English Article 1

Intermediate 1-5

Week 1

Different Drummer
Dressed in a canvas kilt, Ben Brungraber looks like what Henry David Thoreau might have had in mind when he wrote of a man marching to the beat of a different drummer. Brungraber is the senior engineer and resident eccentric at Bensonwood, a company employing practitioners of timber framing, an age-old technique of building with heavy timbers—beamsand posts and braces—fastened together with precisely cut, interlocking mortise and tenon joints and big wooden pegs. He and 35 other volunteers, mostly Bensonwood employees, are building a replica of Thoreau's cabin, a timber frame structure, for the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, near Concord, Massachusetts.

Timber frame revivalists range from high-tech to hands-on. At Bensonwood, amassive $400,000 German-made, automated timber-cutting tool dubbed "Das Machine" could have cut all the joinery for Thoreau's cabin in minutes with strokes of a few computer keys. At the other end of the spectrum are traditional purists like Jack Sobon, who uses only hand tools and hauls logs out of the forest using oxen.

Mortise and tenon joints have been found in 3,000-year-old Egyptian furnitureand in ancient Chinese buildings. Part of a temple in Japan, rebuilt using timber framing techniques, is the world's oldest surviving wooden structure. By the tenth century A.D., cathedrals with complex timber frame roof systems were going up across Europe. Immigrants brought timber framing methods to the New World, but in the mid-1800s, timber framing in the United States began to wane.High-production sawmills made standardized lumber widely available, and railroads transported huge loads of 2 x 4s used in stud framing. But the aesthetics of the bright, open spaces of timber frame structures, a stark contrast to the humdrum, boxy look of many conventionally framed houses, have inspired a timber frame renaissance.

King Ludd's War
In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personalcomputer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet hu-mor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”

Like all good satire, the mockheadline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski,attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.

For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warpingour children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screensglowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”

That’s when he turns on his phone, too.

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and...