Word: gist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gist...
...Gist: The biggest juggernaut in children's-television history sprang forth from mundane origins. At a Manhattan dinner party in 1966, a Carnegie Foundation executive named Lloyd Morrissett mentioned that his young daughter was so enthralled by television that she would park herself in front of the family's set to gaze at early-morning test patterns. That story prompted a public-television producer named Joan Cooney to investigate how television could be used to package education as entertainment: "What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?" The ensuing creation - in which kids learned everything from empathy...
...Gist: Scholars tend to lionize directors who develop groundbreaking styles or who come to dominate and define a genre - men like Hitchcock, Welles, Hawks and Ford. But what of the filmmaker who didn't try to stick out so much as fit in; the man-for-hire who could saddle up to any studio assignment - even a work in progress - and mold it to perfection? In Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, Baltimore Sun film critic Michael Sragow argues that Fleming - who directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind - was such a man, denied his rightful place...
...Gist: Chances are you underestimate your capacity for cruelty. Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments in the 1960s and '70s demonstrated that we're conditioned to inflict pain on complete strangers when impelled to do so by an authority figure. Milgram's experiments - linchpins of any freshman psych class - were simple. Volunteer participants were enlisted to help with a study purportedly tracking the effects of punishment on learning. When the "learner" made an error, the volunteer was told to administer an electric shock. Milgram found volunteers were disturbingly willing to follow orders, even as voltage levels increased in intensity...
...Gist: The days of darkrooms and negatives are mostly behind us, according to Ritchin's exploration of how digital technologies are changing the landscape of news photography. Even if film photography lives on in the fine art world, its limitations make it significantly less interesting than the possibilities offered by digital technology. Ritchin is no digital virgin. The pioneering director of the Web site PixelPress, he was teaching the New York Times how to present photography on the Internet as early as 1994. He views digital photography as a natural evolution of the form, paralleling the evolution of science itself...