Last year, James Fallows illustrated the growing girth of North American's by digging up photos from the 1950s of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ramond Burr. Gleason was a notorious fatso. Hitchcock and Burr were celebrated symbols of portliness. None would draw a second look today. Now comes evidence that the shift in our perception of what constitutes fat has been getting a quiet nudge from pants manufacturers in the form of "vanity sizing." Abram Sauer, of Esquire's Style Blog, snuck a measuring tape into the change rooms of a series of men's retail chains and came back with this heartbreaking news...

10 September, 2010

Before a reader draws me up short on Monday's link to an interactive map showing explosive growth of unemployment in the US, I should acknowledge the choropleth problem. James Fallows introduced the issue, and the word, in a blog post about the same map Tuesday. The problem is that geography does not equal population. A choropleth map depicting social trends (unemployment or election results) can mislead if its geographical units (states or provinces) vary widely in population. (The word derives from Greek terms for "area/region" + "multiply.") Fallows gives the example of the razor thin 2004 US presidential election, in which the...

04 August, 2010

The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes: You can't help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter.  It's both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their "work".   Even when they learn that children have been injured it's no big...

08 April, 2010

Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010

A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing: Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo: The volume of Obama's editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says "This has always been...

27 March, 2010

Still on the subject of aircraft, remember US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus 320 that set down safely in New York's Hudson River after losing both its engines to a collision with Canada geese? Exosphere3D, a Denver company that "specializes in technical animation and scientific visualization of complex data sets," has combined the wealth of publicly available radar data, cockpit and air traffic control recordings, and flight recorder information to create a series of startling 3D animations the tell the story in a way that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. I've embedded the best of the bunch...

10 February, 2010

James Fallows, the Atlantic writer who is a thoughtful observer of US foreign affairs and an admirer of President Obama, says the president's newly announced war strategy rests on two "judgment calls." 1) Whether Al Qaeda/related terrorist groups really do depend so heavily on a specific geographic base in Afghanistan that, if the U.S. can disrupt them there, we won't have to apply similar efforts later on in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or anyplace else. 2) Whether a limited increase in U.S. troops, for a limited amount of time, really can make a decisive difference -- in the long-term stability of the Afghan...

08 December, 2009
"Oil," a major exhibition by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, is currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. in Washington, DC. The exhibit includes horrific photos of the Alberta Tar Sands: Burtynsky-06-s [Click images for larger view - links fixed.] Burtynsky specializes in sweeping, often eerily beautiful views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, which features another of Burtynsky's images this month, writes:
The impact of the exhibit as a whole is, well, hard to convey in words.... [V]ery few people have seen the range of oil-industry artifacts that he has captured in his wall-sized and incredibly-detailed photos. Extraction and refinery operations around the world; the industries oil has made possible; the indications of the end of the oil era. Hard to forget.
The exhibit moves next to The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John's, Newfoundland, where it will be on display from May 7–August 15, 2010. It will continue to travel through 2012. More photos and a video after the jump.
28 November, 2009

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke flags the droll consumer reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint on the Amazon website (scroll way down). Moneyquote: I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried...

20 October, 2009

A cautious Contrarian reader writes: A friendly caution about taking pictures inside the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority pre-board screening area: If noticed, likely to attract unwanted security attention. Noted — but isn't this just further evidence that the real purpose of security theater is not to keep Canadians safe but to buttress the puffed-up functionaries charged with upholding these useless, colossally wasteful procedures? [caption id="attachment_2591" align="alignwrap" width="545" caption="Left: Stanfield International Airport 7 a.m., October 15. The security queue extends past the Clearwater Seafoods kiosk to the Air Canada check-in counter. Right: Half and hour later, inside the CATSA security zone. "][/caption] The overwhelming evidence...

18 October, 2009
Show more
Loading...