Harvard's influential and impressive Berkman Center for Internet & Society is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a conference on "The Future of the Internet" that started yesterday and concludes tomorrow.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is there today, along with Michael Fricklas, an executive vice president of Viacom. Bigwig political blogger Joshua Micah Marshall will preside over the keynote lunch tomorrow. Most impressive to me is the fact that my friend, Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman, who's just had eye surgery, and has been forbidden by his doctor to leave the house or remove his blindfold, showed up at the event anyway. And -- having removed his blindfold -- he's blogging about it.

The death of Robert Rauschenberg, earlier this week, has helped remind us about the debates that once raged between proponents of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

The art movement known as Abstract Expressionism, a postwar invention of the Partisan Generation (b. 1904-13), helped New York displace Paris as center of the art world. This made New York the capital of the 20th century itself, just as Paris had been (according to Walter Benjamin) capital of the 19th.

But American self-satisfaction isn't the only reason that Abstract Expressionism became such a dominant movement in the postwar era. The impression of intellectual, aesthetic, and perhaps most importantly, political freedom evoked by Jackson Pollock's psychologically intense "action paintings," Mark Rothko's spiritually overwhelming "multiforms," and David Smith's witty connect-the-dot sculptures, to name just three Abstract Expressionists, helped reassure Americans that we -- unlike the recently defeated Nazis and the ever-more powerful Communists -- were on the right side of history.

Uninterested in art history? Stick around! Because I'm going to talk about cutting-edge computer-generated artworks like this:

Topless Robot recently posted an item detailing 5 Reasons Why it Sucks to Be a Kid Today, by Rebecca Kelley.

Although I'm not willing to name or describe the generational characteristics of those Americans born between 1994 and 2003, I can't help but agree with Kelley's description of the domestic environment in which middle-class children are raised today...

Excerpt:

1) Food is No Fun. When we were kids we had lunches packed with Fruit By the Foot, Teddy Grahams, and Squeeze Its. Now kids get organic [EXPLETIVE] like fruit leathers, vegetable-flavored "chips" that have the texture of packing cellophane, and sugar-free, 100% juice. What ever happened to "3% juice" juice that you could squeeze out of a cartoon face? Sure, some kids nowadays still have gloriously unhealthy lunches, but yuppie parents regard these children as contagious chunksters who could pass the "fat virus" onto their precious kids via direct, sticky-handed contact.

in real life, plywood, and cake.

Photos by Scott LaPierre.

Here's a nifty new website for conspiracy buffs biographical researchers. The NNDB Mapper is an "intelligence aggregator" that tracks the activities of over 15,000 living noteworthies, and provides the curriculum vitae for nearly 10,000 dead ones. Sounds like "Who's Who," sure... but I haven't explained the nifty part yet.

Gil Kenan's big-screen adaptation of "The City of Ember," a 2003 young adult novel by Jeanne Duprau, isn't premiering until October. But the producers have issued posters, movie stills, and put up an ominous website, so the blogosphere is getting interested.

In the novel, two teens who've grown up in Ember, a truly isolated city, discover that (a) the city is running out of food and energy, no thanks to its corrupt mayor; and (b) the city is underground (no wonder there aren't any stars at night, or animals for that matter), and was built a couple of hundred years earlier to protect a large group of American children from a nuclear holocaust. The children have to decode cryptic clues left behind by the city's founders -- it's a hermeneutic novel, perhaps my favorite genre -- and escape. But will there by anything left on the surface of the planet?

The post-apocalypticist blog Quiet Earth asks whether the Tom Hanks-produced movie, which stars Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway (above) as the teen protagonists, and Bill Murray (below) as the Mayor of Ember, "will be the first Post Apocalyptic Children's film?"

As Brainiac readers know, I'm a lifelong reader of post-apocalyptic juvenile fiction. So I feel that I should be able to answer this question. But it's a tricky one.

Last week, apropos of a suggestion that another blogger had made about a Dr. Strange feature film, I posted the following comment.

My friend Greg Rowland (HC) pointed out recently that in Roger Corman's Poe-inspired horror-comedy, "The Raven," the tall, elegant, refined Vincent Price plays a magician [Dr. Erasmus Craven] who uses mystic power bolts in what Rowland calls "a fairly Ditkoesque manner." Since "The Raven" came out on Jan. 25, 1963, and the first appearance of Doctor Strange (in "Strange Tales" #110) was in July of that same year, it seems likely that Ditko might have designed Strange's look after seeing the Corman/Price movie.

