With extraordinary access, BLAST exposes a world of risky, hardcore, scientific adventure. The story follows an international team of astrophysicists trying to launch a multi-million dollar telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their journey to discover thousands of early galaxies takes them from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Revealing frustrations, inevitable failures and ultimate triumph, BLAST puts a human face on the quest to answer our most basic question - How did we get here?

Blast The Movie

If you've ever watched "The Sopranos" or the 1997 movie "Donnie Brasco," you might have wondered whether killing people is fun. After all, it seems fun to watch, at least on TV. Or maybe it's not the killing that's fun. Maybe it's the planning, the camaraderie, the petty squabbles, and the disdain for normal bourgeois existence that holds our attention. Demanding protection money and dealing drugs seems fun, too. If you've had such thoughts, have I got the social scientist for you.

A Dealer in the Ivory Tower

Stephen Levitt calls him the "main character" in his TEDTalk on crack economics: Sudhir Venkatesh, the young grad student who infiltrated a Chicago crack-dealing gang. His research brought back reams of sociological data -- and offers an unfiltered glimpse into gang life. In his new book, Gang Leader for a Day, Venkatesh writes about his experiences during the six years he spent with the Black Kings gang in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. Venkatesh is interviewed on NPR, whose site also offers an excerpt from his book, while the Chicago Sun-Times has an MP3 of the author reading his work.

'Crack economics' researcher tells his story

"Gang Leader for a Day is not another voyeuristic look into the supposedly tawdry, disorganized life of the black poor. Sudhir Venkatesh entered the Chicago gang world at the height of the crack epidemic and what he found was a tightly organized community, held together by friendship and compassion as well as force. I couldn't stop reading, and ended up loving this brave, reckless young scholar, as well as the gang leader J.T., who has to be one of the greatest characters ever to emerge from something that could be called sociological research."
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

The world promised reconstruction to Afghanistan; it was to be thrust from the medieval rule of the fundamentalist Taliban into the booming twenty-first century. However, progress has materialized only in scattershot fashion across this country where elite villas, five-star hotels, and fabulous malls for a very few take precedence over roads, schools, and farms. Hovels were bulldozed to make way for expensive housing for Kabul’s wealthiest residents—top government officials and their lackeys. Hundreds of refugee families living on government-owned land in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood were ejected from that prime real estate. Mansions and malls tower over mud-and-burlap vendor stalls in a clash of priorities between, on the one hand, a tribal, Islamic culture and, on the other, secular, gotta-have-it, drug-infused venture capitalism. The latter influences everything, including international aid organizations.

All the Country Will Be Shaking

Tracking the location and availability of resources such as hospitals, transportation equipment and water during an emergency situation can be life-saving.

A collaborative mapping tool developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is helping emergency management officials better coordinate event and incident planning – and real-time response.

Mapping Tool Allows Emergency Management Personnel to Visually Track Resources

Bring bad design to justice.

Design Police

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.

Top commanders said that better intelligence-gathering allows them to identify and hit extremist strongholds with bombs and missiles, and they predicted that extensive airstrikes will continue this year as the United States seeks to flush insurgents out of havens in and around Baghdad and to the north in Diyala province.

US Boosts Its Use of Airstrikes In Iraq

I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old suddenly translated to this country in 1933. ‘Imagine yourselves,’ I told my fellow Old Philologians, ‘as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.’

LRB · Eric Hobsbawm: Diary

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