From The Village Voice:

Fareed Zakaria’s career reads like some crazy America fantasy: Neoconservative policy wonk becomes darling of the ultra-liberal Daily Show. Political columnist and editor of Newsweek International is dubbed an “intellectual heartthrob” by Jon Stewart. Upper-class Indian academic raised in mostly secular household becomes America’s favorite explainer of the Muslim world, regularly appearing on Charlie Rose, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and now on his own weekly PBS news series, Foreign Exchange With Fareed Zakaria (airing Saturdays at 10 a.m. on WNET).

Zakaria stands out from the crowd of lily-white talking heads that populate American news shows thanks to his tan skin, clipped Bombay lilt, and his insistence that we pay attention to the rest of the globe. Sitting in his airy corner office at Newsweek, Zakaria is the definition of dapper, clad in a pale yellow checked shirt and crisp khakis. He ignores the constant ambient ping of incoming e-mails and phone calls as he talks about his PBS show. Zakaria may be the pundit world’s answer to the Backstreet Boys, but there’s nothing sexy about Foreign Exchange. It has the standard muted tones of a serious news program, complete with generic set and antiquated electronic theme music. “People ask how we’ll distinguish ourselves from the competition,” Zakaria says animatedly. “What competition? There’s literally not another show on American television that deals only with foreign affairs—you know, the other 95 percent of humanity.”

More here.

From Morning News:

Author, social critic, avowed feminist, and teacher Camille Anna Paglia was born in Endicott, N.Y., to Pasquale and Lydia Paglia, who had immigrated to the United States from Italy. She has published Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art, and American Culture; Vamps & Tramps: New Essays; The Birds, a study of Alfred Hitchcock; and most recently Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems. She is a contributing editor at Interview magazine and has written articles on art, literature, popular culture, feminism, and politics for newspapers and magazines around the world. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is currently at work on a new collection of essays, among other things. As Paglia asserts below, she spent five years away from the fray compiling this book of what she believes are great poems including work by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Dickinson, Lowell, and Plath.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Carbon nanotubes, the wunderkind molecules of the nanoworld, are finally showing strength in numbers. Researchers have now made large nanotube sheets that have many of the same star qualities as the prima donna-like single molecules, bringing the promises of nanotechnology a step closer to reality.

The flexible, transparent sheets can conduct electricity and emit light or heat when a voltage is applied, leading their creators to propose that our car windows and the canopies of military aircraft could contain nearly invisible antennae, electrical heaters for defrost, or informative optical displays.

More here.

Eleni Sikelianos tells a few Creeley tales at Brik.

Fabulous tales of drunken nights and big fights—these were the first stories I heard about Robert Creeley, told by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (once Bobbie Creeley) when I was a student at Naropa in the late eighties/early nineties. One of the tastiest morsels: “. . . so, I turned around and punched Bob in his good eye. . . .” Young poets thrive on such tales of poetry’s heroes, especially when told by those who knew and loved those heroes from up close. I don’t remember the first time I met Bob Creeley, but I do remember being surprised again and again by his generosity and thoughtfulness—his attention to the world and humans, his willingness to connect. Sharp-eyed. The last time I saw him Laird Hunt (my husband) and I were driving him from Boulder to Denver this past October. He wanted to take the scenic route, though he seemed to pay no attention to what was going on outside the car. I was driving, Bob was in the passenger seat, his good eye was window-side. He seemed as energetic as ever; he had the physical wealth of a man in his thirties. We were talking about his switch from New Directions to the University of California Press. I asked if University of California would do his new books as well as his reprints. He turned his face fully toward me, so his good eye could take ME in (much, I imagined, as does the driving speaker in “I Know a Man”). “I don’t have more than a book or two left,” he said, in that completely candid way he had that made things seem grim and tender and funny all at once. “I’m old, don’t you know.”

