Berfrois

May 2011

‘After negotiating a maze of passageways Berners-Lee delivers me at the door of Noam Chomsky’

‘After negotiating a maze of passageways Berners-Lee delivers me at the door of Noam Chomsky’

MIT in Second Life From The Guardian: Before my tour of MIT ends I am given a taste of what this astonishing abundance of riches means in practice. In the space of half an hour I enjoy the company – in the flesh and spacially – of three of...

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“I heard the runners got a little restless”

“I heard the runners got a little restless”

Barkley Marathon, 2009, Michael Hodge From The Believer: On the western edge of Frozen Head State Park, just before dawn, a man in a rust brown trench coat blows a giant conch shell. Runners stir in their tents. They fill their water pouches. They tape their blisters. They eat...

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The Ultimate Rose

The Ultimate Rose

Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens, Henry Arthur Payne, 1908 From Times Literary Supplement: The rose was made for symbolism, metaphor, allusion. Its beautiful flowers – in the wild, each bearing the symbolically charged number of five petals – bloom alongside vicious thorns. Sight,...

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Freewheelin’

Freewheelin’

The world Bob Dylan and The Beatles made remains in its moment of creation all the more compelling to those who lived through it for its tantalising glimpse of a different self and an authentic life...

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Back to the Arcades

Back to the Arcades

by Richard Prouty At one point as I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project I jokingly suggested to my dissertation advisor that I should leave the project unfinished, just like the Arcades Project itself. “Ah, the mimetic fallacy!” he responded. That ended the conversation. His...

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There will inevitably come a point when photorealism in videogames reaches its zenith. But what happens after that point is achieved?

There will inevitably come a point when photorealism in videogames reaches its zenith. But what happens after that point is achieved?

Visual Games: Photorealism in Crisis | by Kyle Chayka,

Kill Screen

In certain corners of the world of Super Mario 64, there are graphical glitches that turn a seemingly solid space into a splintered chaos of polygons...

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Keep the Red Textbook Flying

Keep the Red Textbook Flying

Socialism is an old idea. The ideas and movements that can be subsumed under the term, encompassing a plethora of radical or moderate shades, have shaped the course of human history over the last two hundred years.

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Why Elif Batuman doesn’t read reviews

Why Elif Batuman doesn’t read reviews

by Elif Batuman Let’s say you’re writing a book.  Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you...

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