Platoon: A Game of the Vietnam War

“Avalon Hill Games Inc. is a game company that publishes wargames and strategic board games. It has also published miniature wargaming rules, role-playing games and sports simulations. It is currently a subsidiary of the game company Wizards of the Coast, itself a subsidiary of Hasbro. Avalon Hill introduced many of the concepts of modern recreational wargaming, including the use of a hexagonal grid (a.k.a. hexgrid) overlaid on a flat folding board, zones of control (ZOC), stacking of multiple units at a location, and board games based upon historical events. Avalon Hill was started in 1952 outside Baltimore in Catonsville, Maryland by Charles S. Roberts under the name of ‘The Avalon Game Company’ for the publication of his game Tactics. It is considered the first of a new type of war game, consisting of a self-contained printed…

“First published by Ferry Press in 1968, long out of print, Stephen Jonas’ Exercises for Ear was rescued in 1994 when Talisman House republished the complete book in Stephen Jonas, Selected Poems. Over the years I’ve wanted to extend the discussion of Exercises for Ear that I began in my introduction to that Selected, to look more closely at particulars, not-so particulars, local, not-so local, and to jump into the mix anywhere I choose—amidst characters and dramas of a tawdry, highbrow late 50s through mid-60s milieu—to listen to songs of Boston gone. To begin, these are not poems in a traditional sense. Gerrit Lansing has called them etudes. They are bits and pieces—some complete units, others trail off—snippets of conversations, tongue-in-cheek shouts, persona poems, rants, quick snapshots of Boston above and below ground. If anything, they are a marvelous whole, yet individually they’re more like riffs a…

“The Concert for Bangladesh (or Bangla Desh, as the country’s name was originally spelt) was a pair of benefit concerts organised by former Beatles guitarist George Harrison and Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. The shows were held at 2:30 and 8:00 pm on Sunday, 1 August 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, to raise international awareness of, and fund relief for refugees from East Pakistan, following the Bangladesh Liberation War-related genocide. The concerts were followed by a bestselling live album, a boxed three-record set, and Apple Films‘ concert documentary, which opened in cinemas in the spring of 1972. The event was the first-ever benefit of such a magnitude, and featured a supergroup of performers that included Harrison, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band Badfinger…

“The mood of wry disillusion that seeps through the screen adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel ‘The Quiet American’ is sounded in the movie’s opening moments by the voice of Michael Caine musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 1950’s. It is a place, declares his character, Thomas Fowler, where colors and tastes seem sharper than they do elsewhere and where even the rain has a special intensity. People who go to Saigon in search of something, he suggests in a silky murmur, are likely to find it. That something has everything to do with faraway places and a mirage of sex and adventure in an exotic clime. Fowler is a wistfully cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he is reporting on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. His attitude toward the political turmoil…

“Overpopulation, manipulative politics, imbalances of societal power, addictive drugs, even more addictive technologies: these and other developments have pushed not just democracy but civilization itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Huxley saw it that way, and he told America so when he appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview in 1958. (You can also read a transcript here.) ‘There are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom,’ he told the newly famous news anchor, ‘and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.’ Huxley’s best-known novel Brave New World has remained relevant since its first publication in 1932. He appeared on Wallace’s show to promote Brave New World Revisited (first published as Enemies of Freedom)…

“In the slim volume of A Lover’s Discourse, French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes attempts to deconstruct one of the most powerful of human experiences: that of falling in love. Barthes claims that modern society lacks a language with which to discuss love – a notable change from times past in which it was the sexual, rather than the emotional aspects of love that were considered taboo. This should concern us as, without a system with which to analyse and interpret amorous experience, we are left to practice an unhealthy and unreflective form of love, which can do immense damage to all the parties involved. The stakes are particularly high: when tended properly, love can blossom into a deep and lasting contentment, or become a source of inexhaustible energy and inspiration. If mistreated, however, love can become a source of intense psychological pain, the cause of suicide, or…

“There was the great chess showdown of 1965, when MacHack won a chess game against a critic of artificial intelligence named Herbert Dreyfus, who had bluntly asserted that no computer program would ever be able to beat even a 10-year- old. None of the computer specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cheered when the program won, because they knew it was going to happen. They lived in the world of hackers, a mere extension of the incredible computer environment. There was the Great Subway Hack, in which an M.I.T. student programmed a computer to figure out a route by which someone could ride the entire New York City subway system on a single token, and then a bunch of his fellow students went out and actually did it. And there was the incident when the security people in charge of M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory had to ask one of…