May 7, 2013 | 37 notes

Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up? As he was beginning to start work on the novel that would become The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to his editor, Max Perkins, complaining that, at 27, he had dumped more of his personal experiences into his fiction than anyone else he knew of. This next novel, his new novel, would be different. “In my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work,“ he wrote, “not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.”  But as he wrote, he ended up drawing on the rowdy elegance of the Roaring Twenties milieu in which he lived to create that radiant world—and devotees have been trying to pin down his real-life inspirations ever since. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo: © Warner Bros / courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up?

As he was beginning to start work on the novel that would become The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to his editor, Max Perkins, complaining that, at 27, he had dumped more of his personal experiences into his fiction than anyone else he knew of. This next novel, his new novel, would be different. “In my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work,“ he wrote, “not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.” 

But as he wrote, he ended up drawing on the rowdy elegance of the Roaring Twenties milieu in which he lived to create that radiant world—and devotees have been trying to pin down his real-life inspirations ever since. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: © Warner Bros / courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

October 19, 2012 | 70 notes

Newly Released Photo of Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln The movie project began with [Doris Kearns] Goodwin’s book, before she had written much of it. When she and [Steven] Spielberg met, in 1999, he asked her what she was working on, and she said Lincoln. “At that moment,” says Spielberg, “I was impulsively seized with the chutzpah to ask her to let me reserve the motion-picture rights.” To which effrontery she responded, in so many words: Cool. Her original plan had been to write about Mary and Abe Lincoln, as she had about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevel. “But I realized that he spent more time with members of his cabinet,” she says. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo: David James, SMPSP © DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved Ed note: The Lincoln trailer:

Newly Released Photo of Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln

The movie project began with [Doris Kearns] Goodwin’s book, before she had written much of it. When she and [Steven] Spielberg met, in 1999, he asked her what she was working on, and she said Lincoln. “At that moment,” says Spielberg, “I was impulsively seized with the chutzpah to ask her to let me reserve the motion-picture rights.” To which effrontery she responded, in so many words: Cool. Her original plan had been to write about Mary and Abe Lincoln, as she had about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevel. “But I realized that he spent more time with members of his cabinet,” she says. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: David James, SMPSP © DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved

Ed note: The Lincoln trailer:

May 4, 2012 | 42 notes

The Science of the Millennium Falcon The physicists noted that a real-life innovation, the plasma window, could theoretically serve to create such magnetic fields to create bounded areas filled with plasma, which have the special property of blocking air from entering a vacuum while allowing radiation and physical objects to freely pass through. Photo: Mary Evans / Lucas Film / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection (10336353) Ed note: Could the Death Star destroy a planet?

The Science of the Millennium Falcon

The physicists noted that a real-life innovation, the plasma window, could theoretically serve to create such magnetic fields to create bounded areas filled with plasma, which have the special property of blocking air from entering a vacuum while allowing radiation and physical objects to freely pass through.

Photo: Mary Evans / Lucas Film / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection (10336353)

Ed note: Could the Death Star destroy a planet?