The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Fashion tips from printing press operators
• Minnesota becomes a tornado state
• Twinkie ingredients, lovingly photographed
• Intensely psychedelic "fractal" architecture animation
• Interview with Pesco in marketing publication
• Fred the Raver: videos of toddler jamming hard to dubstep/jungle/drum and bass beats
• "Jesus, would you look at those."
• Living dress of flowers and recycled bicycle inner-tube "vases"
• August 22 is National Go-Topless Day
• The Majestic Plastic Bag: nature mockumentary on "the plastic circle of life"
• My god, it's full of kitteh!
• To do in NYC Tuesday, Aug 17: Dr. Who-themed Burlesque Show
• Toddler fails at hula hoop, but remains blissfully ignorant of said failure
• Article about extreme lifestyle-minimalists
• Human decomposition comics from Mary Roach and Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi
• Interview with the alien hunter
• Quasimodo was real?
• Penguins chasing a butterfly
• Toad-licking restaurant chef fined after being caught on tape
• Canadian 'peter meter' youth program halted; tester charged with sexual assault
• Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive
• Spreading the Word About New Anime Through Cosplay
• $76k for an emergency appendectomy
• Made by Hand on Kindle, iBook
• Heinlein memoir: LEARNING CURVE - the secret history of science fiction

Fashion tips from printing press operators Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:17 PM PDT Once upon a time, the people who worked in newspaper printing presses wore little, square paper hats to keep ink, lint and grease out of their hair. This essay on the death and rebirth of the news industry (Hint: Doing things differently is not the same thing as apocalypse) contains a great set of vintage instructions for making your own Genuine Pressman's Hat (also useful for painting the house or changing the oil in your car!) using pages from your local paper. Act now, while your local paper is still made of paper.

Minnesota becomes a tornado state Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:07 PM PDT This year, Minnesota had more tornadoes than any other state. If you aren't familiar with normal tornado distribution patterns, that fact is pretty surprising. It's also more than just a weird, one-time anomaly. Experts say this years' numbers seem to be part of a pattern of tornado activity becoming more common in more northerly places. Perennial champion Texas isn't throwing in the towel—it's been the tornado capital for 7 of the last 10 years—but Minnesota seems to be becoming a part of the "Tornado Alley" states, a big change from past precedent.

Twinkie ingredients, lovingly photographed Posted: 16 Aug 2010 08:57 PM PDT From wheat flour to Red #40, photographer Dwight Eschliman takes surprisingly compelling photographs of every ingredient in a Twinkie. What you're looking at here is monoglyceride—an emulsifier that helps blend usually not-easily-blendible ingredients. If you've ever made your own vinaigrette, you're already familiar with the concept. Oil and vinegar don't want to join up, and separate into layers when you pour them together. But, whisk in some honey, and you've got yourself a blended oil-and-vinegar dressing. The honey (or mustard. yum.) acts as an emulsifier. There's not much info like this on Eschliman's Web site, but you can read more about several of the ingredients he photographed in this Planet Green slideshow. For the record, I'm posting this more out of fascination than anti-Twinkie sentiment. From what I understand about heavily processed foods, such as the Twinkie, they aren't inherently deadly objects. The issue is more about the way cheap ingredients make sweet treats so inexpensive that we can afford to eat way, way too much of them. But the ingredients themselves fail to inspire a lot of fear in me. It's more just a matter of knowing that Twinkies (or, in my preference, frozen Zebra Cakes) are a (very) sometimes food. Via Sarah Henning Photo taken by Dwight Eschliman.

Intensely psychedelic "fractal" architecture animation Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:46 PM PDT Welcome to the Mandelbox. Over at Dose Nation, the creator Hömpörgő says, "I wanted to go further too, but at the end part a single frame took 18 minutes to render, and the whole 1:27 minute video needed 12 days nonstop rendering. I felt thats more than enough at the time. It was just my first experiment with Mandelbulb 3D, a freeware program, I'm not a film director or something..."

Interview with Pesco in marketing publication Posted: 16 Aug 2010 08:26 PM PDT Online marketing publication iMedia Connection interviewed me about Boing Boing, how we work with advertisers, and my work at Institute for the Future. I hope you dig it! I was honored that they also invited me to speak at their iMedia Breakthrough Summit industry event in October. "Things that go Boing Boing in the night" (Thanks, Marc Ruxin!)

