Word: fictional
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Tilting our way across Quincy Street we come upon the Barker Center. Here, students can take creative writing courses with luminaries of fiction such as Jamaica Kincaid, Steven Pinker, L. Ron Hubbard, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At this point, we will break for lunch. We usually recommend the best bacon cheeseburger in the square, the “Alan Dershowitz” at Bartley’s. Before breaking bread, we make sure to lead the group in a good ol’-fashioned Harvard prayer, so we face the B-school and genuflect five times to the gods...
...most of us the gap in understanding keeps widening between those who create a technology and those affected by it, and a deft writer of fiction can close it because he controls the facts and the narrative, aiming for a satisfying conclusion. The tensions between science and nature, knowledge and wisdom, between what we can do and what we ought to do, have always been great narrative engines. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Birthmark in 1843, in which a brilliant scientist, obsessed with his beautiful wife's Georgiana's tiny handshaped birthmark, is determined to use his vast skills to remove...
...beautiful people with terrible problems. That's The Fountain in a nutshell. Jackman is medical scientist Tom Creo, who's conducting experiments to "stop aging. Stop dying." He has been injecting Mayan medicine into the tumorous brain of a monkey named Donovan (a tribute to the 1953 surgical science-fiction movie Donovan's Brain) to find a cure for the cancer that threatens the life of his novelist wife Izzy, played by Weisz. That's one story. Another is the quest of a 16th-century conquistador, Tomas, to locate the Mayan Tree of Life for his Queen Isabella; this...
...Hollywood was hardly more eager to recognize Altman's talents. A quarter century passed between his first trip west and his breakout film, MASH in 1970, when he turned 45. In between, he directed hundreds of TV dramas and a few promising, thoughtful feature films. His first, the science-fiction drama Countdown, got him fired off the film and banned from the Warner Bros. lot. Studio boss Jack Warner, Altman recalled, "had looked at the dailies and he said, 'That fool has everybody talking at the same time...
...evil corporate junk food, “Fast Food Nation” is its object-lesson counterpart, tediously preaching to the proverbial choir. Director Richard Linklater’s much-anticipated feature film “Fast Food Nation” is not a documentary. Rather, it is a fictional account that dramatizes the nonfiction book by the same name, written by Eric Schlosser, the film’s co-author. “Fast Food Nation” imbeds facts about the American fast food industry in specious “real people” vignettes, hoping to make...