The Hellhound and HeLa: Recent American Historical Writing At Its Best

The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.

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Best effects you’ll see for $300

The folks who made "Lazy Teenage Superheroes" had a lot of fun doing it, and they spent almost nothing. With an outlay of only $300, they filled the video with impressive special video effects, sound, music and humor. I read about this video at boingboing and truly enjoyed watching this 13-minute film. Watching this project made we want to know more about the people who made the video. Here's the video website.

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Snow

We got a good blast of snow yesterday. This is the view out the front door that greeted my children this morning, right after they heard that school had been canceled.

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Tim Wu discusses slow photography

Many of us, much of the time, run around snapping lots of photos to document our lives. There is an alternative to this "fast photography," as described by Tim Wu at Slate. It is a technique for enhancing our experience of the moment:

[S]low photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results. Usually, you use a camera because you want the results (the photos). In slow photography, the basic idea is that photos themselves—the results—are secondary. The goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice. . . . Step 1 in slow photography is spending a long time studying the subject. As one guide enjoins, "pay more attention to your subject than to your camera." . . . When you look carefully and avoid trying to label what you see, you inevitably start to notice things that you mightn't have otherwise. . . .Step 2 is the exercise of creative choices—the greatest pleasure that our automatic cameras rob us of. What should be in the frame and what should be excluded is the most obvious decision, but there's also exposure, depth of field, and more technical choices beyond that. Making such deliberate decisions requires a little bit of courage, for you cannot blame the camera if the results are bad. Yet these choices are, to my mind, the whole game. They are what individualizes photography, what puts the stamp of your personality on the photo.

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