Judith Lewis

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Judith Lewis
Enlarge image Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. --Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" Brian Massey was working in the art department on the Roger Corman­ produced Black Scorpion II when he saw what he calls "the......
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Waiting for the End of the World

Judith Lewis
Half a century ago, when poliomyelitis reached its epidemic peak in the United States, a team of researchers funded by a nonprofit organization and led by a charismatic physician embarked on a campaign to stop the disease with a prophylactic vaccine. The funding agency was the March of Dimes, the......
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Introduction

Judith Lewis
It has become common, amid the ambient hum of binary data and content wars, to imagine that manual laborers toil away in quiet desperation, dreaming of escape by lottery or the glamour of office work. Manual labor is a challenge to the body and sometimes to the spirit; more injuries......

Say It Loud

Judith Lewis
Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter W. The name of the band is W. No one but me seems to appreciate this irony — either the Greens gathered at the Westwood Brewing Company to celebrate the strange rewards of this election night are too earnest or major-party candidates are so far......

My Life as an Underdog

Judith Lewis
One is a longtime activist more accustomed to marching on the protest front than glad-handing at a fund-raiser; the other a U.S. congressman who voted to impeach President Clinton. But in the race to oust Dianne Feinstein from the U.S. Senate, Green Party candidate Medea Benjamin and Republican Tom Campbell,......

Enhancing the Scanner

Judith Lewis
When Dallas-based Digital Convergence ushered in a new era of bar-code scanners with its cat-shaped gadget, the CueCat, the first question on many software developers‘ minds was ”Why?“ The device, which the company distributed at the end of August for free to subscribers of Wired and Forbes magazines, can be......
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The Good Fight

Judith Lewis
Toward the end of Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight, as the film‘s tough young female boxer dukes it out against a male opponent in a battle that could determine her future as an athlete, I felt a peculiar sense of dread. I realized, and not without shame, that I was not sure......
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Psychotropic Delights

Judith Lewis
Beginning in Europe before the Middle Ages, the semi-nomadic tribes of Siberia and Lapland discovered that their native reindeeer had a voracious appetite for a certain kind of mushroom, Amanita muscaria. The mushroom, otherwise known as ”fly agaric,“ is one of the most potent naturally occurring psychoactive substances known to......
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The Lady Is a Tramp

Judith Lewis
Rebecca Solnit‘s Wanderlust: A History of Walking belongs to a genre of literature that in the late 20th century moved from the rarefied confines of Ph.D. theses into the land of almost-marketable books: the small-topic, big-concept cultural study. In it, the author, usually a scholar of literature, a social historian......
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Dancing for the DNC

Judith Lewis
Alli Starr has this fond memory of her life as an activist: In Seattle last December, she arrived at the intersection of Fourth and Pine, where 50 women had locked themselves down around a platform to protest the use of sweatshop labor. ”The police had arrived in the early morning,......