Kiss my math, bitch

 

Remember Danica McKeller? No? How about Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years? Yes, it’s alwaystragic when a person’s identity is swallowed by a past fictional role, and it’s especially devastating for one’s acting career. In lieu of finding steady acting work, McKellar has reached into the recesses of her intellectual past – she majored in math at UCLA – and written two books geared towards math-hating pre-teen girls.

Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss is the follow-up to her surprisingly successful Math Doesn’t Suck, with even more cute boy-metaphors to help the 11-14 set understand integers and exponents. On its face, it seems like it could have come out of CosmoGirl!’s theoretical publishing house, and the cover has the same frantic excess of women’s magazines: “20 ways to beat stress”; “Do you pick supportive friends? Take this quiz!”; “What guys really think about smart girls.” For more than 300 pages, McKellar reframes math into pubescent perspectives: If it’s too hard to remember that 3x and 4x can be added together,  just realize that they like like each other (whereas 3xy and 4x are just friends). “Integer” may sound too dull, so just think of “mint-eger” – positives are peppermint, spearmint and the like (“These are good for a date in case, you know, there’s going to be kissing involved,” McKellar writes) and negatives come from the risky Harry Potter JellyBelly store.

I was never a pre-teen girl, but it still seems like Kiss My Math is the kind of book a mother would push on her daughter after some bad report cards. McKellar’s tone is that of the grown-up trying to communicate to kids after adulthood has robbed her of the ability to relate, and she often comes off as patronizing. But the unintentional condescension may be easily lost on target readers (which no one reading this post is). And hell, if it works – and the letters of appreciation spattered throughout the entire book show that it just might – then who am I to knock it? Anything that will close our comparative disadvantage in science with the rest of the developed world is well needed – even if it only makes us more vapid in the end.

Ad Heaven

In the city’s Municipal Services Building, in the office of the Zoning Board, sits a manila folder filled with letters teeming with invective. Most are written by owners of million-dollar-plus condos. “Hideously massive,” “appalled,” “a blemish,” they say. They’re reactions to an attempt by Unisys Corp. to place two 900-square-foot glowing red signs on the eastern and western facades of Two Liberty Place — one of the iconic pieces of the Philly skyline.

Q & A with new art czar Gary Steuer

After keeping the arts community on the edge of its seat for months and months, Mayor Michael Nutter finally announced who will head the city’s resurrected Office of Arts and Culture. Gary Steuer, who currently serves as a vice president for D.C. nonprofit Americans for the Arts, will serve as director of the brand-new Office of Arts, Culture and (as of 2008 ) the Creative Economy beginning in October.

Steuer comes with a solid background in heading arts organizations big and small, as well as soliciting support from the private sector. It’s good experience to have, considering that Philly has thousands of arts organizations of various sizes and millions of dollars in private funds just waiting to be wooed over to the arts. Most importantly, Steuer will represent the agendas of the arts sector and creative economy to address city priorities, and he’ll use the city to promote the agenda of the arts.

The newly reborn Office has the potential to be a blessing for both the city and its artists — if it’s well-funded. The original Office of Arts and Culture was created during the administration of Wilson Goode and was shut down by John Street in 2004 after he saw no reason to sustain its existence. Maybe this time will be different.

More pictures of children

Photos of the 2008 AFTA convention

Last weekend, the nonprofit Americans for the Arts held its 2008 convention in Philly. Cities vie to have AFTA bring hordes of distinguished guests to their cities, and for the first time in 25 years, Philly won. (Check out our coverage.) The convention featured talks on the state of public arts programs, boozing at the Kimmel Center, tours of Philly’s public art and more boozing at the Art Museum.

Check out some photographic highlights of the weekend.

Beyond Green

The broad mission of Philly’s incoming sustainability director

Last week, Mark Alan Hughes, who in May was appointed director of sustainability for Philadelphia, spoke to a packed auditorium at the Sustainable Philadelphia forum at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Beginning in July, Hughes will try to make good on Michael Nutter’s promises to improve recycling rates, reduce the city’s energy consumption, and generally return Philadelphia to the days of William Penn’s “greene countrie towne.”

At the forum, a panel of academics had been discussing metrics for gauging how sustainable Philly is. But when Hughes delivered his keynote address, he posed a more fundamental question: Do we even know what “sustainability” means?

A couple of photos

Aesthetes in the making

From City Paper:

In 2005, National Geographic Traveler upped Philadelphia’s street cred by declaring it the Next Great City. This weekend, D.C.-based nonprofit Americans for the Arts (AFTA) will descend upon our town to further prove its mettle as more than 1,400 arts and civic leaders gather from around the country for AFTA’s annual convention. Titled “American Evolution: Arts in the New Civic Life,” this year’s program will alternate between talks at the Center City Sheraton (on improving community arts programs) and tours of Philly’s cultural highlights. Discussions will mostly revolve around strengthening existing arts programs in cities and increasing the size of the arts’ blip on the nation’s political radar.

War Torn

The corner of 15th and Cecil B. Moore Streets is a node on the fault line that divides Temple University and blighted North Philadelphia. On the corner is a 7-11 with a triangular overhang, a popular shelter for beggars who stand outside the door and solicit shoppers for change. Most stand humbly upright before their potential donors.

Tony Martin doesn’t. The outside of 7-11 is Tony’s primary place of self-employment, and he slouches against the brick wall underneath the overhang, one leg extended and the other angled upward. He casually asks those entering and leaving if they have anything to spare for food. But he is often a peddler of sorts, hawking various items-of-the day to people unlikely to want a degraded Starter jacket or a Walkman with broken headphones and no batteries. When I go to meet him, he hands me a Lord of the Rings computer game for PC and gives me his best sales pitch. I tell him that unfortunately I have a Macintosh and that this requires a PC. “What’s a PC?” he asks.

One Family, Two Factions, Split Along the Cochlea

Perhaps it’s one of the ultimate exercises of postmodernism: what you call a disability, I call a culture. To the deaf, the malfunctioning cochleae are the source of their language and unbreakable bond between one another. And as Josh Aronson’s documentary “Sound and Fury” shows, the culture strives for its own posterity as does any other. Preventing a deaf child from hearing seems counterintuitive, if not downright abusive, to most who can hear. But Aronson provides an extraordinarily fair look at a debate that is mostly unknown to the hearing world: If the deaf are altered to hear, is it the end of deaf culture? And should deaf culture be preserved at such a cost anyway?