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7 Food and Drink Hacks Based on Math and Science
Ever wonder how to slice your bagel for optimal cream cheese coverage or how to pour champagne without losing the bubbles? We turned to professionals in the fields of math and science for these seven food and drink hacks.
Fake news is a real problem. Now researchers say we may be able to inoculate ourselves against real-looking fabrications the same way we would against any other epidemic. They published their findings in the aptly named journal Global Challenges.
Lead author Sander van der Linden is a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge. “Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” he said in a statement. “We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by preemptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience.”
Van der Linden and his colleagues at Cambridge and George Mason University recruited 2167 participants from across the United States and asked them to rate their familiarity and agreement with a variety of statements about climate change. Some were true, such as: “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change.” Others were falsehoods created and spread by disinformation campaigns, such as: “There is no consensus on human-caused climate change.”
Some people were shown just the facts; others saw only the falsehoods. Others saw a combination of both in varying proportions. As the participants read through the materials, they were asked repeatedly if scientists agreed about human-made global warming, in order to judge which stories they believed.
The results were what you might expect. Being shown only the facts increased participants’ understanding that there is scientific consensus by 20 percentage points. The folks who only saw the falsehoods experienced a 9-percent drop in that understanding.
Showing participants fact and fiction at the same time had worrisome results: fiction seemed to cancel fact out. This is especially problematic at a time when many media outlets insist on presenting a false “balance” on issues like climate change, even though the facts are clearly piled up on one side of the scale: climate change is real and caused by us.
“It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” van der Linden said. “A lot of people’s attitudes toward climate change aren’t very firm. They are aware there is a debate going on, but aren’t necessarily sure what to believe. Conflicting messages can leave them feeling back at square one.”
But there’s good (real) news. The researchers also gave one subgroup of people an ‘inoculation’: a warning that “some politically motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists.”
It worked. People who were given this fake-news vaccine reported a 6.5-percent increase in their understanding that there is scientific consensus on climate change even after they’d read misinformation. Remarkably, this effect held strong even among people who were predisposed to reject climate science.
“There will always be people completely resistant to change,” van der Linden said, “but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”
January 24, 2017 – 10:30am
Ben Leuner/AMC
Though it didn’t premiere to over-the-top ratings, over the course of five seasons, Breaking Bad morphed into a bona fide television phenomenon—thanks in large part to word of mouth and the increasing popularity of binge-watching. At its most basic level, it’s the story of a soft-spoken chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, risks everything he has worked for to make sure his family will be taken care of in the event of his death. But, like all great TV shows, the story is really not that simple. And it evolves over time, with each season somehow being able to top the one before it.
Regularly cited as one of the greatest television series of all time (Rolling Stone recently ranked it number three on its list of the 100 best shows, right in between Mad Men and The Wire), here are 25 things you might not have known about Breaking Bad.
In 2016, it was announced that Vince Gilligan is working on a limited series about Jim Jones for HBO. But the “It’s not TV” network wasn’t always so hot on Gilligan. In a 2011 interview, Gilligan shared that he pitched Breaking Bad to HBO, and that it was “the worst meeting I’ve ever had.”
“The trouble with Hollywood—movies and TV—is people will leave you dangling on the end of a meat hook for days or weeks or months on end,” Gilligan said. “That happened at HBO. Like the worst meeting I ever had … The woman we [were] pitching to could not have been less interested—not even in my story, but about whether I actually lived or died.”
HBO wasn’t the only network that ultimately said no to Walter White: Showtime, TNT, and FX all passed on Breaking Bad, too, for various reasons.
It’s impossible to imagine Breaking Bad with anyone other than Bryan Cranston in the lead role, but he wasn’t as well known when the series kicked off, and AMC wanted a star. They were particularly interested in casting either Matthew Broderick or John Cusack in the lead.
“We all still had the image of Bryan shaving his body in Malcolm in the Middle,” a former AMC executive told The Hollywood Reporter about their initial reluctance to cast Cranston. “We were like, ‘Really? Isn’t there anybody else?’” But Gilligan had worked with Cranston before, on an episode of The X-Files, and knew he had the chops to navigate the quirks of the part. The network brass watched the episode, and agreed.
“We needed somebody who could be dramatic and scary yet have an underlying humanity so when he dies, you felt sorry for him,” Gilligan said. “Bryan nailed it.”
