Evgeny Morozov in The Boston Review:

In 2003 Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published an article on the once-sleepy subject of telecommunications policy. In it, he coined the term “net neutrality” to capture the idea that network operators—the Comcasts and Verizons of the world—should not be in the business of regulating the information traffic that passes through their networks. The term took hold, and the article launched Wu to cyber-rock-star status.

Net neutrality is a simple idea with powerful implications. A neutral net would, for example, prevent cable providers from slowing down their customers’ connections or, worse, banning them from running certain services. That is good for customers, who get equal treatment whether they are streaming movies on Netflix, chatting on Skype, or shopping on Amazon. And it is also good for Netflix, Skype, and other companies that have grown using an Internet infrastructure they do not own and have been able to innovate without worrying about shifting rules of the road.

With those credentials, net neutrality seems like a winning policy. But what about the network operators? They are not so happy with net neutrality, and it is easy to see why. If they respect net neutrality, they cannot impose special burdens on consumers who occupy lots of bandwidth by running data-intensive applications during periods of peak use. Nor can they ban Internet services that compete with their own offerings of cable TV or telephony, thus denying them a lucrative source of revenue. The result may be an underinvestment in infrastructure improvement, which is not good for Netflix and Skype, which depend on fast and ever-improving networks. Predictably, then, network operators prefer that the government not tell them how to run their networks and embrace industry self-regulation instead.

Despite this potential conflict between service and network providers, things have worked out pretty well so far. So even as battles over net neutrality have heated up over the past year—with important rulings from the Washington, D.C. Federal Court of Appeals and the FCC, and Verizon’s appeal of new FCC regulations—opponents often ask: why pass laws or regulations ensuring neutrality if we are doing all right without them?

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

He can be very funny. Sometimes intentionally so, other times not. He once said, “I cannot recognize either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. The Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots.” His sense of fashion is completely his own. He'll wear a pure white suit one day and then robes and animal skins the next. His military outfits sometimes seem like an outright parody of the military, as if he may, even, be trying out for the Village People. But one can never be sure how to take Colonel Muammar Qaddafi when it comes to clothing, or anything else.

The laughter sticks in the throat though when one thinks of the suffering. Qaddafi has been a dictator for a long time — 42 years, ever since he led a coup against King Idris in 1969. During that time, he was never shy about cracking down on any possible opposition. He was directly responsible for some of the more senseless acts of international terrorism in recent history (see the Lockerbie bombing of 1988). He has lorded over the corrupt economy of a country that sits on massive oil reserves but has done little to raise the general standard of living in Libya. His crimes are extensive and well documented. At the time of this writing, Qaddafi still holds power in Libya and seems resolved to drag his country into civil war and the massive violence of a “last stand.” It looks as if Qaddafi's final end will be pathetic and tragic at once.

And yet, there is a way that he may get the last laugh. I say this because of a book Qaddafi published in 1975. It is called The Green Book. When we are all dead and gone, when the literary and political documents we find important have long since been forgotten, I suspect that The Green Book will still be around, still studied by the future historians of present times.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

The world has watched in horror as Libya’s Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi uses his military to attack protesters opposed to his rule, killing hundreds or possibly thousands of unarmed civilians. Many of his own men have refused to fire on their own people, instead defecting to the rebels or flying their planes to nearby Malta, so Qaddafi has called in mercenaries from neighboring countries who are more willing to obey his orders.

World leaders were quick to condemn Qaddafi’s actions. On February 26, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose an arms embargo on Libya, urge member nations to freeze assets owned by Qaddafi and his family, and refer the regime’s violence to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution of those responsible.

This is the first time that the Security Council has unanimously referred a situation involving human rights violations to the International Criminal Court, and it is remarkable that countries that are not members of the Court – including the United States, Russia, and China – nevertheless supported the referral. The resolution can thus be seen as another incremental step towards the establishment of a global system of justice able to punish those who commit gross violations of human rights, regardless of their political or legal status in their own country.