Zheng’s photos of China during the political and economic upheavals of the last decade are a combination of the over-familiar and the strange. Stylistically, they suggest an amalgam of August Sander, Diane Arbus, and Nan Goldin: Flash-lit, centered subjects and black-and-white prints; alluring yet uncomfortable intimacy; typologies of occupations and phyla of “freaks.” But while Zheng’s style is derivative, the world he uncovers is rich and varied. From the gruesome Waxwork in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, 2000, to Actors in a Film about the War Against the Japanese, 2000, to the hulking figure of A Poetess, Beijing, 1998, Zheng is both artist and documentarian. Perhaps the most apt comparison of all is to Robert Frank, who, like Zheng, set out to capture the complexities of a vast and heterogeneous nation.

From Artforum. Zheng’s work can be found at Yossi Milo gallery.

A book and an exhibition:

  “Every city has its icon, some point of interest or civic pride that captures universal attention: the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. The visual symbols of Los Angeles, however, have always tended towards the ironic, evidence of an insubstantial past and a dystopian future. The Hollywood sign? Kitsch? Parking lots? Strip malls? Jammed freeways?

All are evidence of what went wrong in the California paradise – or at least that’s what its critics would say. “

more here

From Haaretz:

“When you first come across it, the concept of “animated documentary” sounds strange, almost an oxymoron. After all, the purpose of a documentary is to capture a fragment of reality and to do so in a way that is as faithful as possible to that reality…

But there has been a surge in the making of documentaries in recent years and a growing realization that a documentary does not capture an objective truth, but rather the way that reality is reflected in the eyes of the director. Decisions such as what to film and what not to film, what angles to employ, how to edit the material and what soundtrack to use affect the portrait of reality presented in the finished film. The successful “Fahrenheit 9/11,” for example, does not offer an objective description of what happened after the terror attacks in the United States; it shows the way in which the director Michael Moore sees things.

If so, then it is possible that animated documentary is not such a wild idea after all. And, indeed, lately there have been an increasing number of films in this genre around the world; animation and documentary film festivals have special categories for it, and even the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has stipulated in its regulations that an animated documentary can compete in the documentary film category.”

More Here

Sometimes I think the only people writing true Modernist fiction anymore are the Japanese. Why not? They do it well. Here’s a Hiromi Kawakami story from the Paris Review.

The next room is overflowing with humans. My wife and I drop the dead ones down the hole, separate the ones who are going to go back aboveground immediately from those who aren’t, and distribute the gruel.

The humans all look very listless, as if they’re dead. But they aren’t dead. They keep eating away at their surroundings, eating away at themselves; they stay where they are, perfectly motionless —but they don’t die. Here in our hole, unable to become Mogera wogura themselves, as human as ever, they wait for the time when they will be able to go back aboveground.

Some humans die before they are able to go back; then all the others shed tears and writhe about wildly on the floor, and for just a moment their faces, otherwise dead, light up.

From NY Arts magazine.

In 2004, when Romania inaugurated its first-ever National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu’s nightmarish Peoples Palace, Dumitru Gorzo contributed a large painting depicting the palace on fire while two thugs knife a peasant —a tableau based on a folkloric legend of the Carpathian mountains. Although Gorzo was among many artists displaying both humor and hatred toward everything Ceausescu stood for, his piece provoked the most controversy. Such is the task of the Romanian artist: to attempt fresh creation in a place that for 50 years was aesthetically desecrated and forced into submission before a deadly prole-cultism in art, architecture and art-criticism.

From Scientific American:

The Milky Way may be our own galactic neighborhood, but it still has some surprises in store. To wit: the most comprehensive structural analysis of the galaxy ever conducted indicates that ours is not a run-of-the-mill spiral one after all.

Using NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to sample light from some 30 million stars in the Milky Way, astronomers observed a long bar of relatively old stars spanning the center of the galaxy.

More here.

From Science:

Some areas of the world, called high background radiation areas (HBRAs), have anomalously high levels of background radiation. In such terrains, the geology and geochemistry of the rocks and minerals have the greatest influence in determining where the high natural radiation shows up. Ramsar, a city in northern Iran, has one of the highest natural-radiation levels in the world. In some locations at Ramsar, the radiation level is 55 to 200 times higher than the background level.

