Gaiutra Bahadur in The Nation:

The belief that women are safest when secluded still holds sway in India. On the sleek Delhi metro, there are cars exclusively—though not compulsory—for women, and at their entrance guards outfitted in navy-blue saris stand sentinel to deter male passengers from entering them, whether by mistake or to make mischief. The threat of sexual harassment, from incidents of aggressive ogling or groping (known euphemistically as “Eve teasing”) to rape, discourages women from venturing out alone, especially at night. And if, having gone out, they are harassed or assaulted, they are often told it was their fault. In 2008, a mob molested two Indian-American women as they left a Mumbai hotel after midnight for a New Year’s stroll with their husbands. The chairman of a state human rights commission said of the incident, “Yes, men are bad…. But who asked [the women] to venture out in the night…. Women should not have gone out in the night and when they do, there is no point in complaining that men touched them and hit them.”

The history of publicly engaged women in India—especially those from elite backgrounds, such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and her publisher Sarojini Naidu, the independence leader and future president of the Indian National Congress—is long and vibrant. What’s relatively new are the employment, educational and leisure opportunities that globalization has created for middle-class and lower-middle-class Indian women, who by working in offices, commuting on trains or buses, or shopping in cafes and malls have staked a certain claim. The ranks of women with roles outside the home—once filled mostly by those at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder or by those, like Hossain, at the top—are expanding, fulfilling the prophesy of Ladyland at least slightly. Yet Hossain’s dream of freedom from crime remains unrealized in India.

There, as across much of the world, violence against women appears to be escalating. The number of reported rapes in India has surged by 792 percent in the past four decades, making it the nation’s fastest-growing crime. To an extent, the statistics reflect greater reporting, but they also point to a substantive issue.

More here.

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker (Illustration by Brian Stauffer):

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming. Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

The word “innovate”—to make new—used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French Revolution a “revolt of innovation”; Federalists declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.” George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these words: “Beware of innovation in politics.” Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in 1828, “It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.”

The redemption of innovation began in 1939, when the economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of economics and business. (In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about “creative destruction”; Christensen, retrofitting, believes that Schumpeter was really describing disruptive innovation.) “Innovation” began to seep beyond specialized literatures in the nineteen-nineties, and gained ubiquity only after 9/11. One measure: between 2011 and 2014, Time, the Times Magazine,The New Yorker, Forbes, and even Better Homes and Gardens published special “innovation” issues—the modern equivalents of what, a century ago, were known as “sketches of men of progress.”

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.

More here.

Bernd Brunner in The Smart Set:

Some hummingbirds are no larger than a thumb, and the smallest among them are the very smallest birds in existence. Yet it’s hard to avoid superlatives when talking about these tiny creatures. With their often magnificent jewel-like colors, they glimmer like finely wrought works of art. In fact, they are miracles of nature: extremely agile, fast-moving animals that take the characteristics of birds to their utmost limit. Combining dynamism, fragility, and a surprising degree of fearlessness, hummingbirds can be found in the most diverse environments: in tiny front yards in North, Central, and South American cities; on the high plateau of the Andes; and in the dense Amazon forests.

The very first mention of hummingbirds by a European probably occurred in the accounts of Jean de Léry, a French sailor and explorer. De Léry was part of a group of mariners sent to the Brazilian coast in 1556. His 1557 Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amérique contains a number of observations about the inhabitants, flora, and fauna of this new continent, completely unknown to the readers. Throughout the two centuries after de Léry, a range of authors mentioned hummingbirds, but a systematic framework for their observations was still a long way off. George Marcgrave, who traveled to Brazil in 1638, described several hummingbird species in his Historia Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae, published in Amsterdam ten years later. Soon the birds were popping up in all sorts of contexts — their unusual features were always worth an anecdote. In his Mundus Mirabilis Tripartitus (1689), one of the compendia of all sorts of natural curiosities popular at the time, the German Eberhard Werner Happel speaks of a “little bird in its shining little plumage” that lives in the “New Netherlands”:

It is barely the length of a thumb and sucks from the flowers like a bee …. Another type of this most beautiful bird is found on the islands of the Antilles, but especially on the island Anegada. Its body is not much larger than that of a beetle, covered with colorful feathers like a rainbow, and its neck is decorated with a little ruby-red ring. The wings appear as if gilded on the underside and the gold-green head wears a tiny cap or hood.

Hummingbirds inspired Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, one of the first American naturalists, to a stirring comparison in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782): “Where do passions find room in so diminutive a body? They often fight with the fury of lions, until one of the combatants falls a sacrifice and dies.”

