When night has fallen over the beach and you’re staring at the stars, you may begin wondering about the mysteries of the cosmos, or even about programming your DVD player. Reading these magazines might give you a head start on finding some of those answers.
Discover interviews “Apes” director Matt Reeves, who created an ape city in Louisiana and used 3D cameras to film many of the scenes in the mud and rain. Cirque de Soleil acrobats wore sensors so their motions could be mimicked by the computerized apes. “I was into the ape civilization,” the director said in stating the obvious. More interesting is a cover feature on a real-life journey to the center of the earth. The Russians spent decades trying to drill into the mantle but got only about halfway through the 15-mile crust before giving up. This, and a feature about the inner workings of our brain in which 8.5 billion neural cells do some heavy lifting, show how little we know about our own world let alone space.
Popular Science also goes to the movies. In fact, it embraces pop culture by providing only pictorials and short news items. An examination of how much reality there is to popular science fiction ideas is intriguing. Yes, the idea of adding a new chromosome like the X-Men has a basis in reality. Thousands of years ago, after all, Europeans started drinking milk, thus developing a new tolerance for lactose. However, combining humans and animals to make super humans is more fiction. Our bodies attack alien tissue, making this reality only in the movies. A feature on GMOs and the new Arctic granny apples about to hit the market feels like science fiction.
Scientific American, meanwhile, is largely inaccessible for the average Joe. One story starts, “Predicting what ubiquitous computing and sensor data will mean for daily life is as difficult as predicting 30 years ago how the
Internet would change the world.” The author then proceeds to write four pages of predictions. There are also several hard-to-follow features about cancer. There is, though, a fascinating feature on scientists discovering how to convert treated sewage into water that is cleaner than what comes out of our reservoirs. The problem is, How do you persuade people in a water-starved city like San Diego to use the reasonably priced technology and get over the mental yuck factor of drinking sewage water?
Want science for hipsters? Popular Mechanics has pictorials galore, including a story on what kind of wood barrels are behind certain whiskies. In the same Williamsburg vein, there’s a feature on converting your motorcycle into a café bike like the one Steve McQueen used to ride. You can get the pieces by mail and do it yourself in 60 to 80 hours. The mag also has some good reporting on how the US government plans to destroy the chemicals of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, which involves taking them out to sea.
The New Yorker’s cover cartoon depicts tourists at the 9/11 memorial, snapping smiling selfies, inhaling giant sodas and toting Century 21 shopping bags. Inside, Adam Gopnik pens an egg-headed treatise in which he calls the monument a “celebration of liberty tightly policed” and “a cemetery that cowers in the shadow of commerce.” Meanwhile, an update on the mess in San Francisco, where tech tycoons are clashing with locals over real estate, is downright naive. Citing the prospect of falling interest rates, Nathan Heller writes that “a company town will move toward becoming, once more, just a town.” Call us crazy, but we’re still quite bullish on Bay-area real estate, no matter what Fed chief Janet Yellen decides.
New York fares far better on the subject with a cover story that declares “New York real estate is the new Swiss bank account.” In an exposé that’s uncharacteristically hard-nosed for this magazine, we are told that “foreigners are flooding the market to stash, hide and sometimes launder their money.” Fleeing transparency laws in Switzerland, they’re jacking up apartment prices in the Big Apple, aided by “an entire industry of tight-lipped advisers that exists largely to keep anyone from discovering” who they are, the mag reports. So does that mean this publication is finally ditching its giddy, bubbly, wide-eyed coverage of real estate as a spectator sport? We doubt it.
Time also happens to weigh in on real estate, this time with a 39-page special report on “The Smarter Home.” Unfortunately, the report itself isn’t so smart. The houses of the future will make you “calmer, safer, richer, and healthier,” the magazine predicts. Given all of the aforementioned that’s happening in real estate, we are far more concerned whether we’ll be able to even afford the house of the future, much less whether it could make us richer by controlling our air conditioning, keeping our pipes from freezing or, most convincingly, being really small. Let’s face it: a bunch of Apple gadgets doesn’t change the fact that the economic outlook looks bleak.