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Word of Mouth 05.05.2012

(Photo by chrisinplymouth via Flickr Creative Commons)

Part 1: Beautiful Souls

Amid stories of horrific atrocities like the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Balkans in the 1990’s, occasional tales of courage emerge: the stories of individuals who fly in the face of convention – or even the law – to stand up for what they know is right. In his new book, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times, Eyal Press explores the flip side of evil, telling dramatic stories of dissent through the lens of the emerging fields of moral psychology and neuro-science. The result is a book that not only fleshes out stories of stunning bravery, but digs into the “why” of acts that seem impossible in their contexts.   

Part 2: Live from New York...It's a Comic Book!

Saturday Night Live... You may love it, you may love to hate it, you may even hate to admit you love it. Either way, the 35 year old comedy institution is now turning into a comedy illustration. Chad Lambert is a comic artist and author. He’s also the editor of the new series “comics” from Bluewater productions, a series of biographies about comedians.The first installmentin the series covers the history of Saturday Night Live. 

Part 3: Tech's Missing Links, A Simpler Internet

If you’re into tech I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about Apple’s iPad – not since Moses has the world been this excited about a tablet. Truth be told, the iPad’s iconic features didn’t drop from the sky into Steve Jobs’ hands – if anything, tech development is a lot more like evolutionary biology – and if you look beneath our latest and greatest gadgets, you’ll find evidence of that evolutionary process – products that were born of good ideas, but didn’t quite make the cut. Think of them as the tech world’s "missing links" – although that term missing links is itself sort of outmoded in biology circles… since I’m getting a little too meta here, let’s turn things over to Rob Fleischman. He’s a computer scientist, tech entrepreneur, and Word of Mouth’s explainer of all things wired.  

and

Before Facebook and MySpace transformed how we interact virtually, there was another kind of Internet — a 1980s network, where users connected via phone lines and communicated through simple lines of text.

And while that may sound outdated, that version of the Internet is still very much alive.

by Todd Bookman

Part 4: Embedded with the Reenactors

by Taylor Quimby

Who are the "brave" men and women who volunteer for active duty in reenacted wars? I spoke with Nick
Kowalczyk, Professor of Writing at Ithaca Collegeand war correspondant...of sorts. He covered a re-enactment of the Siege of Niagara, a battle from the French and Indian War, for Salon. 

 

 

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