Fred the Raver: videos of toddler jamming hard to dubstep/jungle/drum and bass beats Posted: 16 Aug 2010 06:08 PM PDT YouTube uploader Orbojunglist, who is associated with Dub Foundation, regularly uploads short videos of his son Fred grooving out hard to dubstep/drum-n-bass/junglist beats. Above, my favorite of all the uploads so far. Fred's dad explains: Not to worry, the music was not too loud. I have superimposed a small fraction of the original audio back into the file—the car isnt fitted with any big audio systems or anything. Also, the term 'raver' is used lightly, because of the way he is dancing, and does not mean we are pushing him into any walk of life. (...) Some [YouTube commenters are] saying he's, not dancing he's having a seizure? (...) This is how he dances all the time to this music. Spotted on Dangerous Minds, where they've just blogged a newer Fred The Raver episode with all-new toddler headbanging. I can't get enough of this li'l guy. [Thanks, Tara and Richard!]

"Jesus, would you look at those." Posted: 16 Aug 2010 05:31 PM PDT Boing Boing reader Forrest Monk sends in the photo above, and writes, I live in Venice, CA. If you have ever been here, you know there is much to see. I just happened to have my phone camera ready when I saw the scene above, and in my head I said "Jesus would you look at those" —and this is who stepped into the picture. I don't think I could have staged it better myself.

Living dress of flowers and recycled bicycle inner-tube "vases" Posted: 16 Aug 2010 05:15 PM PDT [Photo: Hermanna Prinsen, via ecouterre.com] Over at Ecouterre, a stunning little photo gallery about a "living dress" created by fashion designer Mattijs van Bergen and landscape architect Anouk Vogel as a collaboration for the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture (ARCAM): "A dress that would be the antithesis of fast fashion--a living object that brought each season to life with changing floral arrangements." [Submitterated by BB reader gubke, via adorablenapalm]

August 22 is National Go-Topless Day Posted: 16 Aug 2010 05:21 PM PDT What could be more fun than a nationwide protest orchestrated by a UFO movement to encourage toplessness? "As long as men are allowed to be topless in public, women should have the same constitutional right. Or else, men should have to wear something to hide their chests." -- Rael, spiritual leader, and founder of GoTopless.org Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On Sunday August 22nd, 2010, topless women [will rally] in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and [demand] that their fundamental right to be topless be acknowledged where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution. National Go-Topless Day Previously: Video snapshot (2009): "Topless rights" protest hosted by Raëlian UFO clone sex cult

The Majestic Plastic Bag: nature mockumentary on "the plastic circle of life" Posted: 16 Aug 2010 04:50 PM PDT YouTube video link. Ah, the plastic cycle of life! Heal The Bay produced this advocacy video, the message of which is: put an end to plastic pollution. The short-form "nature mockumentary" is narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons and tracks the "migration" of a plastic bag from a grocery store parking lot to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean. [via Submitterator] Visiting the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch Floating toxic plastic garbage island twice the size of Texas ... Photos of remote birds killed by our trash Plastic Century: a taste of the polluted oceans

My god, it's full of kitteh! Posted: 16 Aug 2010 04:28 PM PDT Last week, I was moved by the spirit of Photoshop to create Aurora Borealis Sad Kitten Cupcake Moonscape (which, as others have pointed out, makes a handy iPad or iPhone wallpaper, if you are so inclined). Boing Boing reader alphabomb asked me to post the PSD file with layers intact for remixing purposes, and I happily obliged. Alphabomb then took that file and created a crazy awesome video remix. It is twisted and kooky mutant fun, and I am so delighted by its existence. Ladies and germs: Aurora Kitteh Cuppy Cakes, on Vimeo. [via Submitterator]

To do in NYC Tuesday, Aug 17: Dr. Who-themed Burlesque Show Posted: 16 Aug 2010 04:44 PM PDT Boing Boing reader Jeff Simmermon says, "My friends and co-bloggers Cyndi Freeman and Brad Lawrence produce on a monthly burlesque show here in NYC called 'Hotsy Totsy.' It's always pretty fun, but this month's should be extra-special. The whole show is a tribute to Doctor Who." The pasties twirl Tuesday, August 17th.

Toddler fails at hula hoop, but remains blissfully ignorant of said failure Posted: 16 Aug 2010 04:32 PM PDT In this uncredited, random video, a toddler fails at hula hooping, yet succeeds at the art of making you and millions of other strangers he will never meet laugh. [Thanks, Tara McGinley!]