While Breaking Bad ultimately ended up being largely about the tumultuous partnership between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, Jesse wasn’t originally intended to be a major character. While it’s often stated that he was supposed to be killed off in episode nine, and that it was the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike that saved him, Gilligan set the record straight in 2013, saying it became clear much earlier than that that Jesse’s character—and relationship to Walter—was integral to moving the show forward.
“The writers’ strike, in a sense, didn’t save him, because I knew by episode two—we all did, all of us, our wonderful directors and our wonderful producers,” Gilligan said. “Everybody knew just how good [Aaron Paul is], and a pleasure to work with, and it became pretty clear early on that that would be a huge, colossal mistake to kill off Jesse.”
When asked during a Reddit AMA about how he would have felt if Jesse had been killed off in season one, Paul posited that, “My career would be over. And I would be a sobbing mess watching week to week on Breaking Bad.”
The Writers Strike did end up shortening the show’s first season, which forced Gilligan to cut two episodes that would have seen Walter’s transformation into Heisenberg happen much more quickly—and violently. Gilligan was glad it worked out the way it did.
“We had plotted out all our episodes before the show ever went on the air, and we didn’t know how well the show would be received,” Gilligan told Creative Screenwriting. “Not knowing how the public would take to it, you tend to want to be a little more sensational. You want to really keep the show exciting and interesting and keep ’em watching. All of that to say that those last two episodes, because of that, would have been really big episodes, and would have taken the characters into a hugely different realm than that they were already in, and it would have been a hard thing to come back from, coming into season two.”
“We’re not just doing those two episodes coming into season two,” he added. “We threw those out completely and we’re starting somewhere else. We’re building more slowly than we otherwise would have built. I think that’s really good, because I know we’ve all had our favorite shows that were really interesting up to a certain point, but maybe they just go too far, and then there’s no going back from it. To me, the trick is to do as little as possible with the characters, and yet keep them as interesting as possible. It’s a real balancing act.”
Because of the subject matter, the show’s creators thought it was only right to inform the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) what they were making—and welcome their help. “We informed them—with all due respect and consideration—that we’re doing this show, and ‘Would you like to be a part of it in a consultancy in order to make sure that we get it right?’” Cranston told High Times. “They had the choice to say, ‘We don’t want anything to do with it.’ But they saw that it might be in their best interest to make sure that we do it correctly. So DEA chemists came onboard as consultants and taught Aaron Paul and me how to make crystal meth.”
Dr. Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, began serving as a science advisor on the show midway through the first season, and was tasked with making sure the show got its science right—or, at least as “right” as is safe.
“I don’t think there’s any popular show that gets it 100 percent right, but that’s not the goal,” Nelson told mental_floss in 2013. “The goal is not to be a science education show; the goal is to be a popular show. And so there’s always going to be some creative license taken, because they want to make the show interesting.”
Of course—particularly with a show about drug-making—you don’t want to give viewers a primer on how to start their own meth empires. “In the case of Walter White, his trademark is the blue meth,” Nelson said. “In reality, it wouldn’t be blue; it would be colorless. But this isn’t a science education show. It’s a fantasy. And Vince Gilligan did a fantastic job of getting most of the science right. And I am just thrilled with that. I think Vince Gilligan is a genius, and you can quote me on that!”
Whenever you see Walter and Jesse’s signature blue meth, what you’re actually seeing is blue rock candy. More specifically: blue rock candy from The Candy Lady, a boutique candy store in Albuquerque. (They have a whole line of Breaking Bad-inspired treats, which they sell under The Bad Candy Lady line.)
Initially, Giancarlo Esposito wasn’t interested in taking on the role of Gus Fring, which was a much smaller part in the beginning. “I had not seen Breaking Bad, but my manager at the time told me it was his favorite show,” Esposito told TIME. “My wife said I should I try it, but it was a guest spot and I’ve done a lot of guest spots. I wanted to develop a character. But I did one episode and then I agreed to do two more with the caveat that I wanted to be part of a filmmaking family.”
When Gilligan offered him another seven episodes for season three, Esposito countered that he wanted a bigger role. “There was some negotiating and I ended up doing 12,” Esposito said. “I wanted to create a character who became intrinsic to the show. And at some point, I realized that I had slid into the Breaking Bad family. Vince told me that I changed the game and raised the bar for the show. And I’m proud of that, but I could only do that because of the depth of the writing and due to the chemistry between Bryan Cranston and myself. And their writing inspired me to think, to create someone who was polite, threatening and poignant.”
In the mid-1980s, Giancarlo Esposito made a few guest appearances on Miami Vice. The experience clearly had an effect on him, as he used Edward James Olmos’s character from that series, Lieutenant Martin Castillo, as a model for Gus Fring.