More here.

Blake Bailey in Vice:

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, as part of the Paris-based Olympia Press Traveler’s Companion books, a series of louche and sometimes avant-garde fiction. Lolita was both: A rapturous first-person account of a middle-aged European’s passion for a prepubescent “nymphet,” the novel was resplendent with Nabokov’s usual wordplay, puzzles, and recondite allusions. Quite apart from its erotic content, Lolita would seem an unlikely best seller in Eisenhower’s America, but when Putnam published an edition in 1958, it sold faster than any American novel since Gone with the Wind. A month later, Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights for $150,000, despite the considerable challenge of making a movie that would satisfy the censors. Meeting with Nabokov the following summer, in 1959, Kubrick tried to entice the great Russian-American novelist to write the screenplay himself. Nabokov gave the matter some thought, but finally declined. “A particular stumbling block,” his wife, Véra, wrote Kubrick’s partner, James Harris, was “the [filmmakers’] idea of having the two main protagonists”—Lolita Haze and her 40-something lover, Humbert Humbert—“married with an adult relative’s blessing.”

A few months later, back in Europe, Nabokov “experienced a small nocturnal illumination” as to how he might fruitfully proceed with an adaptation of Lolita—whereupon, as if by magic, a telegram from Kubrick materialized: “Convinced you were correct dislike marriage Stop Book a masterpiece and should be followed even if Legion and Code disapprove Stop Still believe you are only one for screenplay Stop If financial details can be agreed would you be available.” Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar negotiated a deal whereby Nabokov would receive $40,000 for writing the screenplay and an additional $35,000 if he received sole credit, and in March 1960 the novelist came to California and rented a villa in Brentwood Heights. As he later recalled in his foreword to the published screenplay, “Kubrick and I, at his Universal City studio, debated in an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion how to cinemize the novel. He accepted all my vital points, I accepted some of his less significant ones.” Meanwhile, with the help of Lazar and his wife, the Nabokovs were introduced to the Hollywood cocktail circuit. “I’m in pictures,” John Wayne explained when Nabokov cordially inquired about his line of work.

More here.

Jeremy Butterfield in +Plus Magazine:

There is no doubt that the history of science, and especially of physics, provides countless illustrations of the power of mathematical language to describe natural phenomena. Famously, Galileo himself — the founding father of the mathematical description of motion — envisaged describing many, perhaps all, phenomena in mathematical terms. Thus in The Assayer he wrote the following (saying “philosophy” in roughly the sense of our words “natural science” or “physics”):

“Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”

Of course, since Galileo's time the language of mathematics has developed enormously — in ways that even he, a genius, would have found unimaginable. This lends credence to the claim that maths is more than just a tool; that it is embedded deeper in the nature of reality. Some people have taken this idea to the extreme: they suggest that the Universe itself is a mathematical structure.

How can this be? One line of reasoning, which has been taken by the physicist Max Tegmark in his book Our mathematical Universe, starts with the premise that external reality is completely independent of us humans. If this is true, then external reality must have a description which is utterly free of subjective ingredients: that is, utterly free of factors arising from biological facts about human cognition, or cultural facts, or facts about an individual human's psychology.

More here.

Ayelet Waldman in The Atlantic:

I first saw the boys through the rearview mirror of the car I was riding in, as they approached Shuhada Street. One of them was about the age of my daughter, who became a bat mitzvah last week. The other might have been 16 or so, like my older son. The boys hesitated at the top of the street and seemed to take a breath. Then they stepped into the void.

Shuhada Street, lined with small shops whose owners typically lived upstairs, was once among the busiest market streets in this ancient city. But in 1994, in response to a horrific massacre that left 29 people dead and 125 injured, the Israel Defense Forces began clamping down on Shuhada Street. They welded shut the street-facing doors of all the homes and shops, and by the time of the Second Intifada in 2000, had turned the bustling thoroughfare into a ghost street on which no one was permitted to set foot. No one, that is, who is Palestinian. Israeli Jews and foreign visitors are free to come and go along the road—to snap photos and make their way to Hebron’s three Jewish settler outposts, Beit Hadassah, Beit Romano, and Avraham Avinu. But there is nothing to buy, nothing to see, no reason to tarry. The stores are all closed. The few Palestinians who remain have been barred from the street where they live. If they want to enter their homes, they must do so through back doors, which in many cases involves clambering over rooftops.

