The truth is that the nature and proper scope of satire remain an enormous problem, one that is not going to get any easier to resolve in the political and technological future we can all, by now, see coming.
A decade ago, Dr. MacPherson and a collaborator formulated an equation describing how, in three and higher dimensions, individual bubbles evolve in live foams — the fleeting foam at the meniscus in his champagne flute, for instance, or the more enduring head on a pint of beer.
Researchers of all stripes have written “many thousands of papers” on bubbles, Andrea Prosperetti, a mechanical engineer at the University of Houston, has estimated. Bubbles entice for their seeming simplicity, which approaches the existential.
“Bubbles are emptiness, non-liquid, a tiny cloud shielding a mathematical singularity,” he wrote. “Born from chance, a violent and brief life ending in the union with the nearly infinite.”
“When Vietnamese coffee arrives in the United States, it's no longer Vietnamese coffee,” Sahra Nguyen remembers being told during a visit to Vietnam. Having just returned from another trip, she tells me, the specialty coffee scene is booming. But in the United States, she says, Vietnam’s coffee culture hasn’t translated: here, the country’s beans make up nondescript coffee blends, its identity ignored.
The daughter of refugees from north and south Vietnam, Nguyen grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a neighborhood in South Boston that’s home to much of the city’s Vietnamese population. Still, when she learned that Vietnam is the world’s second largest producer of coffee, it came as a surprise. “I was like, why didn't I know that? Everyone I talk to is like, oh my god, Vietnam is? I've never heard of that,” Nguyen says.
Trust Exercise is fiction that contains multiple truths and lies. Working with such common material, Choi has produced something uncommonly thought-provoking. Trust me.