“Eddie did very little and he was very convincing,” Esposito told the Toronto Sun. “I also thought he was a bit flat, but he did very, very little in playing [Castillo] and I thought it was really effective. Juxtaposed to Philip Michael [Thomas] and Don [Johnson], who were at times a bit full of themselves but were doing a little bit of acting, Eddie was just doing his job. And I wanted Gus to be in that mode.”
Fring’s final sendoff is one of the most memorable visual images from the entire series—and they were able to enlist the help of some true gore experts. “Indeed we did have great help from the prosthetic effects folks at The Walking Dead,” Gilligan told The New York Times. “And I want to give a shout-out to Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, and KNB EFX, those two gentlemen and their company, because their shop did that effect. And then that was augmented by the visual effects work of a guy named Bill Powloski and his crew, who digitally married a three-dimensional sculpture that KNB EFX created with the reality of the film scene. So you can actually see into and through Gus’s head in that final reveal. It’s a combination of great makeup and great visual effects. And it took months to do.”
While any Jesse Pinkman impression ends with a “bitch,” by one calculation, Paul uses the word a total of 54 times throughout the series. Which, considering there are 62 episodes, seems a little on the low side.
Even if that above number seems underwhelming, Pinkman’s favorite add-on became so synonymous with Paul that, in 2014, the actor released an app called Yo, Bitch.
Marius Stan, who played Bogdan, Walter’s boss at the car wash, wasn’t a familiar face to many of the show’s viewers. That’s because the series was his (and his eyebrows’) acting debut. In real life, rather coincidentally, he has a PhD in chemistry and, according to a Reddit AMA, is a “Senior Computational Energy Scientist at Argonne National Lab—which is one of the national laboratories under the U.S. Dept. of Energy—and a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago, the Computation Institute.”
Walter White’s drug kingpin alter ego, Heisenberg, is a nod to Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed the principle of uncertainty.
Heisenberg’s porkpie hat came to identify Walter White’s dark side, but it originated from a very practical place. “Bryan kept asking me, after he shaved his head, ‘Can I have a hat?’ because his head was cold,” Kathleen Detoro, the show’s costume designer, explained. “So I would ask Vince and he kept saying no; Jesse wore the hats. Finally, Vince said, ‘I think there’s a place …’ It was Bryan asking for a hat, me asking Vince, and then Vince figuring out where in the story it makes sense: It’s when he really becomes Heisenberg.” (If you want to buy your own Heisenberg hat, it was made by Goorin.)
Though Walter White and his family live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, the home that you see in exterior shots is actually located at 3828 Piermont Drive NE, a private home in Albuquerque that has become a pretty major tourist attraction. Many fans, caught up in the excitement of seeing the home where Walter White managed to hurl the world’s largest pizza onto the roof in one swift move, have attempted to recreate that scene—leaving the home’s owner with a regular mess.
In 2015, Gilligan appealed to the show’s fan base to refrain from throwing pizza onto the home’s roof. “There is nothing original, or funny, or cool about throwing a pizza on this lady’s roof,” Gilligan said. “It’s been done before—you’re not the first.”
“And if I catch you doing it, I will hunt you down,” added Jonathan Banks, in true Mike Ehrmantraut fashion.
Speaking of that infamous pizza scene: It really was Cranston who threw it, and he managed to do it in one take. Gilligan called it a “one-in-a-million shot.”
A fight scene between Jesse and Tuco (Raymond Cruz) turned serious when Cruz ended up accidentally knocking Paul unconscious. “Yeah, Raymond Cruz who played Tuco gave me a concussion during the episode ‘Grilled,’ where Tuco takes Walt and Jesse to his shack in the middle of nowhere where we meet the famous Uncle Tio,” Paul said in a Reddit AMA. “Tuco takes Jesse and he throws him through the screen door outside, and if you watch it back you’ll notice that my head gets caught inside the wooden screen door and it flips me around and lands me on my stomach and the door splinters into a million pieces. Raymond just thought I was acting so he continued and kicked me in the side and picked me up over his shoulder and threw me against the house, but in reality I was pretty much unconscious … I kept pleading to him, saying ‘stop.’ The next thing I know I guess I blacked out and I woke up to a flashlight in our eyes and it was our medic. And then I hopped up acting like nothing wrong, but it appeared like I was drunk, and I kept saying, ‘Let’s finish the scene’ but then my eye started swelling shut so they took me to the hospital. Just another fun day on the set of Breaking Bad!”