One might be tempted to view Shuhada Street as just another casualty in an endless cycle of violent retribution. A Palestinian kills dozens of Hebron’s Jews, so Israel punishes the Palestinians of Hebron by closing Shuhada Street. But that is not, in fact, what happened. The victims of the massacre that impelled the Israeli government to shutter Shuhada were not Jews. They were Palestinians—unarmed Palestinians gunned down as they prayed at the nearby Cave of the Patriarchs by Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish zealot with Israeli military training and a Galil assault rifle, who stopped firing only when he was overcome and killed by survivors of his attack. You can add Shuhada Street, and the vibrant urban life it once sustained and embodied, to the list of Goldstein’s victims.

More here.

Amy Taubin at Artforum:

TIME FLIES in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which is both a conceptual tour de force and a fragile, unassuming slice of movie life. Two hours and forty minutes in length, it depicts the maturation of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from a six-year-old child into an eighteen-year-old young adult. There has never been a fiction film quite like it.

“‘The clay of cinema is time.’” Tarkovsky’s axiom, paraphrased by Linklater in a conversation we had recently over the phone, has guided the director ever since Slacker (1991)—as has his own corollary that a film should be “locked in the moment and place of its making.” Linklater’s second feature,Slacker was emblematic of a generation—and of a promising moment in American independent film, when a handful of directors eschewed Hollywood production values and conventional dramatic structure to combine the influences of European art cinema with distinctly American imagery and culture. Set in Austin, where, in 1985, Linklater founded a film society in order to show such personal favorites as Tarkovsky, Bresson, Godard, and James Benning, Slacker perambulates a mile-long strip bordering the University of Texas campus, connecting by happenstance more than fifty incidents and roughly a hundred characters within a single day. In 1991, when Todd Haynes’s Poison won the grand prize at the Sundance Film Festival, jury member Gus Van Sant said that his vote had gone to Slacker. Haynes puts his formalism up front; Linklater buries his in the bedrock of his narratives. And if Jim Jarmusch is the post-Beat cinematic bard of rust-belt bohemians and downtown hipsters, then Linklater is the Longfellow of a less glamorous alt-culture—one that could pass for mainstream America, whatever that is. Jarmusch’s protagonists are loners. Linklater creates characters who marry, have kids, divorce, have jobs, and struggle to pay the rent and child support. He is a visionary of everyday life.

more here.

George Scialabba at The Nation:

Still, some deep and troubling questions lurk beneath Krauthammer’s crass celebration of America’s manifest destiny. The flowering of equality, self-reliance and civic virtue in the nonslave states from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century is one of the political wonders of the world, a signal achievement in humankind’s moral history. It was made possible by a great crime: it all took place on stolen, ethnically cleansed land. Likewise that other pinnacle of political enlightenment, Athenian democracy, which rested on slavery. But in both cases, didn’t the subordination or expropriation of the many allow the few to craft social relations from which the rest of the world has learned invaluable lessons? Is some such stolen abundance or leisure a prerequisite of moral and cultural advance? Even if we acknowledge the dimensions of the crime, can we really regret the achievement? Krauthammer is no help in answering such questions, but he is clever enough (and truculent enough) to force them on our attention.

Krauthammer is an unapologetic, even strident hawk. He chides Jeane Kirkpatrick, no less, for suggesting that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States might become “a normal country in a normal time.” On the contrary, he admonishes, we live in a permanently abnormal world. “There is no alternative to confronting, deterring and, if necessary, disarming states that brandish and use weapons of mass destruction. And there is no one to do that but the United States,” with or without allies. Of course, there is no question of deterring or disarming the United States. The very idea is outlandish: America is uniquely benign and that “rarest of geopolitical phenomena,” a “reluctant hegemon” almost quixotic in its “hopeless idealism.” Only twisted leftists would deny that freedom is “the centerpiece” of American foreign policy.

more here.

James Hamilton-Paterson at Literary Review:

Since 1770, when Captain Cook blundered into it in Endeavour and came to grief, Australia's Great Barrier Reef has gone from a navigator's nightmare through being a World Heritage treasure to its present status of moribund paradise. On the way it had to overcome its early 19th-century reputation as the lair of savage Aboriginals. Thanks to Cook's murder in Hawaii and lurid stories of cannibalism by survivors of shipwrecks on the Reef, the newspaper-reading public was cheerfully predisposed to view the 1,400-mile length of the Reef and the Torres Strait as a death zone to sailors, as fatally treacherous to ships as the spear-throwing locals were to their crews.

