by Hari Balasubramanian

One late summer afternoon two years ago, I saw a monarch butterfly casually fly across my office window in Amherst, Massachusetts. If I had not known what monarchs do, I would have only admired its beauty and then forgotten all about it. But since I'd seen a documentary on these butterflies the previous year – how this little creature, barely a few inches long and wide, makes a 2000-mile journey from Canada and US to certain forests in Mexico all by itself, traveling as much as 50 miles each day, navigating its way based on some unknown compass, and then returning back to its northern haunts in the space of multiple generations – since I knew these facts, that moment when I glimpsed the butterfly was suddenly full of wonder and meaning.

I mention this because many nature documentaries, or even short videos, have had a similar effect on me. I like the PBS Nature series the most (full videos available here). The species, habitats and themes vary –and not all the episodes are consistent – but there is always something unusual to learn and contemplate. Just a few random examples: how the male stork, after having made a long journey from Africa to a rooftop nest in a German village, reunites with its late-arriving partner (Earthflight); how a relatively small creature such as the honey badger could be so powerful, intelligent, and – this was the most striking for me – be gifted with a fearless attitude, so much that even lions know to stay away; or, how some astonishing friendships can be formed across species, as in the sanctuary where a goat, unfailingly and without any obvious benefit to itself, helps lead a blind, old horse on its daily graze every single day (Animal Odd Couples).

My Life as a Turkey

Today, though, I'll focus on a Nature episode that won the Emmy award for outstanding nature programming. First aired in November 2011, My Life as a Turkey (full video) skillfully recreates the year that that naturalist and wildlife artist Joe Hutto spent raising 16 wild turkey chicks all by himself, in a forest in Florida. (The qualifier “wild” distinguishes wild turkeys from their domesticated cousins that are consumed as food.)

Hutto isn't simply a passive observer. He takes on the role of an emotionally invested mother from the moment the turkeys are born until they are independent. As he writes in Illumination in the Flatwoods, the book on which the film is based: “Had I known what was in store—the difficult nature of the study and the time I was about to invest—I would have been hard pressed to justify such an intense involvement. But, fortunately, I naively allowed myself to blunder into a two-year commitment that was at once exhausting, often overwhelming, enlightening, and one of the most inspiring and satisfying experiences of my life.”

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History

before a beginning
is the end of a previous beginning

history’s a tangled skein
not a straight-laid thread

it’s full of knots of strands of varied weights
and counter-weights of light and lead

when teased apart we learn
who today has lost and who is winning

who is floating
who is falling

who is free, or who is hauling
someone else’s freight

who can move, or who is in the vice
of someone else’s sinning
.

Jim Culleny
8/3/14

by Brooks Riley

Personal experiences of art should not be foisted on others except in small doses, given that words can only provide semantic guideposts to such an experience. That’s why I never wanted to write a companion piece to my earlier one‚ Holding Albrecht. But recently I found myself longing to see Albrecht Dürer’s Paumgartner Altar again, which was nearly destroyed by an acid attack in 1988, removing it from view for over twenty years. After my earlier epiphany at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, holding and beholding the Dürer engravings up close in an empty room, with all the time in the world to delight in their intricate wit and daunting craftsmanship, I felt uneasy as I slouched over to the grandiose Alte Pinakothek, shouldering a dread of crowds, dread of the official museum-going experience, dread that my memory of Dürer’s paintings might have let me down.

It was one of those cold spells in May, some of which have names. Not the Eisheiligen of mid-May (five saint days of chill), and too soon for the Schafskälte of early June, this was just a no-name dreary day. I would be visiting old friends, not just the paintings themselves, but also the faces in those paintings. If you live in Germany, you see Dürer’s faces everywhere, the genetic variances of a Volk, still in circulation 500 years later. Just look at Oswolt Krel, a young businessman from Lindau. His eyes have darted to the left, his face a mask of worry over some transaction gone wrong. Is it 1499 or 2008?