When asked about the hardest scene to shoot during a Reddit AMA, Paul said that it was Jane’s death. “I honestly think the hardest scene for me to do was when Jesse woke up and found Jane lying next to him dead,” Paul said. “Looking at Jane through Jesse’s eyes that day was very hard and emotional for all of us. When that day was over, I couldn’t be happier that it was over because I really, truly felt I was living those tortured moments with Jesse.”
The scene was hard on Cranston, too, who reportedly spent 15 minutes crying after filming was complete.
When asked about filming his final scene, Jonathan Banks shared that, “The crew on the set that day all wore black armbands all day long. There are a lot of friends on that crew. It was an emotional day to say the least on set—a lot of tears. Tough day, brother.”
When asked about whether he had any regrets about the show or any of its storylines, Gilligan admitted to one: “One thing that sort of troubled me, looking back over the entirety of the show: Jesse’s teeth were a little too perfect. There were all the beatings he took, and, of course, he was using meth, which is brutal on your teeth. He’d probably have terrible teeth in real life.”
Warren Buffet was a fan of the series, and even showed up to its fifth season premiere. On the red carpet, he expressed admiration of Walter White’s entrepreneurship, calling him “a great businessman,” and saying that, “he’s my guy if I ever have to go toe-to-toe with anyone.”
Over the course of five seasons, Breaking Bad produced a total of 62 episodes—which is no arbitrary number. The 62nd element on the periodic table is Samarium, which is used to treat a range of cancers, including lung cancer.
Though you may have underestimated the number of times Jesse uttered “bitch,” you might be surprised by how many people were killed throughout the show’s entire run: 270. (BuzzFeed created a thorough breakdown of some of the most memorable ones.)
Last year, a 55-year-old man named Walter White rose to the top of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s most wanted list for manufacturing and selling meth. Though White wasn’t a teacher, there have been other real-life stories that mirrored Walter White’s descent into the criminal underworld: In 2012, a chemistry teacher named William Duncan was arrested for selling meth; in 2011, Irina Kristy, a 74-year-old math professor, was arrested for running a meth lab.
January 24, 2017 – 10:00am
In order to create vibrant, seamless sound effects for film and television, Foley artists have to get creative. This can mean using cinder blocks, musical instruments, or, as Eater illustrates in their latest episode of Gut Check, the contents of their kitchen.
Food is a popular tool in the industry because it produces organic sounds that can be easily manipulated. Marko Costanzo demonstrates how crushing a head of lettuce mimics the sound of an actual head being crushed in Dead Man (1995), and how twisting a stalk of celery creates the spine-crunching effect we hear in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. (For the sound of breaking bones and spraying blood, Foley artist Gary Hecker first wraps his celery in a damp cloth.)
Food items also played a large role in one of the more gruesome scenes from Silence of the Lambs (1991). When Hannibal Lecter sinks his teeth into his victim’s face during the film’s climax, we’re treated to a skin-crawling sound engineered from apples and chamois. Edible props can also be used to enhance less violent scenes: Shredded coconut on lettuce sounds like falling ash and crunching potato chips stands in for footsteps in the woods. You can watch the full video below.
[h/t Eater]
January 24, 2017 – 9:00am
The voting process that determines which films and filmmakers become Oscar nominees is a long and complicated undertaking that involves approximately 6000 voting members and hundreds of eligible films, actors, actresses, directors, cinematographers, editors, composers, and more. To even be eligible for a nomination—let alone win that coveted gold statuette—involves a strict procedure governed by specific guidelines, all tied to the illustrious history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself. Here’s a little bit of insight into just how the nominations work, and how they’re chosen.
For all the glitz and glamour the Oscars conjure up, it’s actually an accounting firm that makes it happen. The Oscar voting process is managed by an accounting team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who have handled the duties of mailing out ballots and tabulating the results for more than 80 years. The firm mails the ballots of eligible nominees to members of the Academy in December to reflect the previous eligible year with a due date sometime in January of the next year, then tabulates the votes in a process that takes some 1700 hours.
To become one of the approximately 6000 voting members of the Academy, you’d better be in the business. Aside from requiring that each member has “achieved distinction in the motion picture arts and sciences” in their respective fields, candidates must also meet quantitative standards. Writers, producers, and directors must have at least two screen credits to their names, while actors must have credited roles in at least three films. Candidates in the technical branches—like art directors or visual effects supervisors—must be active in their fields for a certain number of years (just how many varies based on the particular area of expertise).