What did most to change the Great Barrier Reef's image was the interest scientists began taking in corals. The English naturalist Joseph Beete Jukes was the first to resist the popular stereotyping of the Reef and its inhabitants. He and his friend 'Griffin' Melville supplied lyrical descriptions of corals that greatly helped R M Ballantyne in writing his boy's Robinsonade, The Coral Island (1858), especially since Ballantyne had never been nearer the South Pacific than Canada. The science remained contentious. When Charles Darwin published The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, he was the first to propose that corals could only thrive in water shallow enough for daylight to reach them and that the great limestone reefs that supported them, often to immense depths, were simply layer upon layer of former corals that had died as the Earth's crust beneath them had sunk over millennia.

more here.

From More Intelligent Life:

When Tokyo won the bid for the 2020 Olympics, it was more good news for Zaha Hadid, who is designing the new national stadium. Six years ago, we published a profile by Jonathan Meades saying, “The world is waking up to her”

ZAHA HADID'S PRACTICE occupies a former school in Clerkenwell, an area of London that still bears the scent of Dickens. It's an 1870s building designed by the London School Board architect E.R. Robson, who, typically of his profession, was unquestionably formulaic. Still, his was a sound enough formula. Today the high, plain, light rooms are crammed to bursting with Hadid's 200 or so employees. Though they are of every conceivable race, they are linked by their youth, their sombre clothes, their intense concentration. They gaze at their screens, astonishingly silently. There is little sound other than the click of keyboards and a low murmur from earphones. They don't talk to each other. It is as though they are engaged in a particularly exigent exam. It feels more like a school than a former school. And it feels more like a factory than a school. If there is such a thing as a physical manifestation of the dubious concept called the knowledge economy, this is it. This is a site of digital industry.

“What is exciting,” says Zaha, “is the link between computing and fabrication. The computer doesn't do the work. There is a similar thing to doing it by hand…”

“The computer is a tool,” I agree.

“No. No, it's not…”

What then? The workers on the factory floor–my way of putting it, not hers–are, she says “connected by digital knowledge…They have very different interests from 20 years ago.” Sure. But this does not make immediate sense. It is a matter to return to, that will become clear(ish) in time.

TEN MINUTES' WALK from the practice is Hadid's apartment—austerely elegant, a sort of gallery of her painting and spectacularly lissom furniture. It's a monument to Zaha the public architect rather than Zaha the private woman. It occupies a chunk of an otherwise forgettable block. Her route from home to work might almost have been confected as an illustration of the abruptness of urban mutation. Here is ur-London: stock bricks and red terracotta, pompous warehouses, run-down factories, Victorian philanthropists' prison-like tenements, grim toytown cottages, high mute walls, a labyrinth of alleys, off-the-peg late-Georgian terraces, neglected pockets of mid-20th-century Utopianism, apologetic infills, ambiguous plots of wasteground. It is neither rough nor pretty, but it has sinewy character. It may be ordinary, but it is undeniably diverse. The daily stroll through this canyon of variety is surely attractive to an artist whose aesthetic is doggedly catholic, each of whose buildings seems unsatisfied with being just one building.

More here.

Kerry Sheridan in PhysOrg:

The vicious fight for survival and power among disparate kingdoms and clans may have led some ancient people to evolve facial traits more quickly than others, a study said Thursday. New research on 17 skulls from a collection of 430,000-year-old remains found at the base of an underground shaft in Spain suggests that big jaws were the first prominent feature of these pre-Neandertals. Their large mandibles could gnash meat, open wide and be used like a tool or a third hand, helping them adapt to their eating needs in a harsh, cold environment. The fact that their skulls were compact, suggesting a small brain, indicates that the development of the larger brain seen in Neandertals came later in the evolutionary process, according to the study in the US journal Science. The group is the largest known discovery of early human remains, including 28 individuals, of whom nearly 7,000 bone fragments have been excavated since the Sima de los Huesos site in the Atapuerca Mountains was uncovered in 1984. They were young adults when they died, raising a host of questions that have yet to be answered by science: How did they die? How did they get to their resting place at the base of the shaft? Scientists say they may have been pitched—ceremoniously or not—into a pit by their conquerors.

