(Photo credit The Economist/University of Oregon)
The annual "Special Holiday Double Issue" of The Economist is much anticipated in our household. In it, the usual weekly news coverage remains intact, but it is augmented with fine feature-length essays, which provide seemingly inexhaustible end-of-year reading.
The current holiday issue seems particularly memorable, with articles about religion in America, the "servant problem" in Brazil, Cairo's venerable Cafe Riche, the failure of China to excel at soccer, hiking in England, Albrecht Durer's medieval art (and self-) marketing plan, Belgian ale ... and two pieces that have made especially deep impressions on me:
Social media in the 16th Century -- How Luther went viral; Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation, in which the crude and rude illustration above is explained.
Musical history -- Seven seconds of fire; How a short burst of drumming changed the face of music ...
Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band’s re-entry.
Elsewhere, Prospero provides aural accompaniment to explain the seven seconds.
Accompanying each of these two links is a listing titled "In this section," in which there are links to all the special essays in this year's special issue. They're worth reading.
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