If wannabe Academy members don’t have the necessary credentials, they can also find two or more current members to officially sponsor them; their membership is then either approved or denied by an Academy committee and its Board of Governors. But the easiest route to Academy membership is simply to get nominated: Those who were nominated for or won an Oscar the previous year and are not currently a member are automatically considered.
Once inducted into the Academy, an individual can belong to only one branch. Ben Affleck, for example, can only be an Academy member as an actor and not as a director, and Brad Pitt can only belong to the Academy as an actor and not a producer.
Members vote on potential nominees for standard awards that are given to individuals or collective groups in up to 25 categories, yet members from each field may only vote to determine the nominees in their respective field. Directors only vote for Best Director nominees, editors only vote for Best Editing nominees, cinematographers only vote for Best Cinematography nominees, and actors only vote for nominees in each acting category. Yet all voting members are eligible to vote for potential Best Picture nominees.
The Academy has strict rules that determine what people or films can be nominated. In order to submit a film for nomination, a movie’s producer or distributor must sign and submit an Official Screen Credits (OSC) form in early December. That’s not just a full list of credits; you need proof that the film meets certain criteria: In order to be eligible, the film must be over 40 minutes in length; must be publicly screened for paid admission in Los Angeles County (with the name of a particular theater where it screened included); and must screen for a qualifying run of at least seven straight days. In addition, the film cannot have its premiere outside of a theatrical run—screening a film for the first time on television or the Internet, for example, renders the film ineligible.
Then, the ballots are sent out. Voting members are allowed to choose up to five nominees, ranked in order of preference. According to Entertainment Weekly, “The Academy instructs voters to ‘follow their hearts’ because the voting process doesn’t penalize for picking eccentric choices … Also, listing the same person or film twice doesn’t help their cause—in fact, it actually diminishes the chance that the voter’s ballot will be counted at all.”
Once members send back their ballots, PricewaterhouseCoopers begins the process of crunching the numbers. Specifically, they’re looking for the magic number—the amount of votes in each category that automatically turns a potential nominee into an official nominee. To determine the magic number, PwC takes the total number of ballots received for a particular category and divides it by the total possible nominees plus one. An easy example is to take 600 potential ballots for the Best Actor category, divide that by six (five possible nominees plus one), thus making the magic number for the category 100 ballots to become an official nominee.
The counting—which is still done by hand—starts based on a voter’s first choice selection until someone reaches the magic number. Say Ryan Gosling reaches the magic number first for his performance in La La Land: the ballots that named him as a first choice are then all set aside, and there are now four spots left for the Best Actor category. The actor with the fewest first-place votes is automatically knocked out, and those ballots are redistributed based on the voters’ second place choices (though the actors still in the running retain their calculated votes from the first round). The counting continues, and actors or different categories rack up redistributed votes until all five spots are filled. According to Entertainment Weekly, “if a ballot runs out of selections, that ballot is voided and is no longer in play, which is why it’s important for voters to list five different nominees.” (The magic number drops as ballots are voided, by the way.) The process is ballooned for the Best Picture category, which can have up to 10 nominees and no less than five.
Deciding the winners is much simpler: After the nominees are decided, the whole Academy gets to vote on each category. Each member gets one vote per category—though they’re discouraged from voting in categories they don’t fully understand or categories in which they haven’t seen all the nominated films—and the film or actor with the most votes wins. That process takes PwC just three days.
An earlier version of this post appeared in 2014.
January 24, 2017 – 7:00am
| Questions: | 5 |
| Available: | Always |
| Pass rate: | 75 % |
| Backwards navigation: | Forbidden |
5 Questions: Supreme Court Cases
Tuesday, January 24, 2017 – 01:45
Whether it’s due to a pair of jeans that are much more difficult to squeeze into, a big social event on your calendar, or just a desire to be healthier, there are plenty of good reasons to work on eliminating excess body fat. Most people don’t like how it makes them look, but there are reasons that may be even more important. Recent research has revealed that excess body fat can be a genuine health hazard. Even if someone is not considered obese, that bit of extra fat around the mid section can increase the risk of serious health problems
The post 10 Ways to Lose Body Fat appeared first on Factual Facts.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla’s Autopilot-enhanced vehicles crash 40 percent less often than cars without driver-assistance technology. The agency recently released a new report [PDF], spotted by IEEE Spectrum.
The report was conducted in response to a fatal accident in June 2016, when a tractor trailer crashed into a Tesla Model S on a Florida highway, killing the Tesla driver, who was using Autopilot at the time. The NHTSA then opened an investigation into the incident, which was the first fatality involving Autopilot.