Lead researcher Juan-Luis Arsuaga from the Complutense University of Madrid described their story in terms of “Game of Thrones,” a popular fantasy television series based on novels by George R.R. Martin. We think that a 'Game of Thrones' scenario probably describes hominin evolution in Eurasia and Africa in the Middle Pleistocene period,” he told reporters. “As in the famous serial, there was never a unified and uniform European Middle Pleistocene kingdom but a number of 'houses,' living in different regions and often competing for land,” he added. Some groupings were closely related, including members of the same extended family, but others were not.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Next month it will be a full ten years since that evening in Manhattan in 2004 when, with my friend Marko Ahtisaari's encouragement, I signed up for a Typepad account, thought of the name 3 Quarks Daily, designed a temporary logo (above), and put up my first posts.

Me and Robin (at his wedding)

We've come a long way since that day: we have done almost 35,000 posts, published several thousand original essays, and we have received around 30 million page views. In these ten years, we have had exactly and only one day when we did not post anything (long story), otherwise we have taken no holiday. Ever. Sometimes 3QD seems like an overwhelming and relentless duty to me from which there is never any escape, not even for just a week out of the year, but for the most part I enjoy it. Well, obviously. Why else would I do it?

I would like to thank all of the many, many people who have joined me and contributed in some way or other to the evolution and progress of the website by name but there are just too many. You know who you are and you also know that I am grateful. I will take this opportunity to personally thank Morgan Meis, Robin Varghese, Azra Raza, Sughra Raza, Jim Culleny, and Zujaja Tauqeer, for all that they have done and continue to do to make this site one worth coming to for so many intelligent and highly educated readers, and to say this to them: guys and gals, I am in your debt!

Now, to the important thing: I will be in New York City on July 3rd and would like to invite all of you to join me here. They have a beautiful space, Robin assures me, and some fine drinks and food are available for purchase. Most of the editors of 3QD will be there as well as quite a few of our writers (well, those who happen to live in NYC). So come and hang out with us, won't you?

PLACE: Die Kölner Bierhalle

TIME: 6 pm to 10 pm

DATE: Thursday, July 3, 2014

RSVP: In the comments section of this post.

I am looking forward to meeting you, so see you there!

Yours,

Abbas

John Kaag in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Do you want to cut it?”

No. I wanted to run and hide. To find some quiet corner of the hospital that had nothing to do with pregnancy, labor, or children. Like the psychiatric ward. It didn’t even look like something that was meant to be cut—it looked like something between a vital artery and the nylon rope you buy at the hardware store. So cutting it was the last thing I wanted to do.

Instead, I wanted to point out to our lovely midwife that my father hadn’t even been in the delivery room when I was born. (In that moment, for the first time ever, I found myself not entirely blaming him.) I also wanted to tell her that I’d only very recently stopped calling her “the Wiccan Priestess,” but that her question had once again convinced me that she clearly was one. Didn’t she know that I was a philosopher, not a surgeon, and therefore not schooled in this sort of occult ritual? More than anything, I wanted to state the obvious: that one end of that cord was attached to the only woman I’d ever really loved, and the other end was affixed to a total stranger. And that once I cut it, that little stranger would become its own person, and would be irreparably ours to take care of.

So, no. I definitely did not want to cut it.

More here.

Sami Ramadani in The Guardian:

Tony Blair has been widely derided for his attempted justification of the 2003 Iraq invasion, and his claim last weekend that he's blameless over the current turmoil. Unfortunately, though, many of his critics have also bought into a central plank of his argument: that Iraqi society is no more than a motley collection of religions and ethnicities which have been waiting for decades, if not centuries, to slaughter each other and plunge the place into a bloodbath.

The main difference between the two sides seems to be that Blair believes western intervention is the answer; some of his critics say Iraq needed a dictator like Saddam to hold the nation together. Neither side, though, has yet produced historical evidence of significant communal fighting between Iraq's religions, sects, ethnicities or nationalities. Prior to the 2003 US-led occupation, the only incident was the 1941 violent looting of Jewish neighbourhoods – which is still shrouded in mystery as to who planned it. Documents relating to that criminal incident are still kept secret at the Public Records Office by orders of successive British governments. The bombing of synagogues in Baghdad in 1950-51 turned out to be the work of Zionists to frighten Iraq's Jews – one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world – into emigrating to Israel following their refusal to do so.

Until the 1970s nearly all Iraq's political organisations were secular, attracting people from all religions and none. The dividing lines were sharply political, mostly based on social class and political orientation. The growth of religious parties followed Saddam's ruthless elimination of all political entities other than the Ba'ath party. Places of worship became centres of political agitation and organisation.

Despite popular myths, the majority of Ba'ath party founders were Shia.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

In the early 1800s, a naturalist named Alexander Wilson was traveling in Kentucky when the sky suddenly became dark. Wilson believed, he later wrote, that it was “a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything round in destruction.”