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by Mara Naselli

Osip Mandelstam spent a lifetime moving from one place to another. His family moved often during his childhood; his exile, however, began after he recited to a gathering of friends a poem he had composed in the fall of 1933. The poem mocked Stalin and his totalitarian rule: “He forges decrees like horseshoes—decrees and decrees: / This one gets it in the balls, that one in the forehead, him right between the eyes. Whenever he’s got a victim, he glows like a broadchested / Georgian munching a raspberry.”

The following spring, Mandelstam was arrested and his apartment searched. The poem was not found and was probably never written down. After his arrest, Mandelstam went to prison for a time and he and his wife Nadezhda were condemned to move from one place to another. “It has been said that Soviet citizens do not need to build houses for themselves because they have the right to demand a free apartment from the state,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoir Hope Against Hope. “But whom does one demand it from?” Soviet propaganda boasted everyone deserved a place to live, but residency required permission, to which all kinds of coercion could be attached. Nadezhda writes,

Your permit to reside went with your accommodation and if you lost it you could never return to the city you had lived in. For many people their apartments turned out to be real traps. The clouds were already gathering, their friends and colleagues were being picked up one after another, or, as we used to say, the shells were falling nearer and nearer, but the possessors of permanent titles to apartments stayed put for the police to come and get them.

Soviet logic worked in two directions at once. A right to live meant a right to be traced, monitored, interrogated, moved. Nadezhda lived in twelve cities between the time of her husband’s arrest in 1934 and his death in 1938. “Every time we joined all the other people making the rounds of offices to get our bits of paper,” she writes, “we trembled in case we should be unlucky and be forced to move in some unknown direction for reasons not revealed to us.” Osip’s first city of exile was Cherdyn, where he was required to report to a bureaucratic office every three weeks. The reporting, the applications for permits, the constant threat of informants. The state forced on the Mandelstams and countless others a life of dislocation.

No wonder Osip Mandelstam loved Dante. When the police took him to prison in the middle of the night, he brought The Divine Comedy with him. When Nadezhda followed him, months later, she brought another copy in case the first had been lost or confiscated.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Enhancement is a hot topic in biomedical ethics, though the academic conversation is coloured by a surprisingly strong – even reactionary – conservatism. On the one hand it probably is a good thing to have some critical scrutiny of the techno utopians' claims. On the other hand, should we – can we? – distinguish between good 'treatment' and bad 'enhancement', as Michael Sandel has argued? Is there really a difference between glasses and laser eye surgery apart from semantics? Does the capability to 'hear' non-acoustically constitute some kind of infringement of the human telos? And if so, so what? I sometimes wonder whether these concerns amount to anything more than the insinuation of a conservative vision of the human condition that would be challenged in any other conversation in moral philosophy.

Nonetheless, thinking about enhancement can be fun, and even enlightening. As with good science fiction, imagining changes to the human condition pushes us to look more clearly at what we already have, and how we might use it better. Take moral enhancement. Is it possible to make humans morally better than we are now? What might that look like and are there any dystopian risks to look out for?

‘Morality' seems to comprise three distinct dimensions towards which an enhancement project could be directed: theoretical reason, practical reason, and self-command. It's important to note at the beginning that such a project doesn't depend on science fiction technologies – special IQ pills, brain implants, and so forth might be part of this in the future, but moral enhancement is an ancient project with a long and mixed track record of developing enhancement technologies, including formal education, role-modelling, parenting, physical exercise, religious rituals, nutritional supplements, philosophical 'leisure', judicial punishment, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and so on.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Like, Caesars, seated on couches, now remote controls in hand, watching people on couches watching:

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one twenty two twenty three twenty four twenty five twenty six twenty seven twenty eight twenty nine thirty thirty one thirty two thirty three thirty four thirty five thirty six thirty seven thirty eight thirty nine forty forty one forty two forty three forty four forty five forty six forty seven forty eight forty nine fifty fifty one fifty two fifty three fifty four fifty five fifty six fifty seven fifty eight fifty nine sixty sixty one sixty two sixty three sixty four sixty five sixty six sixty seven sixty eight sixty nine seventy seventy one seventy two seventy three seventy four seventy five seventy six seventy seven seventy eight seventy nine eighty eight one eighty two eighty three eight four eighty five eighty six eight seven eighty eight eighty nine ninety ninety one ninety two ninety three ninety four ninety five ninety six ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine one hundred.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