Yet, in another way, the Security Council resolution was a disappointment. The situation in Libya became a test of how seriously the international community takes the idea of a responsibility to protect people from their rulers. The idea is an old one, but its modern form is rooted in the tragic failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The author is the owner of a dilapidated summer cottage on a small island in the Adriatic. This inheritance from a distant relative included the accompanying goods and chattels – the collected clutter of several generations. We did not dispose of this junk immediately, but inspected and assessed it, with a loving eye for detail: a fatal mistake. Inspection and assessment turned the “junk” into traces of life, relics bearing witness to an eventful family history that could no longer be “disposed of”. The piece of land and the structure that occupied it became a place of remembrance that resists demolition and hampers renovation. In a sense we inherited the hoarding syndrome of aunt S. (1918-1996), the last inhabitant of the house, albeit not to the same pathological degree. For S., not a single woodworm-infested piece of furniture could be disposed of, not a kitchen utensil replaced, not a document in the art nouveau bureau touched. But it was these documents that finally revealed the reason for her hoarding. Expropriation Decree No. 3723/45, dated 8.1.1946, lists familiar objects: furniture (“cloth armchairs, 3 pieces at 150.-“), crockery (“bowl, porcelain, with lid, 1 piece, 90.-“), clothes, (“women’s hats, with boxes, 12 pieces at 20.-“, the toys (“Children’s iron, 1 piece, 10.-“), utensils (“bread basket, basketweave, 1 piece, 10.-“), books (“Skiing, with a postscript by the Ustasha Youth”). Of the 335 items listed, only six are included in the final Court Decree No. 3723/45-4 dated 26.1.1946: 1) three men’s nightshirts, 2) light summer coat, 3) short underpants, 4) razor strop, 5) walking stick, 6) old shoes (men’s).

more from Svjetlan Lacko Vidulic at Eurozine here.

Those were dangerous times. It was the early 1980s. The Libyan dictatorship was targeting dissidents abroad. We had recently read in the newspaper about the death of a renowned Libyan economist. He was stepping off a train at Rome’s Stazione Termini when a stranger pressed a pistol to his chest and pulled the trigger. A photograph of his dark figure, partly covered in a white sheet, was printed beside the article. His shoes were polished. That detail troubled me. Another time there was a report of a Libyan student shot in a café in Athens. I don’t recall seeing a photograph, but I tried to imagine how it might have happened. I pictured the student sitting on the terrace of the café, a scooter clumsily coming to a stop by the pavement and the man sitting behind the driver pointing a gun at the student and firing. Then a Libyan BBC World Service radio newsreader was killed in London. And, in April 1984, there was the now infamous demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy in St James’s Square. One of the embassy staff pushed open a sash window on the first floor, held out a Kalashnikov and sprayed the crowd. Yvonne Fletcher, a policewoman, died and 11 Libyan demonstrators, mostly students, were wounded. These events were in the background, but I didn’t consciously link them then to my brother’s abrupt return from school, his changed face, his silence and altered manner. All I cared about was that he was back. His friends, those boys who I thought were the coolest people in the world, started visiting. He gradually regained his spirits.

more from Hisham Matar at the FT here.

From Scientific American:

As the 2005 school year got underway, a new requirement in a Pennsylvania public school district mandated that all 9th-grade biology students listen to a statement questioning the validity of evolutionary theory and promoting intelligent design. Eleven parents of students in the Dover Area School District sued the local school board in protest. Four months later a Republican judge in a Pennsylvania federal court ruled in favor of the parents, issuing an eloquent defense of evolutionary theory—and a scathing rebuke to those who support intelligent design (ID) as a scientific alternative. Judge John E. Jones III wrote in the 139-page decision for Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, named for one of the parents who brought the suit, that ID was not only unscientific but was also a front used by those on the school board with a religiously motivated, pro-creationist agenda. “ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny, which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class,” Jones wrote. “This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the ID movement is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.”

Jennifer Miller was one of the Dover biology teachers who refused to read the contentious ID statement in her class and testified in support of the parents during the 2005 hearings. Miller still works in the area's school district, teaching honors biology to ninth graders and anatomy and physiology to 10th through 12th graders at Dover Area Senior High School. For the past four years she has also chaired the school's science department. Scientific American spoke with Miller about the changes she has seen since the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision was handed down five years ago.