When Wilson got his wits back, he realized the sun had been blotted out by passenger pigeons.

The journals of many early explorers contain similar passages. The passenger pigeon would sweep across the eastern United States in vast flocks, feeding on chestnuts and acorns as they traveled. As Wilson gazed at his passenger pigeon flock, he tried to figure out how many birds it contained. From one side to the other, it was a mile wide. It streamed overhead like a feathered river for more than four hours. Based on that information, Wilson guessed that it contained over 2.2 billion birds–”an almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.”

In 1914, the passenger pigeon became extinct, likely thanks to industrial-scale hunting. In his book Nature’s Ghosts, Mark Barrow notes that our eradication of such a populous species came as a tremendous shock–one that helped the world appreciate nature’s true fragility.

More here.

Ellen Lupton at Smithsonian Magazine:

From the moment Massimo Vignelli started his career in Italy in the mid-1950s, he forged a rigorous philosophy that transformed the international language of design for print, products, and environments. Over the decades, debates about design’s cultural function bubbled and boiled around him. Confronting the upheavals of Pop, post-modernism, deconstruction, and the digital age, Massimo didn’t change his methodology so much as polish it into an ever sharper, more refined instrument. His ability to stay modern in a post-modern world sealed his reputation as one of the great designers of our time. As his career advanced, Massimo’s work and ideas became more relevant, not less. He remains a towering and untarnished design hero, not only to his peers and to the generation who started their own careers in his offices in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but to designers just entering the field now, who view the elegant man in the modernist menswear with almost mystical reverence.

Massimo Vignelli’s career is inseparable from that of his equally gifted wife, Lella Vignelli. The couple married in 1957 and opened their first firm together in Milan in 1960. While both were trained as architects, Lella continued to focus on three-dimensional design, while Massimo focused on graphics. Together, they could move across disciplines with astonishing grace.

more here.

Brian Cummings at the Times Literary Supplement:

Sitting in a drab hotel room with an old journalist friend after the latest alarm about his liver, watching an old video of his playing days, George Best suddenly jumped up from his armchair. “Jesus Christ!”, he shouted at the screen. “I’d forgotten I was that fucking good!”

Best probably was not thinking about Pindar at the time, but this stifled eulogy on himself raises the question asked with most acuteness by Pindar, of why we praise athletes, and indeed, why we watch them. The epinikion was the Greek lyric genre of the victory ode: Ibycus (sixth century BCE), Simonides and Bacchylides all are known to have composed them, and in the case of Pindar (c.518–438 BCE) there are forty-four complete odes, composed for winners in all four of the panhellenic games, the Olympic, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmian. If modern sportswriting has tended to concentrate on direct reportage (what happened next?), or else interviews with participants (how did it feel?), Pindar only occasionally offers details of the events themselves.

Pindar understood that we do not respond to sport only at the literal level. He mixes prayers to the gods with address to the muses and haunting retelling of topical myths, which he relates to the sportsman in action (for they are all men), whether it is a sprinter or a charioteer or a wrestler.

more here.

Peter Brewitt in Orion Magazine:

PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO CONTROL traffic and speeding since the invention of the car—maybe since the domestication of the horse. And for good reason: research has shown that when America got a nationwide fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in 1974, driving fatality rates plummeted, and when it was lifted in 1987, deaths increased. The good news is, in more and more places, art is coming to the rescue. Over the past decade, communities across the nation have taken to beautifying their roads and intersections with hand-painted murals, slowing drivers as they go. Murals like these come at minimal cost—just buy some street-grade paint, get whatever permits your city requires, and figure out how to reroute traffic for a few hours. As people motor through the neighborhood, murals catch the eye, situate the mind, and lighten the right foot.

Many of these creations did not begin as traffic-control devices—the goal was often to engage the neighborhood with itself, to display its spirits and hopes for the future, and to embrace the spaces that bind people together. But art touches drivers as well as neighbors: when a motorist sees a sunburst on the roadway, it draws her mind to the surroundings, focusing her on where she is, not just where she’s heading. More and more communities, seeing the kaleidoscopic benefits of street painting, are making these expressions part of their physical and cultural infrastructure. Of course, many of them are in big cities—New York, Baltimore, Portland—but every place has cars, and communities in smaller towns from New Jersey to Mississippi are also getting together and coloring the asphalt. Some of the images you see here come courtesy of Paint the Pavement, a street-art program in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

More here.