of the “personality” - is beyond the financial means of pretty much all Americans, with the exception of a fraction of a percent of ultra wealthy individuals. And let me assure you, those ultra rich Americans who can afford these KraftMaid kitchens, trust me, they don’t read Southern Living.

Thoughts on drama, production values, and collective therapy from the director of the transglobal, peripatetic Telenovela Institute, studying the effect of Latin American TV soaps in Eastern Europe and around the world.

communism, community, cultural worlds, entertainment, europe, latin america, mexico, story, tv

Nate

:

Since the first days of the [Telenovela] institute’s research, I began to notice common patterns in the way each country related to telenovelas, and, at the same time, the way in which a country’s relationship to telenovelas revealed something unique about it. A Canadian researcher, Denise Bombardier, described it perfectly with her phrase “Give me a telenovela and I’ll give you a nation.” In general terms, however, telenovelas implement what the critic Tomás Lopez-Pumarejo (my principal theorist at the Institute) described as “the drama of the subconscious”: They are stories that revolve around ontological questions: “Where is my son?” or “Where is my love?”

There is a clear relationship in the way in which the telenovela soap operas explore the social tensions of a country and convert them into collective therapy. This process worked very well in countries that had recently emerged from communism, where people were casting about in a psychological search to deal with the class taboos that had dominated for so long. As a result, a drama centered on the impossibility of love because of social or economic obstacles was extremely powerful. Several studies of the time during which Los Ricos También Lloran was broadcast in Russia indicate that programs simultaneously broadcast from the US (such as Dallas and Dynasty) were popular but never generated the same level of interest, because Russians could not identify with the family problems of an oil millionaire in Texas. The higher production quality of those programs didn’t seem to matter either, and so companies like Televisa did not overly concern themselves with investments in production. It was the drama, the emotions worn on the sleeve, and in part the exotic settings that gave the telenovelas a special attraction.

Beautiful reflections by the artist Makoto Fujimura on N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope and (after the portion excerpted below) the work of American artist Jasper Johns.

fruitfulness, grace, redemption, revelation, visual arts

Andy

:

Especially in evangelical circles, many will argue that earth is to be burnt up in the Judgment fire of God, and everything will be destroyed anyhow, so why worry about culture at all. Wright walks through this issue carefully in his book [Surprised by Hope], noting and clarifying many theological nuances deftly, correcting the knee-jerk anti-culture stance of the “Left Behind” theology. Even if you do not fully agree with all of his theological conclusions, his arguments are worth exploring.

I’ve always wondered why, for instance, in 2 Peter 3:10, it is not the earth that is burned up, but heaven. (“The heavens will disappear with a roar.”) And why 1 Corinthians 3 gives a resounding nod to the remarkable idea that even our works, and not only our souls, will remain after the Judgment. Further, as another theologian, Richard Mouw, points out in his wonderful book, When the Kings Come Marching in: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, Isaiah 60 and Revelation seem to point to the final celebration of the coming of this new Reality, would have pagan Kings and secular ships sailing into the edges of New Jerusalem. In other words, cultural influencers of all types, whether classified as Christians or not, seem to end up joining the parade in some way. . . .

Culture shaping is not an escapist activity from our current woes: instead it is breathing life into the very ashes from our present and our past, and finding, with T.S. Eliot, “the still point of the turning world.” Generative creativity flows out of not just Eden, but out of this reality of “Life after Life after Death.” We can begin to deposit our efforts into the future, rather than hope to escape into our Edenic past. Our earth, no matter how bleak, is full of promise on this side of Easter. Heaven can invade into our art of life, right in the midst of our ground zeros.

And if the earth acts as a conduit of heaven, then this yeast-like hope can be worked into the dough of culture. Naturally, as I pondered Wright’s comments, I began to ask what if art is infused with heaven, what would that art look like? If true understanding of heaven is not mere escapism, but the physical manifestation of the “substance of things hoped for,” (Hebrews 11:1) then art needs to echo this promise into tangible reality. If Wright is correct, then even ephemeral expressions done in faith will remain etched in eternal reality, and somehow earth, all of earth, is fair game for heaven’s invasion. And every act, done in faith, will count.