Maya Lin, best known for the stunning Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, has throughout her career done a number of other remarkable works, both as an artist and as an architect (not that these are mutually exclusive categories). A recent project of hers is called “What is missing?” It’s very much worth a look. The internet, which I normally just think of as the world’s biggest library, is sometimes much more.

Spring break, 2011. I’m in Ashtabula, Ohio, visiting my mother, and The Walking Dead are everywhere.

Or so it seems. American Movie Classics, AMC, is about to release season one of The Walking Dead on DVD, so the cable channel is promoting it heavily. I watch virtually no TV, but it plays almost constantly at my mother’s, and she’s an especially big fan of old movies. It makes the Walking Dead commercials seem all the more ubiquitous.

I’ve heard about the cult-fave show. Entertainment Weekly, in particular, has had the magazine equivalent of a man-crush on the series. Since I watch no TV, and since zombie movies gross me out, the show has had no allure.

But the commercials…. Oh, those commercials…. They do something to me…. Full story »

As the godfather of the modern zombie, it’s hard to understate the impact George Romero has had on the genre. He’s been cranking out zombie movies since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead—six in all, including his most recent outing, Survival of the Dead in 2010. As World War Z author Max Brooks has said, “It’s Romero’s world, and we’re all just living in it.”

However, the genre might trace one of its more problematic legacies back to Romero, too. Zombie lit is typically schlocky and shocky, with little of the artistic literary value that, say, the vampire genre has sometimes achieved. Romero set a low bar for low-brow writing with his 1978 novel Dawn of the Dead, an adaptation (with writer Susanna Sparrow) of his second zombie film.

However, his novel lumbers like one of the walking dead. Full story »

I wonder what Twain is thinking as he stands there atop the granite steppes of the pedestal. Surely he’d chuckle if he could see himself that way, raised up like that, though it’d please his ego, too.

The statue stands next to a well-manicured lawn at the heart of Elmira College in Elmira, NY—the town where Twain’s wife was from and where they are both buried. Atop the pedestal, the statue strikes a thoughtful pose. Standing below it, the statue looks dignified and noble: Twain gazing up into the sky, a packet of papers in his left hand, some great thought occurring to him. His bushy eyebrows give his expression an air of concentration.

But up close, the expression changes subtly. The far-off look is clearer in his eyes. His brow seems less serious, more musing. There’s wonder happening in there. Full story »

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotic and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

This, from the folks at game developer Quantic Dream, is simply remarkable.

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One of the things that made World War Z so successful is that presents itself as a collection of oral histories about the zombie apocalypse. Author Max Brooks did an outstanding job of presenting a global catastrophe from multiple perspectives, creating distinct character voices for each.

One of the things that makes A Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse so unsuccessful is that it presents itself as a collection of primary documents—emails, memos, transcribed recordings, diaries—about the zombie apocalypse. Anthologist Stephen Jones does a patchwork job of presenting a global catastrophe from multiple perspectives, creating bothersome continuity issues.

And it tries too damn hard to be clever, to boot. Full story »

We recently did a three-part ArtSunday series on the work of Denver photographer Greg Thow and I know many of you were as blown away by his shot of Colorado and the 5280 as we were. Full story »

Daniel Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicted that a zombie outbreak, as devastating as it would be, probably would not mean total annihilation for the human race. “The public benefits of wiping the undead from the face of the earth are quite significant, boosting the likelihood of significant policy coordination,” he said. Nonetheless, the zombie canon is “quick to get to the apocalypse,” he noted.

So, what would that apocalypse look like? How might it play out on a global scale?

While writers have offered plenty of horrifying visions, fewer have offered a more comprehensive look than Max Brooks in his thriller World War Z, which is as infectious as the zombie plague he writes about.

In other words, once you pick it up, there’s no turning back. It’s nearly impossible to stop. And six years after it was first published—six years after I first read it—the book still sticks me like a creeping nightmare that’s both terrifying yet somehow still delicious. Full story »

American propagandists and PR hacks have developed remarkably innovative ways of making words lie. Back in the ’80s we had “freedom fighters,” which was the way we described death squads who were friendly to America. “Pro-life” can be used to describe those who bomb clinics and murder physicians. “Enhanced interrogation,” of course, means “torture.” And so on. In some cases this Orwellian distortion of the language falls under the category of “euphemism,” but the more insidious innovations can be so subtle that we don’t recognize the way the language is being gamed unless we think about it very hard.

One of the most dangerous new lies: “tort reform.” Full story »

Daniel Drezner’s visit to Graceland a few years back taught him something important about writing about zombies. Fellow tourists seemed to fall into two contingents:

The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome…. The second group of tourists was equally delighted to be at Graceland, but for a different reason. These people took great pleasure in the kitschy nature of all things Elvis.

Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies is a “tour of a different kind of Graceland, only with a lot more footnotes. Oh, and zombies.” Full story »

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, they say. How true, how true, especially when it comes to reducing the wisdom of brilliant, complex minds to their pithiest quotes. In a recent thread on what has become of the GOP, one commenter went all-in with Henry David Thoreau’s famous (and greatly abused) edict: that government is best which governs the least. (Thoreau was actually quoting someone else, but he endorsed the idea, so let’s go with it.)

As I explained at the time, I used to be an enthusiastic young Republican and I was known to quote that line myself. Granted, I was just spouting something I’d heard others say – I hadn’t actually read Civil Disobedience. But by gods, it sounded good. It’s brief, it’s clever, it has the smell of truthiness about it and it comes with the credibility that automatically attends canonical high school reading assignments, even if we hated them at the time.

But there are a couple of problems with the quote. Full story »

by Sarah Allegra

There are an unusually high number of suicides in those with Chronic Fatigue, and I can understand why. Full story »

Matt Mogk knows zombies.

Not personally, of course—only theoretically. “All zombie research is theoretical,” he reminds readers in his excellent Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies.

But as director of the Zombie Research Society, no one in the world knows more about the walking dead than Mogk. If anyone could give me insights about the looming Zombie Apocalypse, I figured it’d be him. I knew I had to talk to him. Full story »

The prevailing argument among our brilliant crew of writers here  at S&R lately over our public discourses v. those of our opponents goes something like this: some of us want to take the high road in public discussion of the issues; some of us want to go into the same attack dog mode that our opponents use; and some of us, as Sam Smith so eloquently notes in his post on the matter:

… some of us watch the debate with a good measure of conflict in our souls. We think about it, we test the implications, we agonize over it, all because we appreciate the complexities of politics and culture and we understand the human, emotional and spiritual costs as well as we do the collective, physical, economic ones.

Today Scholars & Rogues honors our 50^th masthead scrogue, Samuel L. Clemens of Hannibal, MO, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain – arguably (though I don’t think there can be much argument) America’s greatest writer. Full story »

Like a bizillion other people, I’ve caught snippets of Night of the Living Dead on late-night AMC while channel surfing, but I’ve never stopped for more than a few seconds. There’s something so quintessentially “B-movie” about any given thee-minute segment of the movie that keeps it from being too enticing (and that coming from a guy who generally loves old B-movie monster pics, too).

But watch George Romero’s seminal zombie movie from start to finish and a creepy excellence somehow manifests itself. Night of the Living Dead rises up beyond B-movie status into something enduring and chilling—and like the zombies themselves, it just keeps coming at you. Full story »

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