In January of 2009, I was browsing through news networks when I came across a headline that read: “Indian call centre employee punished for harassing British woman”. Seeing that I was in the process of writing a dissertation on call centers around that time, my interest was piqued. The article reported that British Telecom (BT) had received a complaint from one of its customers saying that she had been receiving creepy messages from an employee at BT's call center. She had earlier called the customer centre in order to have an engineer sent to install a landline at her house and had subsequently been contacted by the agent who wanted to know where she lived and what she was doing for the day. The agent's name was reported as Hemant; the woman's identity was not disclosed. Hemant was reported to have subsequently begun sending her text messages on her phone, some of which are included in the article.

“Hello, Hemant this side with whom you spoke two hours ago regarding ur BT order. U must be thinking dat why I called u up second time without any reason of the call but to be honest I got attracted towards u and ur wonderful voice. Can I be ur friend?”

“As precious as u r to me, as precious only few can ever be, I know all friends r hard to choose but u r someone I never want to lose. Take care xxx.”

The woman is also reported as having complained: “The messages were inappropriate and very creepy. I felt as if I was being stalked.”

The messages are inappropriate in many ways. They transgress privacy, professionalism, and grammar all in one text. One wonders what manner of desire fuelled this transoceanic burst of sentiment. Did Hemant in his cubicle, attending to one British call after another find a moment of connection in the caller's “wonderful voice”? Did he see this as a way to bring nearer one of the many callers who were to him not even a face, but only a voice? Did she speak kindly to him and chat in a manner that assured him that she was ready and waiting for him to make a move? Was he egged on by colleagues who saw him flirting on the phone with a caller? Was it merely a dare? Did he, in the Lacanian sense, read beyond the phrase-ology of polite customer communication, in itself a complete economy of empty language gestures? Did he fill the emptiness with content of his own and break the symbolic understanding of customer-agent communication?

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by Carl Pierer

A key ingredient to the good life seems to be that we, for ourselves, choose our goals and commitments. Indeed, Immanuel Kant goes as far as to claim that this is a necessary prerequisite for actions to have any moral worth at all. Individual Autonomy is widely accepted as an ideal. Kantianism and Consequentialism, two of the major contemporary ethical theories, disagree on many an issue, but this they value equally. However, in a recent paper, Thomas Miles from Boston College used Soren Kierkegaard's criticism of the ethical life and applied it to the concept of individual autonomy. This essay will first reconstruct Kierkegaard's and Miles' four main arguments and second try to demonstrate that the most powerful of those – the guilt trap – presupposes a religious point of view.

Kierkegaard's Either/Or was published pseudonymously under the name of Victor Eremita in 1843. Eremita claims to have found the papers of the book, which are written by four different authors. These writings are by A (the aesthete), Johannes the Seducer, B or Judge William and a Jutland priest. A's papers together with The Seducer's Diary form the first (the aesthetic life view), William's letters together with the priest's sermon the second part (the ethical life view). According to Miles, it is in William's letters that we find one of the most eloquent and sophisticated expositions of an autonomous ethical life. Very roughly, it can be sketched as follows.

“What I have said to you so often I say once more, or rather shout it to you: either/or; aut/aut.” The ethical life is all about choosing. By choosing and committing to a certain path of life, the ethical person takes responsibility for herself. By “choosing oneself”, she accepts her past and will identify with her present and future actions. Accepting something that connects past, present and future events gives herself continuity in time. Since commitment to duty and responsibility for herself, the ultimate aspiration of the ethical life, can be achieved autonomously, she is independent of the world. “Therefore, the truly ethical person has an inner serenity and sense of security, for he does not have duty outside himself but within himself”, Judge William writes. Miles identifies four main arguments against this position in Kierkegaard's authorship. He calls them: the guilt trap, the self-mastery argument, the problem of meaning and the loss of self.

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by Grace Boey

When Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, the novel generated an enormous amount of controversy. Narrated by Humbert Humbert, a fictional literature professor in his late thirties, the tragicomedy depicts his obsessive sexual relationship with 12-year-old Dolores Haze—the eponymous Lolita.