The most interesting feature in all these cases is that the people living in these HBRAs do not appear to suffer any adverse health effects as a result of their high exposures to radiation. On the contrary, in some cases the individuals living in these HBRAs appear to be even healthier and to live longer than those living in control areas that are not classified as HBRAs. These phenomena pose many intriguing questions for medical geologists. Chandra Dissanayake, a senior professor of geology at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, has pioneered geochemical research in Sri Lanka.

More here.

“Sign up and you’re signing away your free time!” That’s just one of the many myths out there about Today’s Military. The reality? 30 days of paid vacation a year is the norm. From salaries to Basic Training, there are lots of misconceptions about military life. Maybe it’s time to familiarize yourself with the truth.
—From Today’s Military, a government Web site.

Joel Stein in The New Yorker:

Dude, we totally know what you’re thinking. That you’ll have to wake up early. That we’ll make you run all day with heavy stuff on your back. That you have to be drug-free, know how to read, and rank the U.S. as one of your top five favorite countries. Wrong, wrong, and wrong! And whatever else you’re thinking? Wrong!

The Army is actually a whole lot of fun. Picture this: You get up—ten, eleven, whatever’s good for you. Then we have brunch. Pancakes, waffles, French toast, some grease if the night before was a rough one. Sugar cereals. Then, at 1200 hours—just kidding! nobody here uses that number thing anymore—around noonish we hit the Xbox for a few hours of Halo and all-you-can-eat Cool Ranch Doritos. It’s combat training without breaking a sweat. After a quick nap, we pack in some more training by watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie marathon. Then a dinner of chipped beef on toast, dehydrated mashed pota- Again, totally joking! We’re having Taco Bell every night, all night, washed down by some of the best that Milwaukee has to offer.

As for uniforms, could that G.I. Joe crap have been any dorkier?

More here.

From The Economist:

The calm unyielding (yet racially and religiously inclusive) leadership of Rudolph Giuliani on September 11th 2001 transformed the mayor of New York into a national hero, dubbed “America’s mayor” by Oprah Winfrey. To the outside world—then, as now, underwhelmed by the president of the explosion-shocked superpower—Mr Giuliani came to symbolise all that was most impressive about America’s response to the terrorist attacks. His heroism during the crisis has made “Sir” Rudy (he was knighted in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth) a potential candidate for the presidency in 2008. Yet it was but the remarkable final act of an eight-year reign in City Hall that required leadership just as heroic in much less obvious ways.

In Fred Siegel’s gripping and persuasive account of that reign, Mr Giuliani mostly comes across as the opposite of the unifying figure standing amid the ruins of the World Trade Centre. According to this modern retelling of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, Mr Giuliani revived a city in seemingly irresistible decline by the determined application of a “corrupt wisdom” that confronted the conventional wisdom propagated by New York’s powerful interest groups (above all, the public-sector unions and Manhattan liberals). Strikingly, Rudy’s favourite aphorism, “I’d rather be respected than loved,” echoed Machiavelli’s “it is better to be feared than loved”.

More here.

“A veteran Vietnam correspondent revisits the romantic retreat where he, and so many others, sought respite from war in Indochina.”

Stanley Karnow in Smithsonian Magazine:

When I was reporting on the Vietnam War for Time, the Washington Post and NBC News, as a respite from the relentless sweat, grime and danger of my assignment, I occasionally flew up to Da Lat, the resort that the French carved out of a misty, pine-covered plateau about 200 miles northeast of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Apart from a brief clash in 1968, the retreat was hardly affected by the fighting. When I recently returned there, I found that Da Lat still retains much of its old-fashioned charm.

I checked into a meticulously remodeled 1920s luxury hotel, the Sofitel Dalat Palace. The Palace, majestically perched on a crest overlooking placid Xuan Huong Lake, served as my base for exploring the town. Parks and broad avenues are shaded by acacias, cedars, palms and mimosas.