Over the weekend, I received a few skeptical emails. For example: "No way was Dr. Strange based on cheeseball Vincent Price," wrote Eddie P. of Jamaica Plain.

However, this morning I received an email from Greg Rowland. Turns out that he spent part of his weekend capturing a few screen shots from "The Raven." Check 'em out:

Late last month, I argued that when pundits point out that Republican presidential candidate John McCain mysteriously defies the stereotype of the so-called Silent Generation, whose members were mostly born in the 1930s, and which gave us two uninspiring Democratic presidential candidates (Mike Dukakis and Ted Kennedy), it's really not as mysterious as they think. Because the so-called Silent Generation is actually two generations: the Postmoderns (born between 1924-33) and the Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43). Which means that McCain, who was born in 1936, is an Anti-Anti, while Kennedy (1932) and Dukakis (1933) are Postmoderns.

Nineteen-thirty-four -- the first year of the era known as the Thirties -- was a long time ago, according to a blog called Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention “war hero”?) John McCain.

Here's an excerpt:

After Iron Man, and the Hulk (again), that is?

Graeme McMillan, of the SF blog io9, has heard rumors about Thor (please no! can only be cheesy), the Avengers (too many of 'em! Plus: Thor), and Ant-Man (actually makes a lot of sense, now that small is beautiful again, but... small guy, giant ants = cheesy). Dissatisfied with these options, McMillan made a few other suggestions on Monday.

Like Doctor Strange, for example!

McMillan's pitch:

Created by Spider-Man's combination of [writer] Stan Lee and [artist] Steve Ditko, Marvel's "Master of The Mystic Arts" has all the potential to crossover to mainstream success. The story of an arrogant famous surgeon who survives a terrible accident but without the finger dexterity to keep slicing and sewing, only to become the world's most powerful magician after a Tibetan retreat, it's Nip/Tuck meets Iron Man meets Harry Potter. Get someone like Guillermo Del Toro to direct and George Clooney to star, and your summer blockbuster is all taken care of.

Sounds great. Except for

According to the always excellent nerd-culture blog, Topless Robot, the most-hated (by parents) of all toys we remember from the 1970s-80s is... Slime.

Topless Robot's Brian Heiler writes:

It was green, sticky, had an odd smell and served absolutely no purpose. Frankly, it looked like a jar of boogers, so naturally, we as kids had to have it. Whether the Slime was produced as its own toy or was part of a He-Man or Harry Potter toyline, it's always been the same putrid stuff, and kids have always done the same thing with it -- smeared it on furniture, carpets, the pet, a younger sibling, in the DVD player, or some other place that ensured total destruction-by-booger. If you are an adult who bought your child slime, you are an idiot. Just say no.

The second most hated toy? Fisher Price's Corn Popper.

Heiler writes:

The National Book Critics Circle has posted its Spring "Good Reads" recommendations, as voted by the reviewer-organization's 825 members, to its blog, Critical Mass. The list, which is intended to highlight good new books that you might not otherwise have heard about, is as follows:

Fiction:

1. Richard Price, "Lush Life"
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, "Unaccustomed Earth"
3. Steven Millhauser, "Dangerous Laughter."
*4. Charles Baxter, "The Soul Thief."
*4. Peter Carey, "His Illegal Self."
*4. J. M. Coetzee, "Diary of Bad Year."
*4. James Collins, "Beginner's Greek."
*4. Brian Hall, "Fall of Frost."
*4. Roxana Robinson, "Cost."
*4. Owen Sheers, "Resistance."

Nonfiction:

1. Nicholson Baker, "Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, the End of Civilization."
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War."

A couple of years ago, Rhino Records released "Hallucinations," a collection of 1960s pop-psychedelic tunes; the cover of the CD boasted a period photo of a woman clad in a polka-dotted wimple, posed before a polka-dotted background. Whenever I see a vintage image quoted like that, I wonder where it came from... but never find out. Thanks to British designer John Coulthart, though, this particular riddle has been solved.

Coulthart, noted for his own neo-psychedelic CD covers, posted an item today to his blog, called {feuilleton}, about "the viral nature of design" -- meaning the repeated use of motifs and styles from one designer and era to another, the breeding and proliferation of typefaces, and so forth.

Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whose blog is called Quomodocumque, graduated from Harvard in 1993. His graduating class's 15th anniversary is coming up soon, so he recently read the class reunion report from cover to cover. His analysis is very funny. Here are a couple of excerpts:

* If you are a woman who went to Harvard and you're not presently working outside the house, you call yourself a "stay-at-home mom" -- but if you're a woman married to a male alum and in the same situation, your husband might call you a "homemaker," or even, in one case, a "housewife."

