• The NHL, which has seen an average of 75 concussions in each of the last four years, had long talked about curbing head shots, but two incidents last season were catalysts: Philadelphia’s Mike Richards’s hit on Florida’s David Booth and Pittsburgh’s Matt Cooke’s blow to Boston’s Marc Savard. [Sports Illustrated]
• About a year ago I found myself trying to figure out how video games relate to traditional, non-interactive forms of artistic expression. I was struggling to articulate a sense that playing a game could be similar to consuming a painting, the symphony or the ballet.
And then a friend gave me a copy of “Art as Experience,” John Dewey’s seminal 1934 work on the philosophy of art, and it became clear: art exists not as artifact but as we engage with it. As Dewey puts it: “The product of art — temple, painting, statue, poem — is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.”
With no media do humans cooperate so intimately as video games. [New York Times]
• Indeed, these days the caves look a lot better than the government housing. In 1993, in an attempt to protect the historically significant sassi, Unesco declared the Matera sassi a World Heritage site, and gradually those condemned homes have been transformed into hotels and restaurants. Now that some of the caves are designed with Starck bathtubs and high-tech temperature and humidity control, some travelers spend more than $400 a night to immerse themselves in an enchanted atmosphere of antiquity, even if it means doing without flat-screen television or Wi-Fi. [New York Times]
• [L]ogic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.
Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. {NY Times]
• “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.” [NY Times]
• Safety Brian Dawkins stresses the importance of exercise and activity to students at Kepner Middle School in Denver as part of the Keep Gym in School initiative. [DenverBroncos.com]
And some that I’ve written:
• Philadelphia City Council public-comment-rule changes.
• Bill Barnes was found not guilty of murder, but he’s still in jail.
• Bernard Hopkins is back at it.
• Dangerous toys.
• Lady Hates Michigan So Much She Lets Her Breastuses Hang Out.