60 years down the road, the book remains as controversial as ever. A large part of this seems to be that Lolita, despite our moral condemnation of child sex, somehow manages to elicit the reader’s sympathy for its pedophilic ‘protagonist’ (who is, possibly, more accurately described as a hebephile). Beyond our contempt for Humbert, there is also disgust with ourselves. How dare we even think of sympathizing with such a pervert? Surely by doing so we inch closer to condoning sex with children.

Such confusion reflects unresolved thoughts and feelings about sexual deviation in general. What does it mean to sympathize with perversion? Where, exactly, lies the wrong in what many of us think of as sexual deviance—such as pedophilia, zoophilia, homosexuality, and various other unusual forms of sexuality? What specifically is it that’s so outrageous about the affair between Humbert and Dolores? To answer such questions, we must delve into the field of sexual ethics.

Sex: the moral minefield

Why is the ethics of sex even a thing? For one, sex is a significant act which plays a big part in an individual’s life. How someone practices (or doesn’t practice) sex is intertwined with their emotions, relationships, expression and identity. Moreover, sex is an act involving our own bodies that we either wish to participate in, or don’t. In deontological terms or rights-speak, there are important rights and potential violations surrounding sex. From a consequentialist perspective, there is the potential for both great harm and utility to arise from sex. All this makes sex something we should tread around pretty carefully.

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by Liam Heneghan

In the early 1980s wanting to be a naturalist — a coleopterist, in particular, that most Darwin-like of naturalists — I spent a couple of summer months in Killarney National Park, in Ireland, making a collection of chrysomelid beetles. This was the first of many such collecting trips, part of a series of increasingly violent engagements with the natural world that served as stepping stones that link my life as an Irish teen to the one I live now in Chicago. All of them involved the killing of animals or plants for the sake of science.

The Chrysomelidae had been offered up to me by Dr Jimmy O’Connor, an entomology curator at Ireland’s Natural History Museum (The Dead Zoo, as it was called in Dublin). Apparently, the Irish representatives of this group were poorly known, not having been taxonomically revised since early in the 20th Century. Chrysomelid beetles include a number of notorious pests such as Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado Potato beetle, but for the most part these insects go about their business without causing us much bother. They are remarkably pretty though, many of them possessing metallic elytra (the sclerotized outer-wing of the beetle) and when you train your eye to notice them you see them as a marvel of shimmer and vivid color. Some of them, the flea-beetles, have greatly enlarged hind-leg femora, so that when disturbed they erupt into action and spring away from you like a glorious idea that thought you had but now cannot seem to fully recall.

Collecting them is easy enough. Using a sweep net, I thrashed my way across the grassier spots in the National Park; in other locations I’d search the under-leaves of shrubs and low hanging plants, catching them on the tip of a wetted paintbrush.

The issue of killing them was quite another matter. After all, I wanted to collect them because I had conceived a liking for them, and was concerned that if neglected, we, the scientific community, would not know, ironically, if these animals needed more vigorous protection. I loved them enough I suppose to want them dead; a couple of specimens of each species at the very least. I was the Noah of death and my ark was a killing jar.

However, when one sees glamorous creatures such as these looking up at you, as it were, from the bottom of the net, the ethical calculation concerning their dispatch is not an easy one to make. Should these few glimmering Isaacs be sacrificed so that others of their kind might flourish. Or perhaps more proximately, since the question of how data might be used is always somewhat further down the road, should they die so that the storehouse of my knowledge could grow?

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by Akim Reinhardt

In February the word came in. My brother in law had a job offer in Orange County. He and my sister would finally be giving up the little apartment in far northern Manhattan and heading for the West coast.

“Lemme know if I can help,” I to told my sister.

“You wanna drive the moving truck across the country with Noah?” she asked.

“Sure, I can do that,” I said.

