The first rule is that there are no rules. Anything I might say about or against the derivation of movies from great works of literature is gainsaid by what’s at the top of my all-time-top-ten list, the adaptation of King Lear, by Jean-Luc Godard (and, high on the list that follows it, of younger filmmakers’ greats, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz). And, of course, some of the very best filmmakers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, have made a lifetime’s work of literary adaptation. That said, the practice—which has burst into the headlines again with the news that Baz Luhrmann’s take

The Internet, originally known as ARPAnet, was first constructed for specialized use by educational and government professionals, but when the idea took off, the small infrastructure could not handle the sudden explosion of users. So in the 1990s, private companies built huge amounts of their own Internet infrastructure, mostly across a few locations in the United States and Europe. Wired journalist Andrew Blum’s first book, Tubes, is an entertaining travelogue that takes him through these sites—from Silicon Valley conference rooms to Oregon datacenter warehouses to ships laying underseas cables—in search of the physical places that create the virtual space we

For those who are dreading the next two weeks – for those for whom the last seven years, since the dramatic announcement of London’s appointment as the host city for the 2012 Olympic Games, have been a torment – the French academic Marc Perelman’s polemic could not be more perfect; an ideal accompaniment, perhaps, to a fortnight that might best be spent, for the naysayers, doubters and outright opponents, in an isolation tank. Not that Barbaric Sport confines its withering contempt to the Olympics – although it does, somewhat opportunistically, lead off with them; football also comes in for a

A young doctor drives through the California desert on his way to a family wedding in Arizona. He stops at a drive-in. A pack of teenagers taunts him. He’s more anxious than the situation seems to justify. Back on the highway, he passes a young girl, a hitchhiker. At first he ignores her, but qualms of conscience prompt him to turn around and pick her up. She says her name is Iris Croom. He wants to drop her in Blythe, but she finagles a ride all the way to Phoenix. She asks him to perform an abortion. He angrily refuses,

If David Wojnarowicz were alive today he’d be turning fifty-eight in September. Who knows what his art would look like by now? But there is every reason to think he would have been one of the relative few to have graduated from the hit-or-miss East Village art scene of the 1980s and gone on to greater glory. His stencils, icons, symmetry, hot colors, homoerotic imagery, and street art all remain visible in the work of others now. His ghost is just about discernible around the edges of stuff by Gilbert & George, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, and I’m sure

ExxonMobil, the worlds’s biggest and most profitable corporation, is used to being viewed as the bad guy. Every time recession-strapped Americans face new spikes in the cost of gas, the oil giant’s profits ratchet up even more. In 2008, record-high gasoline prices were the direct driver of ExxonMobil’s forty-five billion dollars in profit, the largest total in corporate history.

What was troubling Julian Assange when he made a dash for friendly extra-territorial space? His detractors argue that it’s the usual story, to do with his propensity to see himself as the centre of the universe, and the target of an improbable plot to lock him up

While it is widely accepted that science influences literature, it is a much dicier proposition to suggest that literature influences the sciences. Even physicists, who frequently declare their equations as beautiful as poetry, are rarely willing to cop to being culture-bound. According to English professor Barri J. Gold, however, physics—and nineteenth-century physics in particular—is heavily indebted to literature, and vice versa. In ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, Gold argues that some of the universal truths that eventually ended up codified as “the laws of thermodynamics” were presaged by poets and other writers, and that the conversation swirling around