Author: Mark Sample
Irregular around the Margins
I've been a devoted follower of The Sopranos ever since I borrowed the entire first and second seasons on VHS from a friend, back in 2000. I've managed to see every episode since, even without having HBO, by begging, borrowing, and sometimes just showing up unannounced, uninvited at the right place at the right time.… Continue reading Irregular around the Margins
Mixed Signals
On my desk
Terror Alert Banana
Free Elections
Domination through Fear
He Lied (A Work in Progress)
The World Trade Center (from the archives)
Lately I've been reading up on the history of the World Trade Center. It's easy to forget, in this post-9/11 world, that for most of their life the Twin Towers were reviled. One of the most prominent critics was Wolf Von Eckardt, the Washington Post's eminent architectural critic. Upon seeing Minoru Yamasaki's model for the… Continue reading The World Trade Center (from the archives)
Censorship on CBS
Search Inside This Book
Like many avid readers and scholars I am thoroughly enamored of Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book feature. The feature debuted October 23, 2003 with the complete text of more than 120,000 books. I can't find any recent data on how large the digital archive has grown in the past several months, but the folks at… Continue reading Search Inside This Book
Mergers and Acquisitions
The recently proposed merger between JP Morgan Chase and Bank One has got me thinking about the ways that multinational corporations work. Never forget that these two "banks" are really corporations -- meaning that their primary concern is, always, to make more money. And, ironically, to make more money at any cost. The cost, unfortunately,… Continue reading Mergers and Acquisitions
Tracking the Fugitives
The 21st century will be the century of the fugitive. Not because fugitives are proliferating, but because they are disappearing. And not disappearing in the way that fugitives like to disappear, but disappearing because they simply won't exist. Technology won't allow it. In the near future fugitives will occupy the same place in our collective… Continue reading Tracking the Fugitives
Some notes on the Last Samurai
Some notes on The Last Samurai: first, beware of any work of popular culture that has "Last" in the title. It is usually used to conjure up a mythic past, and it signals a strong nostalgic longing for "the good old days" or "the way things used to be." Any such cultural production is bound… Continue reading Some notes on the Last Samurai
Story-Space-Surveillance Triangle
My posting the other day about DARPA's now-defunct Total Information Awareness project inspired me to rethink a New Media course I've been designing, using the concept of TIA as one of the three themes for the course. The technology that DARPA proposed in its Total Information Awareness program is an example of what Laura Marks… Continue reading Story-Space-Surveillance Triangle