Monday, July 21

With luggage, I make the 20 minute walk to the light rail station. Train shows up, and the ride to the airport is uneventful. Not like last time when I had some drunk fool trying to pick a fight with me at 9:00 in the morning cause he thought I was “gay lookin'” at him. Goin' on about how he did a dime in prison and he'd kick my ass, except he's either about 60 years old or a very rough 50, and already lit, drinking tall boys out of paper bags, so no, he can't actually kick my ass. After not engaging, I finally had to tell him to shut the fuck up already, but that didn't help. Didn't make it worse either. Just kept on prattling his belligerent, drunken shit.

Nothing like that this time. To the airport, all good. Until you walk in to find your flight's been delayed two hours.

After what passes for a nice meal at BWI (decent beer, cured olives, mixed salad with goat cheese; actually, that's a nice meal anywhere), I mosey over to the gate. My gate's jammed, so I go to something a bit emptier. I open up Murdering McKinley by Eric Rauchway, a history prof up at UC Davis. He's a good writer, which isn't a given for a historian.

I mean, just look at this pablum.

About thirty pages in, this terribly annoying extended family sits next to me. Not a decent one in the lot.

I move on to a quieter spot. Then the guy behind me starts slurping the straw of his empty Dunkin' Donuts cup. And he won't stop. On and off for 20 minutes. I look behind me. He's about 50 years old

Truly, there is no sense of decorum left in this country.

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by Eric Byrd

On Facebook I follow a number of the US Department of the Interior's National Battlefield Parks, National Battle Sites, and Military Parks. In the progress of the Civil War's sesquicentennial each of these sites has had their day in the social media sun, their special anniversary posts with pictures of the commemorative ceremonies. In May and June it was the turn of the parks that memorialize the battles of Grant's Overland Campaign.

In the spring of 1864 Ulysses Grant came east, to personally oversee the destruction of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, the veteran force that had in the previous two years baffled and humiliated every Federal drive on the rebel capitol of Richmond. Though baffled and humiliated – but never demoralized or destroyed, a distinction apparently lost on the aristocratic Lee – the eastern armies of the Union came on in early May and fought continuously for six weeks, chewing and choking “with a bulldog grip,” as Lincoln would exhort via telegraph.

By the end of June, when the exhausted armies began to dig in for a long siege of the last rail hub supplying Richmond, Grant had lost 55,000 men and Lee 33,000. About half of each army. Lincoln said Grant was the general who could “face the arithmetic.” Meaning he could fight all out, lose half his army while costing Lee half of his, replace his losses just when Lee could not, and then resume the offensive and finish the war. Grant, reflected one of his staff officers, “was assigned one of the most appalling tasks ever intrusted to a commander.”

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by Bill Benzon

Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press 2013. 229 pp.

This is a strange book, for it is three. There is the book that is easy to praise for its range of topics – quantum mechanics, La Monte Young, global warming, The Matrix, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example – and its quasi-virtuoso stylistic versatility. There is, as well, the book that is easy to criticize – though I’m sure some would regard that as too mild a word – for its conceptual instabilities, lapses in logic, and misreading of science.

And there is another book, the one leaking out of the cracks and pores in the first two. That book has the scattered beginnings of a framework in which we can construct a viable approach to the future. That's the book I'm writing about, making this essay as much an interpretation of as a review of Morton's fine Hyperobjects.

Hyperobjects and Objects

Hyperobjects are “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (p. 1). What isn’t a hyperobject is an object. Kumquats, automobiles, palm trees, squids, geosynchronous satellites, Olympic records, a promise, a rooster’s crow, these are all objects in the philosophical sense of the word. In the first paragraph of the book Morton lists these examples: the Lago Agrio oil field, Florida Everglades, the biosphere, the Solar System, “the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium,” Styrofoam, plastic bags, or “the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism.”

The philosophical sense of object is not quite the same as the ordinary sense, which tends toward physical things that are neither very large nor very small. Roughly speaking, for Morton and proponents of other object oriented ontology (OOO) – a recent school of Continental philosophy – anything that can be designated by a noun or a noun phrase is an object. Anything. Including, of course hyperobjects.

