And yet, the newspapers and the magazines and the websites still do the work every day. There's never been more news. To the extent that you know your local school board is corrupt or that your city's subway expansion plan is millions of dollars over budget or that your local power plant is dumping coal ash into your water supply, it's usually because of a reporter. You may think this stuff just comes drifting in on the air, or the Internet, like water flows when you turn on the tap, but no: Reporter. Newspaper. Journalism.
In October, the University of North Carolina's School of Media and Journalism released a study that estimated that a full 20 percent of all local newspapers have gone out of business or merged since 2004. Since then, an additional 1,300-plus communities in the United States have found themselves without any news source about their own city, town, or county. "Our sense of community and our trust in democracy at all levels suffer when journalism is lost or diminished," the authors of the report wrote. "In an age of fake news and divisive politics, the fate of communities across the country—and of grassroots democracy itself—is linked to the vitality of local journalism."
If Shyamalan has righted his career ship, he believes it’s because he’s sending the right energy out to the universe, focusing on the right stuff. (If, in his life and art, he has a tendency toward an idiosyncratic spirituality, you might credit the experience of growing up in a Hindu household while attending a Catholic grammar school.) “If I’m a songwriter, concentrate on the song,” he says. “Put no energy into the column of ‘How will they receive the song?’ ” On set, he adds, “I gave it my all, so the audience, when they come pay their money, they see an artist that gave everything he had, and risked everything. I was like a rookie. All in, angsting and sitting on the set as the sun is coming up. No trailer, freezing to death and wondering, ‘Am I good enough? Can I make this shot work? Will we get the day?’ All those things that bring out the best in you. If it doesn’t work out, I gave it my all.” He wishes he could go back and tell the “younger version of myself who was lying on the couch after Unbreakable opened and feeling like I had failed” (because it didn’t out-gross The Sixth Sense) that he deserved to feel the same way.
Maybe most important, Shyamalan has also come to grips with his identity as a filmmaker. In his twenties, he says, “I don’t think you could have told me that making thrillers for your whole life wasn’t a bad thing. At first it was a sense of, ‘Hey, I can make anything.’ But that’s hypocritical, because when I pick up an Agatha Christie novel in my library, I have a strong expectation. So, I get it. . . . When I became happy with the idea of making thrillers for the rest of my life, everything went right.”
What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.
Ah, but if you, like an impertinent child seeking a logistical timetable of Santa Claus’ nocturnal intercontinental journey, demand a more detailed definition — a word of warning: The path to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, CIA-levels of obfuscation, the invisible regions of the visible spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as “10-6 m” and also New Jersey.
Around 1730 Johann Sebastian Bach began to recycle his earlier works in a major way. He was in his mid-forties at the time, and he had composed hundreds of masterful keyboard, instrumental, and vocal pieces, including at least three annual cycles of approximately sixty cantatas each for worship services in Leipzig, where he was serving as St. Thomas Cantor and town music director. Bach was at the peak of his creative powers. Yet for some reason, instead of sitting down and writing original music, he turned increasingly to old compositions, pulling them off the shelf and using their contents as the basis for new works.
There is something comforting for people of all ages about the way at least some kids in every generation go through a “dinosaur phase,” despite all the changes that society has experienced in the last century and a half. Dinosaurs appeal to a Victorian sort of “childhood wonder,” as well as reassuring us that our childhood experiences are part of an eternal condition. The phenomenon is especially remarkable because it so often seems to first emerge spontaneously in children, with very little adult encouragement. Yet perhaps dinosaurs, after all, are no more immortal than human beings. The ways we imagine them, at least, have been subject to constant change since their initial discovery in the early 19th century.
Maybe, after my childhood encounter with dinosaur bones, every subsequent experience of them could not be without a trace of disappointment. For me, as a child, it was the gateway to a world that would be without social pressures and demands. “To be a dinosaur,” a phrase that I used in a late adolescent poem, meant simply to be myself. It turns out that dinosaurs, or at least their bones, have been, since their discovery, deeply implicated in the worlds of commerce and power politics. But my childhood experiences suggest to me that, if all the hype could be finally stripped away, something wonderful might remain.
“Whose woods these are, I think I”—whoa! We can’t quote any more of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” because it is still under copyright as this magazine goes to press. But come January 1, 2019, we, you, and everyone in America will be able to quote it at length on any platform.
At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.
Conor, our juvenile delinquent chef, emerges from the galley and drapes himself across the table to soothe her.
“What can I get you, love?” he coos, “Can I get you an egg?”
“I don’t want an egg.”
“Can I get you some bacon?”
“I don’t want bacon. What I want is a second piece of toast.”
“I’m so sorry, but we don’t have enough for all the gluten-free passengers.”
You want to begin a review of “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s stimulating and lively new biography of Philip Johnson, by saying something about architecture. But the reality of Johnson — one of the most compelling architects who has ever lived, which is not the same as being one of the best architects — is that the most interesting thing about him was not the buildings he designed. The qualities that make him, and this book, fascinating are his nimble intelligence, his restlessness, his energy, his anxieties, his ambitions and his passions, all of which were channeled into the making of a few pieces of architecture that will stand the test of time, and many others thatwill not.
“The real test of an object’s worth lies not in its efficiency, novelty or even beauty,” Adamson says, “but in whether it gives us a sense of our shared humanity.” Edwards’s latest innovation allows us to digitally transmit aromas through a small device that plugs into our phone. Thus far, our phones have engaged only our senses of sight and sound, leaving our olfactory organs untapped. Edwards’s hope is to offer the scientifically proven metabolic and calming health benefits of scent to us, on demand, even as we sit stressed out at work. Maybe one day, if widely adopted, this technology might, after the inevitable scented spam and fart pranks dissipate, revolutionize global food and medicine delivery systems. In the meantime, as Adamson might suggest, we should step outside and smell the roses.