Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.

Ball Don’t Lie

For a rebellious, Korean-American teen like myself who was awkwardly trying to situate himself, without much success, Jackson’s writing, with its rap and jazz references and its relentless, engaging voice, provided a vision of Black agency that felt almost illicit.

Follow the Money

Over the span of four years, federal investigators estimated millions of dollars stolen from Mexican taxpayers passed through one South Texas bank. When they followed the trail, it led to real estate, cars, and airplanes. But in 2018, those investigations suddenly stopped.

Mizoram’s Wild Flower

In 1974,  a pair of four-year-old cousins wandered into the jungle near India’s border with Myanmar. The boy was found five days later, temporarily incapable of speech. The girl was gone. For decades, stories echoed through villages of a “wild-looking woman,” sometimes striding beside a tiger. Thirty-eight years later, she returned.

It Knows

On the Google conundrum:

It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?

Boy

On the nature of violence.

When my brother was twelve, I found six mice nailed to the wall of the abandoned tree house in the woods near our apartment. He spent a lot of time there. It seemed to me the little mouse faces were frozen in agony. As though they’d been alive when he’d hammered the nails through them.

The Longform Guide to George Saunders

This guide is sponsored by George Saunders's Tenth of December, the acclaimed short story collection published this year by Random House. A National Book Award Finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review's Top 10 of 2013, Tenth of December has been hailed by critics as "an irresistible mix of humor and humanity," "a visceral and moving act of storytelling," and "a feat of inventiveness."</p>

It's really, really good. Makes for a great gift, too. Buy it today.

Should you need further convincing, here is a collection of classic Saunders stories, both fiction and non-fiction, from our archive:</em>

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My Summer at an Indian Call Center

Next is "culture training," in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. "The most marketable skill in India today," the Guardian wrote in 2003, "is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else's."

Little Boy Lost

On a child diagnosed with autism:

The worst part was that I knew he sensed it, too. In the same way that I know when he wants vegetable puffs or puréed fruit by the subtle pitch of his cries, I could tell that he also perceived the change—and feared it. At night he was terrified to go to bed, needing to hold my fingers with one hand and touch my face with the other in order to get the few hours of sleep he managed. Every morning he was different. Another word was gone, another moment of eye contact was lost. He began to cry in a way that was untranslatable. The wails were not meant as messages to be decoded; they were terrified expressions of being beyond expression itself.