Life is stranger than fiction for Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a familiar trend for Leo, he played Howard Hughes in The Aviator, Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can, and Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life. And Leo’s also attached to films in development about Wall Street felon Jordan Belfort and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Well, portraying real people on screen has continued, as the Oscar-nominated actor-producer has pressed the play button. Leo just become attached to star in “Atari,” a pitch that writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman sold to Paramount on Friday about the godfather of the video game industry, Nolan Bushnell.

Leo DiCaprio as the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese?

On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry, Natasha?”

Natasha, by Vladimir Nabokov

In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the experience of travelling through the fourth dimension is cinematic: the Time Traveller sits like a film-goer, watching the accelerated passage of time, as the time machine’s dials spin ever faster. The effect is of rapid cutting and slow fade-out: “The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.” As Keith Williams says, time in the novel becomes a “movie reel, speeded forwards and backwards, or stopped at will”. Remarkably, The Time Machine was written before Wells had seen a film. It was published in 1895, the very year the cinematograph was invented by the Lumière brothers. As film historian Ian Christie has said, their invention “quite literally made time travel a spectator sport”.

Williams’s scholarly study argues convincingly that Wells’s early fiction anticipates the “cinematisation” of culture, both in his narrative technique and in his description of the technology. Wells – dubbed the “Realist of the Fantastic” by Conrad – is, says Williams, “the unjustly neglected precursor of High Modernist interest and influence on both avant garde and popular aspects of the new medium.” Wells’s prescience is, of course, legendary and today we live in a Wellsian world. He coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before World War I, anticipating the age of nuclear proliferation and terrorists armed with suitcase nukes.

Kafka’s mouse | Science and the cinema | PD Smith

Last month a controversial op-ed by Slavoj Žižek was published in Le Monde diplomatique. Around the same time, Žižek also wrote a similar letter to the London Review of Books. In the current issue, LRB has published some of its readers' responses.

As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling.

This assessment is consistent with Jello's reaction that Žižek's argument "reads exactly like Chinese propaganda."

No Shangri-La | Letters to the LRB

A free alternative to the ever-offensive Comic Sans.

HVD Comic Serif

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories – anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.

This site archives 190 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

Indeterminacy

In the 1970s Joe Haldeman approached more than a dozen different publishers before he finally found one interested in The Forever War. The book went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, although a large chunk of the story had been cut out before it saw publication. Now Haldeman and Avon Books have released the definitive version of The Forever War, published for the first time as Haldeman originally intended. The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can't adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Auto-Tune corrects a singer’s pitch. It also distorts—a grand tradition in pop.

The Gerbil’s Revenge

This is a cute reminder of the "boss button" in old games.

Read at Work

Vanishing America

DNJ Gallery: Artist: Michael Eastman