Word: seriality
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There's a little bit of the unabomber in most of us. We may not share his approach to airing a grievance, but the grievance itself feels familiar. In the recently released excerpts of his still unpublished 35,000-word essay, the serial bomber complains that the modern world, for all its technological marvels, can be an uncomfortable, "unfulfilling" place to live. It makes us behave in ways "remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." Amen.VCRs and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives, there are times when something seems deeply...
College professors as a rule do not lead swashbuckling lives. But some 50 or 60 of them last week were given a chance to help in the pursuit of the nation's most wanted serial killer. The FBI gave them copies of the notorious Unabomber's 35,000-word screed against technology, the same document the terrorist mailed on June 24 to the New York Times, the Washington Post and Penthouse (which had previously offered to publish it). Since then, both papers have been fretting over the bargain the Unabomber proposed: publish the tract in toto within three months...
Another of the details that adds to the play is the style in which it is written. It resembles a radio serial show of the 1930s and 1940s. The same lines are repeated often by different characters, and pretty soon the order in which the lines were said is mixed up by the audience, smearing the time line of the action...
...MANY PARENTS OF YOUNG children, television is something far more intimidating than the vast wasteland it has been called. Instead it is an almighty ocean, perilous and all too enticing. Serial killers in cable movies, bloody episodes of Tales from the Crypt, grisly crime footage on the local news: How to protect a child from the rude shocks of the tube? Forcing all TV to conform to a safe-for-kids standard seems unfair to adults. Advisories that warn of excessive violence are fine, but who can guarantee what kids will do when parents are out of the room...
...increasingly bizarre--and epistolary--Unabomber case took another odd turn when Tom Tyler, a University of California, Berkeley, social psychology professor, wrote an open letter to the serial bomber in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Tyler was responding to a letter he had received from the Unabomber that came with a copy of the terrorist's as yet unpublished 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto. The correspondence followed remarks that the professor made about the case to the press. The gist of Tyler's message to the Unabomber: your manifesto raises some valid points, but none that justify...