Article about extreme lifestyle-minimalists Posted: 16 Aug 2010 11:01 AM PDT Kelly Sutton is a 22-year-old software engineer in Brookyln. He says he has gotten rid of all of his possessions, save for "his laptop, an iPad, an Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, a 'few' articles of clothing, and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment." He has a some other items that he is unloading on his website, Cult of Less. Matthew Danzico of the BBC has an article about Sutton and other extreme lifestyle minimalists who use digital technology to reduce their ownership of physical goods. This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions. "I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation - cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact," said Mr Sutton. Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items The tech-savvy Los Angeles "transplant" credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive

Human decomposition comics from Mary Roach and Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi Posted: 16 Aug 2010 02:10 PM PDT Following up on the castration comics, here's another pair of panels by Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi, inspired by my books (in this case, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers). This one draws on the stages of human decomposition. Ariyana zeroed in on food images and references in the chapter, using a visit to a sushi bar to illustrate phenomena like "skin slip" and end-stage soupiness (not a technical term). Her work just floors me. More at www.feed-ariyana.com.

Interview with the alien hunter Posted: 16 Aug 2010 10:33 AM PDT Seth Shostak, author of "Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," is senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a very down-to-Earth organization of scientists attempting to "explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe." Last weekend was the SETI's Institute's SETIcon and KALW radio spoke to Shostak before the event. From KALW (Shostak photo from Star Trek: Of Gods and Men"): What makes you so sure there is extraterrestrial life - that might be a very basic question, but what evidence, to you, is most compelling? SHOSTAK: Well, there isn't any evidence of extraterrestrial life, compelling evidence, yet; in fact, the bottom line is, there isn't - we haven't found ET and frankly, we haven't found pond scum. We haven't found dead pond scum. But, I think that situation is going to change in the next couple of decades and the reason is that the searches are getting so much better. We're sending space craft, of course, to Mars. There may be life on Mars. What you have to do, probably, to find it, is drill a hole a couple of hundred feet deep and pull up the muck at the bottom of that hole and look at it under a microscope and you might see martian pond scum. You might say, I don't know, do I care about that? Do I want to spend my tax dollars looking for Martian pond scum? Because you know, I've got earthly pond scum in the bathtub at home. But if you found life on Mars then you would know that life is just some sort of cosmic infection, it's not something miraculous because look, two worlds have it, so there must be many more. All these things are possible but we haven't found them yet and I think that the reason that I remain optimistic that we will, are just developments in mostly astronomy, and the fact that we're learning that planets are just as common as fire hydrants - they're all over place. The best estimates for the number of worlds in our own galaxy, the number of planets - a trillion. A trillion! That's a big number. "Senior astronomer Seth Shostak on the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (KALW News, via Daily Grail) Confessions of an Alien Hunter by Seth Shostak (Amazon)

Quasimodo was real? Posted: 16 Aug 2010 10:18 AM PDT New evidence suggests that the iconic character of Quasimodo was not entirely the brainchild of Victor Hugo, author of the famed 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Historians recently found references to a "hunchback sculptor" working at the cathedral in British sculptor Henry Sibson's memoirs, now in the Tate Archive. From The Telegraph: In one entry, he writes: "the [French] government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress ... I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures [for Notre Dame] and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers." In a later entry, Sibson writes about working with the same group of sculptors on another project outside Paris, where he again mentions the reclusive government sculptor, this time recalling his name as "Mon. Le Bossu". Le Bossu is French for "the hunchback". He writes: "Mon Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other ... " "Real-life Quasimodo uncovered in Tate archives"

Penguins chasing a butterfly Posted: 16 Aug 2010 10:12 AM PDT A lovely antidote to Monday morning stress! The only part about this that's a bummer? These wonderful, wild critters are stuck in a zoo. Video link: Humboldt Penguins chasing a butterfly at the Philadelphia Zoo [Submitterated by voightkamff, video by Marty McGuire]