Today, Da Lat’s thriving outdoor market reflects a new prosperity: huge crates overflow with a dazzling array of fruits and vegetables.

Guidebooks publicize the mansion where the country’s last emperor, Bao Dai, dallied with his favorite concubine until he was exiled to the Côte d’Azur in 1955. Not far from the royal mansion lies a mildewed cottage concealed in a bamboo grove: here, at the Stop and Go Café, writers and artists gather to swap ideas and discuss works in progress. Not far away, another landmark, the Han Nga Guesthouse and Art Gallery, embodies a fusion of Surrealism and Dada.

More here.

“In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight’s Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web.”

From the BBC:

Mark Lawson: Because of your invention, I was able to look up every article written by or about you quickly and easily. But at the same time, I was sent several unsolicited links to porn sites. I have to accept that someone in Mexico may have stolen my identity and now be using it. Is the latter absolutely worth paying for the former?

Tim Berners-Lee: That’s an interesting question that you ask, as though it’s a yes or no answer. As though our choice is to turn off the whole thing, or turn on the whole thing. I feel that the web should be something, which basically doesn’t try to coerce people into putting particular sorts of things on it.

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

More here.

Amanda Mitchison in The Telegraph:

Zaha Hadid, visionary exponent of the crash-landed-and-about-to-explode look in modern architecture and the woman charged with creating an aquatics centre in east London for the 2012 Olympics, has her main offices in a perfectly solid, old, red-brick converted school in Clerkenwell, central London. The surroundings are rather stark: white walls, rows of black files and a series of long tables where her employees – young, thin, brisk worker-bee architects dressed in black – sit behind their laptops.

In contrast Hadid herself, who is also completely clad in black, is large and voluptuous. She regularly works late into the night, her hair looks ruffled and her big, liquid eyes are heavy-lidded. The impression that she has just got out of bed is echoed by the fact that she is wearing a ring decorated with something that looks like a huge diamond-encrusted bedspring.

Wrapped around her torso is an extraordinary garment: a sort of jagged-edged little black duvet with sleeves. Hadid has always dressed adventurously. She once wrote that every garment ‘should be a statement that either questions its form, structure or materiality. I often put on a jacket or a cape upside-down as a means of understanding it in a new way.’

More here.

Mr. Hilton Kramer on the Cézanne/Pissarro exhibit currently showing at MoMA.

To fully understand the exhibition called Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885, which has been organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Joachim Pissarro, the painter’s great-grandson (who is also a MoMA curator), it has to be remembered that the two featured patriarchs of pictorial modernism began their public careers as rejected artists. That is, they were stigmatized as rejected artists by the French government’s annual Salon. But such were the paradoxes of governmental authority in the arts that the French also provided the means for exhibiting these great painters by creating an official Salon des Refusés, which allowed unorthodox talents to be admitted (albeit on a segregated basis) without the approval of an official jury. Thus was born the kind of challenge to established opinion that later came to be called the avant-garde.

More from The New York Observer, here.

The philosopher David Chalmers has created a website compiling the various kinds of zombies that can be found on the web. He’s interested in zombies because of the thought problems they present in terms of philosophy of mind, but he’s liberal minded and inclusive in his approach to zombies of all kinds on this site.

Zombies are hypothetical creatures of the sort that philosophers have been known to cherish. A zombie is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings that we know and love, but “all is dark inside.” There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.

From BBC News:

It is hoped the newly-created cells will eventually help scientists find new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh said the cells should help researchers test the effectiveness of new drugs. Stem cells are “master” cells that can become many kinds of tissue. Nerve stem cells are those which help build the brain and central nervous system. The breakthrough comes three months after scientists at Newcastle University announced they had successfully produced a cloned embryo using donated eggs and genetic material from stem cells. It was the first time a human cloned embryo had been created in Britain.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Juicy gossip moves so quickly – He did what? She has pictures? – that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they wanted to. Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction. People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue.

More here.