Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.

The 2011 National Magazine Award Winners

As announced last night. Click here for the full list of nominees.

  1. Personal Service: I Want My Prostate Back (Laurence Roy Stains, Men’s Health)

  2. Public Interest: Letting Go (Atul Gawande, New Yorker)

  3. Reporting: The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’ (Scott Horton, Harper’s)

  4. Feature Writing: The End (Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles)

  5. Profile Writing: The Man the White House Wakes Up To (Mark Leibovich, NYT Magazine)

  6. Essays and Criticism: Mister Lytle: An Essay(John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review)

The Town That Blew Away

Fourteen other tornadoes hit Georgia on April 27 and 28. This was not the record — that would be twenty, during Tropical Storm Alberto in 1994. But it was one of the worst twenty-four-hour periods in the history of the state. Tornadoes hit Trenton, Cherokee Valley, south of LaGrange, and Covington; killed seven people in a neighborhood in Catoosa County, swept through Ringgold, and killed two more — a disabled man and his caregiver — in a double-wide trailer on the far end of Spalding County. Those tornadoes got all the attention. The Vaughn tornado didn’t even warrant an article in a major newspaper. No one talked about Vaughn. The only way for a person to really find out about it was to drive past.

The Movie Set That Ate Itself

Inside the five-year (so far) production of the Ilya Khrzhanovsky film Dau:

Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin's USSR), allowing Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically anywhere — through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors. The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass.