Word: formful
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...This tension stems mainly from the fact that China prefers North Korea to exist, even in its impoverished and infuriating current form, as opposed to what it sees as the other possibility: a unified Korean peninsula aligned with the U.S. Klingner says Beijing has for years feared a North Korean implosion, in the manner of the former East Germany's, because it would come with costs both economic (refugees crossing the Chinese border) and diplomatic (the loss of a buffer state in a region that, though stable, is inhabited by countries that really don't like one another much...
...Will Ferrell dinosaur movie. Taking the multiple-amnesia theme from the 2006 melodrama Unknown and referencing about a dozen movies set in Las Vegas, it revels in the hectic display of rude elements (sexual and ethnic stereotyping, pedophile gags, inappropriate people with their pants off) that have made the form as rigid in its conventions as Kabuki theater...
While I can't write what I want to say about Twitter in only 140 characters (the maximum number you can use in a tweet), there is an admirable brevity to tweets that is increasingly rare in our culture. I would argue that Twitter is a uniquely democratic form of communication--that is, it's open to everyone, there is no central authority, and people vote on whom and what they like by signing up to be followers. It's about the wisdom--or folly--of crowds. It's also, as Johnson observes in his superb piece, a prototype...
Some argue that Twitter is a form of digital narcissism, the toy of the moment for an attention-deficit-disordered culture. But as Johnson notes, the Twitter platform is ultimately about an accretion of tweets, the way hundreds of thousands of pixels form a detailed and complex digital image. Twitter underscores Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism that the medium is the message--the idea that technological form shapes and determines the culture. McLuhan challenged the traditional notion that content--whether in print, in film or on television--is automatically more significant than the medium through which it is delivered. What...
...National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The Department of Health and Human Services has allocated $1 billion to the development, testing and production of an H1N1 vaccine, and five different companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis, currently have the seed virus from CDC that will form the core of the immunization. But a vaccine won't be ready until September at the earliest, and even then, it won't be clear whether that shot will be a good match against the H1N1 influenza virus that will be circulating in the fall, since it may mutate between now and then...