Joshuah Bearman

The Jacuzzi Apocalypse

Joshuah Bearman
Illustration by Carson MellIt was the turn of the Millennium, gateway to the year 2000. The night when civilization would realize the promise Prince had made some two decades earlier on the title track of his fifth album. Or the night it would collapse for good: because this New Year’s......

Smash Box

Joshuah Bearman
It’s a fundamental joy, destruction. From kids who tear down their own Lego castles to responsible suburban dads whose true satisfaction in home improvement is derived from what my own father eagerly refers to as “the demolition phase,” we are all joined by the unspoken thrill that resides in the......

King Kong's Monkey Love

Joshuah Bearman
Courtesy Paramount PicturesThere was a scene cut from the original, 1933 King Kong in which the mighty gorilla gently probes an unconscious Fay Wray with his finger and sniffs it. The censors didn’t approve, my dad explained to me when I was around 8, as we meandered past the pongids......

Man's Best Friend

Joshuah Bearman
“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.” —Alan Turing Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called “ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” in......

Digital Trim

Joshuah Bearman
We’re still a ways off from the snows of Iowa in 2008, but rest assured the Democratic primary race is well under way. Not surprisingly, it was Hillary Clinton who appeared first on the field, well-stretched and suited up, and firing the starting gun herself with some carefully stage-managed outrage......

Put a Cork in It

Joshuah Bearman
A massive sonic boom echoed over Southern California before dawn on Tuesday. I heard it, and knew then that Discovery had made it home. Flying at 25 times the speed of sound, the shuttle landed at Edwards and made a noise loud enough to wake me up more than a......
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Bush’s Energy Disaster

Joshuah Bearman
As the Senate cast its votes on the energy bill last Friday, giving Republicans a little legislative victory before everyone skipped town for the summer, Bush issued a congratulatory statement. “I applaud Congress,” he said, “for a bill that will help secure our energy future and reduce our dependence on......

Star Wars Rules/Sucks

Joshuah Bearman
The first Star Wars video game, released in 1982, was an Empire Strikes Back cartridge for Atari 2600. The idea was to pilot a rudimentary snowspeeder composed of six pixels across a few hundred or so more pixels of various shades of blue meant to represent the ice planet Hoth......

The Moralgorithm

Joshuah Bearman
At the height of performance, great athletics seems inexplicable, like something conjured. Even the athletes are at a loss to explain what goes on in those moments that are always vaguely articulated as “flow,” or being “in the zone,” or what Zen students of samurai swordsmanship called mushin. Ineffable or......

Smoke the Muthafuckas, 50!

Joshuah Bearman
“Where are the helicopters?”That was the question on the mind of many conventioneers heading into the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo at the L.A. Convention Center last week. E3, as it’s known, is the video game industry’s annual trade show, a digital debutante’s ball where grand announcements are made, and last......