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by Sarah Firisen

I am Jewish by birth. My family wasn’t particularly religious; we went to synagogue at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but not really any other time. My brother and I went through years of Hebrew school, but we came home and ate bacon sandwiches. As a teenager, I became involved in BBYO, a Jewish teen organization and through it became quite heavily exposed to conversations about Israel, the general evilness of the Palestinians and the righteousness of the concept of a Jewish homeland. When I was 17, a school friend and I went away together to Israel for our first trip without our parents. We chose not to do a tour or a work on a kibbutz but instead to make our own way around Israel staying in youth hostels.

I remember the moment we got off the plane onto the tarmac thinking, “this is it, I’m in Israel, the Jewish homeland.” It was a transcendent moment that made me feel connected to my heritage and to a community that I had only ever skirted around of the edge for the most part. I truly believed that this would be a transformative trip for me.

In the second hostel we stayed in, I fell in love with Abbud, a Palestinian man who was working there for the summer. We spent a few days and nights together and then my friend and I moved to another part of the country. But I promised to come back. When I did, Abbud wanted to show me his village in the West Bank. This was in 1986 just before the first Palestinian Intifada and, apart from the general lack of common sense shown by two young girls agreeing to travel across country with a man they hardly knew, there didn’t seem to be any good reason not to go with him.

We arrived in Abbud’s village in time for dinner and he took us to his cousin’s home. My friend and I were both vegetarian and so unable to eat much of what was put before us and I was wearing quite a prominent Star of David around my neck, regardless we were treated as honored guests. We stayed in his parent’s home that night. I woke up early the next morning and padded through the house in bare feet. I came across Abbud’s elderly father who spoke no English. He took off his sandals and gave them to me to wear. The gesture was so gracious and generous that I couldn’t say no and spent the rest of the morning flopping around in sandals that were much too big for me. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of reception my family would give Abbud if he visited me in London.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Time in space

The race was on: for whoever discovered a way to accurately measure longitude aboard a ship would be able to control the seas –and thereby control the riches of the world!

The search for longitude at sea was one of the great quests starting in the late Renaissance. And, it was how it came to be that a 17th century nobleman named Roberto della Griva found himself aboard a ship sailing southward toward Australia in search of the Prime Meridian, in Umberto Eco’s novel Island of the Day Before.

Being obsessed by longitude, the characters in the book are also obsessed by notions of time. For to calculate longitude is, of course, to calculate time.

But to do this at sea is no easy feat, because while one only requires to know the local time at the ship's current meridian as well as what the current time is would be back at the meridian of departure (or at some fixed meridian, like, say at the Solomon Islands), this remained very difficult to accurately determine aboard ship. And inaccuracies in time would result in inaccuracies of place–as is well known.

You can see where this is going…

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by Matt McKenna

Back in 2000, chances were that if you were using a computer, it was running a Microsoft operating system. In 2014, those chances have diminished considerably, and you are now more likely to be using a device running Apple's iOS or Google's Android software. Microsoft's stock price has responded accordingly, and its inflation adjusted market cap is now less than half of what it was at its peak in 1999. How appropriate it is then that Matt Reeve's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was released this month just as Microsoft announced plans to lay off 18,000 employees in what looks to be the dawn of the trivialization of Microsoft's standing as a technology leader in the same way that the rebooted Apes series chronicles the trivialization of the human species as a planetary leader. While there are many tempting social readings crawling along the surface of the Planet of the Apes series, the most coherent one invites viewers to imagine the story's fictional planet Earth as a metaphor for the consumer electronics industry, a metaphor in which the humans represent Microsoft and the various species of apes represent the various technology companies usurping Microsoft's dominance.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes picks up immediately where its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, takes off. In Rise, the first film in the second reboot of the Planet of the Apes series, James Franco's character creates a supposedly benign virus that regenerates brain cells, resulting in the reversal of diseases such as Alzheimer's. Unfortunately, the virus has the annoying side effect of afflicting humans with flu-like symptoms (you can see where this is going). The apes on which the virus was tested, however, receive all the positive effects to their cognitive abilities without any of the negative effects to the rest of their bodies. At the end of Rise, the brainy apes storm the Golden Gate Bridge en route to Muir Woods where they plan to live the peaceful simian life. The humans, on the other hand, are impotent to stop their zoological Frankenstein's monsters and can only look on while engaging in some ominous sneezing.

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