Garbage Dreams is a documentary film which sheds light on how much the world needs to refocus its values. This film proves that modernization is not always the best idea. The film introduces us to Cairo’s most influential, but highly underappreciated, social group, Christians known as the Zaballeen. Their livelihoods are centered on collecting and recycling Cairo’s trash. This is all they know, but now foreign garbage companies want to strip them of their livelihood. The Zaballeen live on the outskirts of Cairo, where hey recycle 80 percent of everything …

Also see Rosalee’s review of The Age of Stupid.
With ice caps melting in the Arctic and the rising of global temperatures, how many more years do we really have on Earth? The Age of Stupid is a documentary which combines fiction, personal accounts from real people, and animation to illustrate how our ignorance will lead to our demise. The Age of Stupid opens in the United States on September 21, 2009, as part of the United Nations’ Climate Week. The producers want us all to take action against climate change …

Also see Betty’s review of The Age of Stupid.
The Age Of Stupid is a movie that blends documentary techniques and fiction to focus on the effects of climate change. The producers, two young women who devoted five years to making the movie, say that they are not interested in awards, but rather mobilizing young people to combat climate change.
The movie opens in the year 2055 after nothing has been done to stop climate change. The narrator looks back to 2008 and tries to figure out why …

We wonder whether we’re alone in the universe. The science fiction movie District 9 shows what might very well happen if aliens visited Earth. It tells the story of creatures who are refugees from their homeland, trying to find shelter on earth. The mother ship lands in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the aliens are confined to a slum called District 9.
Even so, the aliens have advanced technology, and we meet three aliens, including a child, who are scientists and technically adept. A private arms dealer, …

There’s a lot of buzz about antimatter and whether the threat it poses in the movie Angels and Demons is real. But less has been said about the character Vittoria Vetra, an Italian scientist played by Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer. Maybe that’s good. I remember when Barbra Streisand accepted an award for best woman director in the early 1990s. In her speech, she said the award was “very nice,” but that she hoped soon such a qualification would not occur to anyone. Perhaps we’ve arrived at that moment with regard …

Between the Folds, a new documentary about origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, is a gorgeous cinematic experience. I was so captivated by the documentary that halfway through I felt intense admiration for humanity, the same tingling I feel when listening to music so exquisite it’s almost painful. Many people portrayed in the film—artists, mathematicians, scientists––have devoted their lives to creating paper art objects for the pure fun of it, to satisfy their curiosity, to communicate. It was glorious to behold their energy and originality.
Director Vanessa Gould says her …

Like a colorful Mandelbrot fractal, Emily Levine’s one-woman show about her illness and triumph over it spirals in and out from her personal experience to the universal. Her story spans Emily 2.0 and Emily 3.0––releases on life during her struggle with acromegaly. This disease is caused by a pituitary gland tumor and results in “gigantism,” severe headache, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, enlarged jaw and heart, hypertension, diabetes, and heart and kidney failure. Here is the website of humorist, speaker, and radio commentator Levine.
Levine’s case took some time to diagnose and …

In early May, The New York Academy of Sciences hosted a day-long conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of C. P. Snow’s seminal lecture, “Two Cultures.” The first panel, “Historical Perspective: From Aristotle to “Science Wars” set the tone for the day. Below I highlight what was said and remarks that were echoed later in the day.
Ann Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Harvard University, opened the discussion by outlining the evolution of the split between the humanities and sciences. Before and during the scientific …

By Teshamae Monteith, MD

A few hours after a fall on a ski slope in a Canadian resort on March 18th, Natasha Richardson appeared “disoriented… with signs of confusion… a concussion,” according to a medic. After a lucid interval, she experienced severe headaches. Within a few hours she was verbal but without orientation. The final moments of Richardson’s life illustrate the progressive stages of a fatal brain injury. On March 19, the New York Medical Examiner declared the cause of death was due to a traumatic epidural …

We are all the suns of our own universes, yet I’m not sure I would have had the audacity, or maybe the wisdom, to extend the metaphor to a personal theory of wave particle duality or to a life-sized paradigm shift. Emily Levine dares to see the biggest picture out there and then shrinks it down to the size of her own life in her one-woman show, Emily at the Edge of Chaos, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Directed by Marcia Jean Kurtz, Levine takes us through a personal …