* Triathlon is startlingly popular among my classmates. Alternative explanation: each and every person who completed a triathlon mentioned this fact in their entry. Actually, both might apply. Travel to non-western countries enjoys a similar status.

* Harvard does thousands of great things to its students and a few bad things, one of which is to promote the idea that the people eating Chickwiches on either side of us are fated to be the rulers of the world we'll live in as adults. Not true, it turns out. On first glance, I think the members of our class most notable to the world at large are the executive producer of the Daily Show and the minority whip of the Florida State Senate.

Quomodocumque, by the way, means "after whatever fashion."

MassArt (Massachusetts College of Art and Design) has produced several of my favorite artists and designers. These include: leftwing illustrator and cartoonist Boardman Robinson, whose antiwar cartoons led to the suppression, during WWI, of the socialist journal The Masses; the Providence, RI-based art collective Paper Rad; Ben Edlund, creator of "The Tick"; and Tony Millionaire, creator of "Maakies." Not to mention a few taented friends: Back Bay-based graphic designer Anthony Leone, who was art director of Hermenaut; Jamaica Plain-based multimedia artist Michael Lewy; and Brooklyn-based graphic designer Carol Hayes, who coedited "Taking Things Seriously." (Sorry, I'm not a William Wegman fan.)

Less well-known is the fact that MassArt has also produced some cutting-edge musicians, perhaps most notably the artist and DJ Christian Marclay ('80). A pioneering turntablist, Marclay started using LPs and turntables to create sound collages around the same time that hip hop artists did; one of his best tricks is to cut and rejoin different LPs into a single disc, which not only sound funny and cool but look excellent.

More commonly known as the Greatest Generation, the New Gods were in their teens and 20s in the Thirties (1934-43, not to be confused with the the 1930s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Forties (1944-53). Before I explain my decision to call these Americans the New Gods, here's a reminder of my eccentric periodization scheme.

BRAINIAC'S GUIDE TO AMERICA'S RECENT GENERATIONS

1904-13: The Greatest Generation Partisans
1914-23: The Greatest Generation New Gods
1924-33: The Silent Generation Postmoderns
1934-43: The Silent Generation Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: Baby Boomers
1954-63: Baby Boomers OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: Generation X PC Generation
1974-83: Generation Y Net Generation
1984-93: Millennials

Please credit Brainiac/Joshua Glenn whenever you use this guide. Got a beef with my periodization, or different generational name suggestions? Leave a comment on this post or email me. Born between 1954 and 1993 and still unsure about whether you're a Boomer, Xer, Yer, or Millennial? Here's a handy guide.

***

The 1914-23 generation came of age during the Depression, during which time they were kept busy by the Civilian Conservation Corps "getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day," as it's been admiringly put. (Members of the older Partisan cohort, meanwhile, engaged in sit-down strikes in assembly-line industries, and questioned the inevitability of capitalism.) As adults, the 1914-23 generation fought World War II; note that a handful of Americans born in 1924, like George H.W. Bush, saw action in the war, and are honorary members of this generation. After the war, they saved American industry, tamed the business cycle, built the suburbs and moved into them.

As children, the Anti-Anti-Utopians and Boomers revered members of the 1914-23 generation; and as adults, they've continued to do so. In their opinion, their juniors -- the Original Generation X, the PCers, and the Netters have failed to live up to "the greatest generation any society has produced," as Tom Brokaw puts it in his 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation." In their 1991 book, "Generations," meanwhile, pop demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe (who call the Greatests the "GI" generation) gush:

Every now and then I like to remind Brainiac readers of the great success that contemporary artists who once lived in Boston are having... now that they've left town.

Arnold Kemp, a friend of mine from Boston Latin School (Class of 1986) who went on to study art at Tufts and the SMFA, for example, was featured in three gallery shows that opened last month. If you're going to be in Los Angeles tomorrow or the next day, or in New York any time this month, you can still check out two of them.

If you see Arnold at one of these shows, say hi for me. He lives in San Francisco spends a lot of time in New York, now.

Here's Arnold:

And here's the exhibit info:

Greenwashing, as you know, is the practice of misleading consumers about a business's environmental practices or about the pro-environmental benefits of a product or service. Like this infamous recent Shell ad, for example, in which oil refineries emit flowers from their smokestacks:

An article in The Guardian today notes that the number of complaints lodged to Great Britain's Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) relating to environmental or green claims has more than quadrupled in the past year. In 2006, the ASA received 117 complaints about environmental claims in 83 advertisements; in 2007, they received 561 complaints about a whopping 410 ads.