Toad-licking restaurant chef fined after being caught on tape Posted: 16 Aug 2010 10:08 AM PDT An Iowa restaurant was fined $335 after the head chef was caught "kissing and licking live toads" in the kitchen. Christopher Turla, who goes by the name TaiMaiShu at the popular Japanese restaurant, is seen on the tape inside the restaurant during business hours with two small toads on the prep table where vegetables are cut. As customers linger in the dining room, he picks up the toads, then kisses them a few times, repeatedly licks them, then stuffs them both in his mouth and puts both of his hands back on the table. "It was a joke, it was like a dare to myself, if I can lick a frog or kiss a frog," Turla said after getting the citation. Chef in hot water after licking frog, posting video on Facebook (Via Arbroath)

Canadian 'peter meter' youth program halted; tester charged with sexual assault Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:29 AM PDT I've covered Canadian psychology hijinks before, and how a handful of them are leading the push to expand which sexual interests are mental illnesses. Now comes another scandal that's like something out of Clockwork Orange. Late last month, Youth Forensic Psychiatric Services in Burnaby, British Columbia was forced to shut down a decades-old program where troubled youths had a device placed on their penises while they were subjected to media depicting stuff like rape and child pornography. The final straw was when one of the test administrators was arrested for a sexual assault allegedly committed during leisure time. The whole sordid story follows. Canada has had a long, hard fixation with catching people getting aroused over things Canadian "experts" consider mental illnesses. One program in the mid-20th century, nicknamed the "fruit machine," led to over 9,000 Canadian citizens being investigated as suspected homosexuals, with some even being tested and drummed out of government jobs. In the wake of the fruit machine program, the fine folks at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health developed and still promote penile plethysmography (PPG). The device, nicknamed a peter meter, is supposedly a lie detector for male genitalia. It's not admissible in court cases as evidence for the same reason as a polygraph: the data can be manipulated by both subject and tester, and there's little standardization in equipment or stimuli. Because the whole concept is based on the premise that the subject is a "non-admitter" who needs to be caught, sometimes they jam another sensor up the subject's butt to ensure he is not clenching his sphincter to alter the blood flow into his penis. Males in general and teenage boys in particular can get spontaneous erections for any number of reasons that may or may not be related to the stimulus presented. They might even chub up just because of the test itself (the stress, touching, humiliation, etc.). According to those who learned how to game the device, it's also pretty easy for other subjects to suppress tumescence by thinking of something decidedly unsexy. In case you are wondering, they've also created one for young ladies that gets inserted in the vagina, but the testers are much, much, much more interested in teen peen. PPG evangelists have fanned across North America, using their device in all kinds of questionable ways for decades. Then a 2009 article, ironically published in the journal Sexual Abuse, reported on the long-running practice of hooking up penile plethysmographs to minors charged with sex offenses in British Columbia. That got the attention of civil rights groups. The sexual assault arrest of one of the testers was the last straw for local lawmakers, who finally pulled the plug on the abusive plethysmograph for kids program. The current guy in charge of Sexual Abuse is, unsurprisingly, a CAMH employee, so he is a huge proponent of penile plethysmography. In fact, you can often find him on Wikipedia altering articles on sexuality to promote theories and devices his coworkers developed via the CAMH Phallometry Lab (an actual tax-funded Toronto lab). Anyone interested in measuring penises should consider an internship or even a career as a Canadian psychologist. Perhaps you can even be part of history by developing the next-gen fruit machine or peter meter... To learn more about how high-tech penile plethysmography is, you can visit this major manufacturer's cutting-edge website (complete with 1995-style Under Construction sign and email gif). The Skeptic's Dictionary has a good overview of PPG, too. B.C. permanently halts sexual arousal testing [ctv.ca] Sex charge prompts expanded probe of youth-offender penile test [theprovince.com] B.C. used penile teen sex test for decades [cbc.ca]

Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive Posted: 16 Aug 2010 11:06 AM PDT On June 5, 1925, Sir John Bland-Sutton delivered a fascinating lecture titled "The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive" to the Royal College of Surgeons, of which he was president. Over at our Submitterator, Dani points us to a transcript of the presentation that ran in the British Medical Journal. It's a lot to digest -- rich with witty tales of frogs, fish, snakes, and, of course, whales -- and filled with some fantastic quotes. Here are a few: "Many discoveries and observations made by naturalists are of little interest to the public, but aniimal psychology and vagaries of the human minid are interesting to all." "When sitting in quiet contemplation digesting after dinner, with beneficient microbes hard at work within me, I sometimes wonder if animals who swallow their pray alive are worried by the acrobatic efforts of victims trying to escape." "A live fish in an animal's stomach must cause some discomfort." "Meditations on the psychology of the swallowed suggest that the animal world may be divided into swallowers and the swallowed." "The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive"

