Culture

Culture

Dear Earth: Happy 400th Birthday! Love, Groupon.

Ah, Earth Day: an opportunity for the country’s worst polluters to rise, phoenix-like, from puddles of industrial effluent and recreate themselves as environmentalists. An opportunity for America’s retailers to shamelessly hijack the words “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” and repurpose them to quicken the pulse of fetishistic shoppers. An opportunity for a free canvas shopping bag with every purchase!

I was hardly surprised when Groupon sent me an email proffering Earth

Culture, Reviews

Review: The Whale

arrived at the theater a little early. There were good seats left at the front, and the crowd – an older, calmer population than I am used to – was chatting and milling about contentedly. I expected this to be a routine assignment: show up, watch a movie, write a digestible review. What I didn’t know then, as I settled […]

Culture, Reviews

Review: Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

Big Boys Gone Bananas!* documents the year-long battle between film director Fredrik Gertten and the crushing public relations and legal force of Dole Food Company. “If you have mighty enemies, then you need many friends,” said Gertten when introduced to the audience. He founded and heads a four-person film production company in Malmö, Sweden. Dole oversees 36,000 full-time employees worldwide […]

Culture, Reviews

Review: The Last Mountain

The Last Mountain, Bill Haney’s piercing new documentary about coal mining in the Appalachians, features enough explosions to make Michael Bay blush. In shot after shot, violent plumes of rubble erupt skyward from the side of denuded mountains, leaving malevolent clouds of dark ash lingering behind to coat the inside of West Virginians’ lungs. The explosive montages are brutal and […]

Culture, Reviews

Review: Eating Alabama

shaggy haired man perches in a little wooden shack, camouflaged head to toe, arms cradling a rifle and eyes watching for deer. Trepidatiously, he loads a shell and while his voiceover announces unassumingly, “I’ve never done this before.” And so begins Eating Alabama, which follows Andrew Beck Grace and his wife, Rashmi, as they return to their childhood locale in […]

At Yale, Culture

Evolutionary War Hero: An Interview with Carl Zimmer

Nearly 40% of Americans don’t believe in evolution, and acknowledgment of anthropogenic climate change is equally spotty. Acclaimed author Carl Zimmer spoke with Sage about how science communicators can begin to reach creationists and climate deniers, why Einstein makes for a great magazine cover, and what to do when your work gets slandered on the Daily Show.

Fisheries, Multimedia

Hauling in the Sound

In the wake of continually declining lobster stocks in Connecticut, Tahria Sheather follows one of the state’s few remaining full-time lobstermen, Mike Theiler, out for a day of hauling to explore what it’s really like to be a lobsterman these days in Long Island Sound and capture what is fast becoming an endangered livelihood.