At first glance, Meju bears all the hallmarks of the several hip bars that surround it in Davis Square. Meju is a relatively new Davis tenant, spinning out from Allston sibling Bibim last year, and is clearly dressed to fit in with its immediate surroundings: delicate lighting and a partial exposed-brick interior contribute to a familiar, though inviting, atmosphere. …
Category: By type
Review: Suvaai, offering rich rewards, demands a journey north
Head up Mass Ave from campus and you’ll pass mainstays like Clover and Flour, trendy vegetarian spots like Life Alive and Veggie Galaxy, and the chic eateries surrounding Harvard. But it’s worth the effort to keep going. The best ramen (Sapporo), pho (Pho House), and bagels (Bagelsaurus) on this side of the Charles line the quiet stretch between Harvard and Porter Squares. Head on a little further still and you’ll reach Suvaai. It’s an unassuming spot — keep your eyes open for the red lights strung up in the window, guiding you in like an airport runway …
Review: D.C. drama casts light on shady lobbying
If 2016 has taught us anything, it’s that politics today is all about performance — a conclusion inescapably reached in Miss Sloane, the new Beltway-based political thriller from John Madden. The eponymous Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is an ambitious politico working for a strictly amoral DC lobbying firm. Yet Sloane has a secret, something that passes for heresy in her firm: on some political issues, she actually cares …
The Potential and Perils of Election Prediction Using Social Media Sources
The Potential and Perils of Election Prediction Using Social Media Sources (with Federico Nanni). Invited presentation to Connected Life 2016, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
Generation Boom
One of my most formative experiences was an upper school trip to the battlefields of France and Belgium. Amidst all the stories of carnage and destruction, and the unfathomable numbers of casualties involved, what struck me above all else was the sheer proximity of the respective front lines. In some places a mere hundred yards might separate the two groups of young European men, conscripted to throw grenades and fire rifles at each other across the small parcel of scorched earth between them.
Review: Darkness lurks in Hemingway’s island paradise
“Never meet your heroes” is the cardinal rule broken by reporter Ed Myers, the protagonist of Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, a largely true-to-life depiction of Ernest Hemingway’s sunset years. It’s 1957, and in the sepia-toned newsroom of the Miami Globe, Myers sweats over the latest draft of a fan letter to esteemed writer and recent Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway. A short time later, Myers receives an unexpected phone call from Hemingway himself, warmly inviting him on a trip to Cuba, the writer’s adopted home …
2016: year of the tactical takedown?
Cross-posted from MIT’s Center for Civic Media blog.
The present presidential election is a spectacle, in the truest sense of the word, like few before. Just as FDR’s weekly radio addresses and JFK’s success in the first televised presidential debate watermark the adoption and cooption of a particular communication medium for political ends, so the 2016 campaign may go down in history as marking a seismic shift in the landscape of political uses of media. The candidate leading the charge, this time round, is unquestionably Donald Trump, currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Yet it’s a little more difficult to identify precisely which medium or platform Trump has coopted. The most readily available answer seems to be ‘all of the above’ – although in different ways.
Review: WTF offers a unique perspective on life on the front line
Reviews often destroy movies, and only rarely, as in the case of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, do they create them. In 2011, a New York Times review of Kim Barker’s wartime memoir The Taliban Shuffle described Barker as “a sort of Tina Fey character, who unexpectedly finds herself addicted to the adrenaline rush of war.” This caught the eye of Fey herself, who began pulling strings to bring Barker’s story to movie audiences as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. …
Consider the Lawn Sign: elections as civic engagement
Cross-posted from the Center for Civic Media blog.
Last week I had the chance to watch one of the world’s great electoral-political spectacles – the New Hampshire primary – up close. It wasn’t by any means my first dalliance with American politics: I’ve had at least a loose involvement in the fascinating and frequently Freudian process by which Americans elect their leaders for several cycles now. But this time I saw the process through a slightly different lens.
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Review: Michael Moore’s war of hearts and minds
The title of Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Where to Invade Next, seems to reflect ambivalence on the part of its creator. It is after all no coincidence that Moore’s trio of breakout box office hits — Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko — appeared during the administration of his antagonist-in-chief, George W. Bush. Though no one would pretend that mass shootings have subsided since the release of Bowling for Columbine, the election of President Obama saw the formal end of the Iraq War and the passing of health care reform — the subjects of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko, respectively. The working title of Moore’s latest project might as well have been, What To Tackle Next? …
Josh Cowls 