Spreading the Word About New Anime Through Cosplay Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:27 AM PDT Photo: Shannon Cottrell/LA Weekly, Durarara!! cosplayers from Anime Expo 2010 In our time covering conventions and other fandom events for LA Weekly, cosplayers have both directly and indirectly influenced the work that photographer Shannon Cottrell and I produce. Neither one of us has ever cosplayed, but we appreciate it as an art form. We try to look at cosplay culture from a variety of angles. One of our questions, on occasion, is about creating the cosplay. Cosplayers often spend months on their work and the process of becoming someone else for a day requires a lot of trial and error in costume design, prop creation, make-up, etc. We're genuinely curious about this. Other times, though, we look at cosplay to help us gain insight into what's making an impact within the fandom. This is most important when we're at anime conventions. Cosplay is, from our experience, far more common at an anime con than at any other sort of event. When you regularly go to anime cons, you'll notice that cosplays tend to reflect the newest anime and manga series. Thanks to cosplayers, we've become aware of many titles over the years, like Ouran High School Host Club, Black Butler, K-On! and, most recently, Durarara!!, which ran in the U.S. online via Crunchyroll alongside the Japanese broadcast, but won't be out on DVD for a few more months. Cosplayers are in some ways evangelists for specific anime and manga series. Because of their dedication to the craft, they help spread the word about new titles. This stands in contrast to the studio-driven hype at cons that I mentioned in a post on Friday. As an observer, seeing 100 people cosplaying a certain series on their own (something you can usually tell by the varying degree of quality in the outfits) can mean a lot more than advertising for fans. Links: Anime Expo 2010 Day 1 (Photos) Anime Expo Day 2 (Photos) Anime Expo Day 3 (Photos)

$76k for an emergency appendectomy Posted: 16 Aug 2010 09:26 AM PDT I've read about people who have performed appendectomies on themselves. Now it makes sense. This is how much it will cost us to have a ruptured appendix removed (Via Cynical-C)

Made by Hand on Kindle, iBook Posted: 13 Aug 2010 05:36 PM PDT My book Made By Hand is finally available in Kindle and iBook formats. If you've been waiting to buy an electronic copy, here you go. Learn more about my book here. A few recent reviews: • Less a how-to book and more a rumination on the value of screwing up as a path to mastery, Made by Hand is impossible to set down once you start reading it. -- Dinotopia creator James Gurney • Frauenfelder is a do-it-yourself expert who took the notion to its extreme for a year by keeping his own chickens and bees and playing a guitar he made out of cigar boxes. Kooky, sure, but the underlying instinct is pure and hilarious. -- Steven E. Levingston, Washington Post Political Bookworm • Altogether, Made by Hand is an excellent introduction to the world of doing-it-yourself, and is an inspiring look into how the author decided to find meaning in relying less on consumer goods, and more on himself. -- James Robertson, National Geographics Green Guide Made by Hand Kindle version