According to the ASA's annual report, which was released this week, the number of complaints on advertiser's green claims became one of the two key emerging issues for consumers in 2007; the other issue was images of violence and weapons. Claims that products and services were carbon "neutral" or "zero" or "negative" were particularly open to challenge, notes the report; same thing goes for statements claiming products to be "100% recycled" or "wholly sustainable."

Also this week, the British ad agency Futerra, which calls itself "the sustainability communications agency; from green to ethical, climate change to corporate responsibility," released a Greenwash Guide. Here's what to look out for on advertising and packaging, they warn:

1. Fluffy language. Words or terms with no clear meaning, e.g. "ecofriendly."

2. Green products v dirty company. Such as efficient light bulbs made in a factory which pollutes rivers.

3. Suggestive pictures. Green images that indicate an (unjustified) green impact eg flowers blooming from exhaust pipes.

4. Irrelevant claims. Emphasizing one tiny green attribute when everything else is "ungreen."

Earlier this month, the literati of the blogosphere were buzzing about Lawrence Shainberg's forthcoming novella, "Crust." Now, the buzz is about "The Brooklyn Literary 100," a feature published on April 22 by The New York Observer.

"Manhattan -- especially the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, and Elaine's -- for years occupied a special place in the city's literary landscape," notes Doree Shafrir in her introduction to the Observer's list of Brooklyn's 100 top authors, editors, literary agents, literary cocktail party hosts, magazine and newspaper writers, and bloggers. "But making the jump across the East River, and onto Carroll Street and Clinton Avenue -- along with the assistants and junior staffers and newly minted MFAs -- are now the likes of (No. 1 New York Times best-selling author!) Jhumpa Lahiri; Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who famously bought a Park Slope townhouse for $3.5 million in 2005; and the veritable Renaissance man Kurt Andersen, who makes his home in Carroll Gardens."

... is to hit a sharp-tongued critic in the face with a baseball bat. Or at least a cream pie. The latter fantasy came true, last night, for novelist Rick "Ice Storm" Moody, who in a 2002 review was described by The New Republic's Dale Peck as "the worst writer of his generation."

And that was just for starters. Here's more of what Peck had to say, in the course of reviewing Moody's "The Black Veil": "His intelligence does not make up for the badness of his books." * "What most readers think of as the subject of a story has [no] role in a Moody project beyond giving his tangled prose something to wrap itself around, the way a vine will wrap itself around the nearest thing to hand, be it trellis, tree, or trash." * "[His novels] bear the same relationship to Moody's career as his subjects do to his prose: the former come across as little more than a prop for the latter, incidental, interchangeable." * "I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant." * "[Moody's 'The Black Veil' is] the latest in what I have come to regard as a series of imitations or echoes of Moody's more talented, or at any rate more authentically individual, peers."

At a Brooklyn fundraiser for the writers' retreat Sangam House last night, we read in an entry posted by ex-Ideas editor Jennifer Schuessler to The New York Times's books blog, Paper Cuts, Peck finally got what was coming to him. For every $5 raffle ticket sold, Moody would move one inch closer to his target, from a starting point 9 feet away. Schuessler filmed what happened next:

It actually looks as though Peck enjoyed the whole thing more than Moody did...

On Wednesday, the Boston Athenaeum will unveil its terrific collection of advertising prints, photographs, maps, sheet music covers, and large-scale chromolithographs related to vacationing in Northern New England between 1825 and 1900. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public through August 22, is titled "Always Delightfully Cool.” It reminds us that in the years between, say, the Louisiana Purchase and the construction of Disneyland, the nation's most popular vacation sites were the mountains, lakes , and beaches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

The lithographs of enormous Victorian hotels in Moosehead Lake, Maine, for example, or Plymouth, N.H., are a blast from the past. But I'm particularly charmed by the frolicking beachgoers on the 1881 timetables for the Boston & Hingham Steamboat Co. and Nantasket Beach Railroad Co. True, those of us who grew up in the past half-century, during which the amusement park at Hull's Nantasket Beach was torn down, Hingham residents opposed the restoration of the Greenbush commuter line, and the waters of Boston Harbor were polluted, may feel like we missed out on all the fun. But these days, the Harbor is clean, Hull's bath house and carousel have been spruced up, and the 48-years-dormant Greenbush line is back in action. Let the frolicking begin.

Here are a few samples from the Athenaeum's collection. Click on each image to see a larger version.