Tesla’s Autopilot has sensors that can engage the car’s brakes when it detects an oncoming crash, even if the driver doesn’t react in time, as well as cruise control that takes the speed of other cars into account. (Autopilot also has automatic lane changing and automatic parking capabilities.) In this case, the Automatic Emergency Braking part of the system didn’t deploy or warn the driver before the collision. However, the report notes that the cars’ automatic braking is only designed for rear-end collisions—which means it can’t be blamed for a side collision. Those kind of crashes are beyond the scope of the system, according to the report, which means it wasn’t a question of the technology malfunctioning.
In the case of the fatal accident in Florida, the NHTSA report found that the Tesla driver was apparently distracted for at least seven seconds, and never tried to brake or steer away from the truck.
In fact, the report found that not only was Autopilot not to blame for the 2016 crash, its related Autosteer technology was actually responsible for a significant reduction in Tesla crashes. The Autosteer system can detect road markings and the presence of other vehicles to help drivers stay within their lane, but there’s a catch: The driver is required to keep their hands on the wheel. If the sensors don’t detect hands on the wheel, the software warns the driver several times before turning the technology off.
Once Tesla debuted Autosteer, crash rates for its vehicles went down by almost 40 percent. For every million miles driven before Autosteer, there were 1.3 crashes where the Tesla’s airbags were deployed; after Autosteer, there were only 0.8.
All Tesla cars now come with the hardware necessary to drive fully autonomously, but the law still says drivers can’t let the car take the wheel entirely. In the meantime, while it’s clear that Tesla could improve upon its current driver-assistance tech, the report shows that machines are capable of driving more safely than humans—in certain situations, at least.
[h/t IEEE Spectrum]
January 23, 2017 – 3:30pm
United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
When did U.S. presidents start outsourcing the writing of their speeches?
According to Robert Schlesinger, author of Presidents and Their Speechwriters, “Judson Welliver, ‘literary clerk’ during the Harding administration, from 1921 to 1923, is generally considered the first presidential speechwriter in the modern sense—someone whose job description includes helping to compose speeches.”
And then FDR had a number of people helping him.
That said, some of it started right from the beginning, to some extent. Not outsourcing, per se—at least not consistently—but certainly collaboration.
The first draft of George Washington’s famous farewell address was prepared with the assistance of James Madison, five years before he ultimately delivered it. Years later, Alexander Hamilton put in a lot of work helping Washington revise it before it reached its final form.
James Monroe delivered his famous doctrine in a State of the Union Address, but it was primarily written by his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.
“When James K. Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war against Mexico in 1846, his words were written by Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, the most distinguished American historian of the time,” according to Profiles of U.S. Presidents. “Years later Bancroft was again the presidential amanuensis, this time of Andrew Johnson.”
According to the same source, Woodrow Wilson was the last president to write his own speeches.
After Wilson came Harding, who was the first president with a dedicated speechwriter (though I’m not sure if his immediate successors, Coolidge and Hoover, had one as well). Once they were through it becomes a little clearer, as FDR is known to have used a number of ghost writers for his speeches.
This post originally appeared on Quora. Click here to view.
January 23, 2017 – 3:00pm
When discussing Georgia O’Keeffe, it’s impossible to leave out the colorful florals and southwestern imagery that dominated her work, but a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum puts some of the focus on the less-explored facets of the painter’s life. As The Creators Project reports, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” includes portraits of the artist, and, for the first time in an art show, pieces from her wardrobe.
According to the Brooklyn Museum, O’Keeffe used fashion and posed photographs as tools for molding her public persona. The description page says that the exhibition “confirms and explores her determination to be in charge of how the world understood her identity and artistic values.”
The installation includes pieces from the artist’s early years, her time in New York in the 1920s and ’30s, and the period in New Mexico that shaped her signature style. Her stark, self-made clothing can be seen both in person and in the portraits selected for the exhibit. Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, and O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, are a few of the photographers whose work is on display.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” is part of an ongoing program at the Brooklyn Museum titled “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism.” Focusing on the artist’s fashion decisions may seem like an odd move for a feminist art show, but her clothing choices helped O’Keeffe communicate power in a male-dominated field. Her androgynous style made a bold statement in the early 20th century, and modern designers like Calvin Klein, Victoria Beckham, and Céline continue to cite the icon as inspiration today. The exhibition opens March 3 and runs until July 23; discounted tickets go on sale January 24.
[h/t The Creators Project]
January 23, 2017 – 2:30pm