Heinlein memoir: LEARNING CURVE - the secret history of science fiction Posted: 16 Aug 2010 12:11 PM PDT The first volume of William H Patterson's enormous Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century is out. It's the first authorized biography of the sf writer who popularized at least three important motifs of the 20th century (polyamory, private space travel and libertarianism) and redefined the field of science fiction with a series of novels, stories and essays that are usually brilliant but sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes offensive in their treatment of race and gender, and always provocative and generally sneaky. The best review I've read of this book so far comes from John Clute, one of the field's great scholars and critical writers, who devoted his June column in Strange Horizons to discussing Heinlein's work and (flatteringly enough) comparing it to the whys and hows of my own work. I recommend you read Clute's piece now, but for those of you without the time to follow the link, I'll sum up some of the bones of Clute's essay: Heinlein was notoriously recalcitrant about his early life and the two wives he was married to before his epic marriage to Virginia Heinlein. He repeatedly burned correspondence and other writings that related to that period. Clute suggests that this is partly driven by Heinlein's desire to be Robert A Heinlein, titan of the field, without having to cope with his youthful embarrassments. It's a good bet -- lots of the stuff that drives young people to write science fiction also makes them a pain in the ass to be around until they work some of the kinks out of their system (I wholeheartedly include myself in this generalization). Patterson doesn't seem to have ever met Heinlein, and most of Heinlein's contemporaries were dead by the time Virginia Heinlein authorized the project, which means that, by and large, Patterson works from secondary and tertiary sources (fascinatingly documented in a lengthy set of end-notes that I'd much rather have seen as footnotes), playing detective, especially in Heinlein's early, pre-WWII military career. This makes some of the early material a bit dry, a bit of a detective's notebook rather than the gripping narrative that the book gradually turns into as Heinlein comes into focus through increased use of primary sources. But the dry detective work of those first hundred-some pages (the main body of the enormous book runs to 473 pages) absolutely pays off as the book goes on. Patterson isn't just aiming to be a detective of Heinlein's life: he's seeking out the inspiration, situational and philosophical, behind Heinlein's fiction, and the carefully traced pathways from Heinlein's boyhood and adolescence into his career as a writer are peppered with Aha! moments as the origins of his best-loved work are revealed. Patterson also puts forward a pretty comprehensive case for the idea that Heinlein's fiction generally conveys Heinlein's own political beliefs. This is widely acknowledged among Heinlein fans, save for a few who seem distressed by the idea that the blatant racism and sexism (especially in the earlier works) are the true beliefs of the writer at the time of writing and would prefer to believe that Heinlein didn't write himself into his works. I got into a pretty heated debate with one such person at the Heinlein panel at the 2007 Comicon, who maintained the absurd position that Heinlein's views could never be divined by reading his fiction -- after all, his characters espouse all manner of contradictory beliefs! (To which I replied: "Yes, but the convincing arguments are always for the same set of beliefs, and the characters who challenge those beliefs are beaten in the argument.") Not that I fault Heinlein for this -- it's an honorable tradition in SF and the mainstream of literature, and I find Heinlein's beliefs to be nuanced and complex, anything but the reactionary caricature with which he is often dismissed. Once Heinlein gets out of the Navy, marries his second wife, Leslyn, and relocates to LA, things start to get a lot more interesting. He and Leslyn had an open marriage, and were at the center of a quirky, bohemian circle of sf writers and oddballs. They befriended a young L Ron Hubbard (Leslyn later has an affair with him) and subsequently introduced him to a disciple of Crowleyan sex magick, who, it seems, inspired much of Dianetics (but this comes later, after the war). Heinlein also began writing fiction for John W Campbell in this period, and their chummy -- but often tempestuous -- correspondence is a genuinely fascinating look into the development of the Heinlein Project, the thing that motivated Heinlein through his years as a writer, and before that as a California politician (as Clute puts it, "he was a utopian quasi-socialist Social-Credit doorbell-ringer for the Upton Sinclair rump of the Democratic party in California") -- a utopian ideology based on global government, an end to war, technological increase, personal liberty, and a society built on fairness and equality. Heinlein's war years are harrowing due to personal illness and long years spent working as an engineer in a materiel factory (his poor health disqualified him from active military service), and put him in the center of a gang of sf writer/engineers whom he gathered around him to work on the war effort, including an obnoxiously high-strung young Isaac Asimov, who had to be treated like a clever but naughty puppy. After the war, Heinlein's second marriage turned sour (his first marriage hardly existed and was dissolved quickly) and his fortunes wavered as he strove to find his place in the world, with one foot in the pulps and the other in respectable slicks like the Saturday Evening Post. The complex logistics of the dissolution of his second marriage to Leslyn -- his longtime collaborator, who had fallen to alcoholism and depression -- are made more fraught by the commercial uncertainty his fictional risk-taking engenders, but by the book's ending, Heinlein's career is in the black, he has remarried (to Virginia Heinlein, to whom he remained married until he died) and things seem to be going well for him. I've read a few memorable histories of the early years of science fiction, such as Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary's Better to Have Loved and Damon Knight's The Futurians but Heinlein was in a class all his own, someone who, along with John W Campbell and a few others, personally changed the shape of the field, and possibly the world. Reading Learning Curve feels a little like happening on a secret history, a hidden lens through which my understanding of the world came into slightly sharper focus. I'm really looking forward to volume two. Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve Notes on the upcoming monster-sized authorized Heinlein biography ... How Heinlein plotted Heinlein's fan-mail solution Stross's new novel: Saturn's Children, a late Heinlein homage ... Heinlein freaked out at "invasive" review of STRANGER IN A ... Varley's ROLLING THUNDER: third book in Thunder/Lightning Heinlein ... Heinlein's house for sale

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