How has teaching evolution in your classroom changed in the five years since Kitzmiller v. Dover?
Since Kitzmiller v. Dover I've definitely changed how I teach. The biggest thing is probably that evolution used to be the last thing we got to in the semester. Sometimes we maybe had one week or two weeks to cover it. Now I put evolution first, and I refer back to it to show how important it is to all topics of biology. The other thing that I really think has changed is how I cover evolution. I'm no longer afraid to cover it in depth and to have in-depth conversations about evolution. I make sure I hit [the concept of] what is science and what is not, and how a scientific theory is very different from a “theory” that we use in everyday conversation.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition. For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind. “I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials — awards, degrees, patents and theorems in their name.

More here.

Mark Changizi in Seed Magazine:

If there is something next, some imminently arriving transformative development for human capabilities, then the key will not be improved genes or cortical plug-ins. But what other way forward could humans possibly have? With genetic and cyborg enhancement off the table for many years, it would seem we are presently stuck as-is, sans upgrades.

There is, however, another avenue for human evolution, one mostly unappreciated in both science and fiction. It is this unheralded mechanism that will usher in the next stage of human, giving future people exquisite powers we do not currently possess, powers worthy of natural selection itself. And, importantly, it doesn’t require us to transform into cyborgs or bio-engineered lab rats. It merely relies on our natural bodies and brains functioning as they have for millions of years.

This mystery mechanism of human transformation is neuronal recycling, coined by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, wherein the brain’s innate capabilities are harnessed for altogether novel functions.

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. In this view, natural selection is so riddled by accidents and saddled with developmental constraints that the resultant biological hardware and software should be described as a “just good enough” solution rather than as a “fine-tuned machine.”

More here.

Walter Kirn in his new blog Walter Kirn's Permanent Morning:

1. As Cautionary Tale.

Acutely problematic. Since Sheen's biography bears little relationship to the experiences of most civilians, it's hard to know where exactly he went wrong or how, under the circumstances (father a hyper-observant Roman Catholic political activist thinking-person's movie star; brother a frozen-in-pop-culture-time non-thinking person's teen-dream idol; face a peculiar demonic composite of both of them that's somehow been robbed of its individuality; ex-wife a robotic sex kitten projection deemed real only for legal and gossip purposes; TV show a fiendishly exploitative mechanism which invites the viewer to superimpose what he knows to be Sheen's degraded consciousness on a generic asshole background of a character) he might have avoided going wrong.

Yes, in theory, cocaine abuse is something human beings should avoid and probably ought to condemn when it's observed, but Charlie Sheen does not exist in theory. Indeed, no theory can account for Charlie Sheen. Indeed, the possibility of his existence proves that theory has no useful part in any account of lived human reality.

More here.

Charles J. Shields, whose biography of Kurt Vonnegut is due out from Henry Holt & Co. in 2011, in his blog Writing Kurt Vonnegut:

These are the notes that I typed back in my hotel room a few hours after I met Kurt for the first time on December 13, 2006.

Vonnegut lives in an off-white brick home on E. 48th Street; a long flight of stairs in front. He greeted me at the door in light grey denim trousers, walking shoes, and a Xavier College sweatshirt. His face was drawn, his skin was gray, and his large hazel eyes had a rheumy stare. His hair— brushed and blown until it stood out— was the color of nicotine and cigarette paper.

I presented him with a bouquet of flowers for his wife, the photojournalist Jill Krementz. Kurt instructed their housekeeper, Maria to “put them in water and say who they’re from.” He was eager to show me where he worked, which was on the third floor, at the top of two staircases that curled up the right-hand wall. I had the feeling we were like two boys who had just met and he was making friends in the time-honored way of showing me his room.

His study, L-shaped, about 12’ x 15’ looks like where a man could spend a good deal of time alone. There’s a double bed in there; and his framed lithographs appear on the walls. A stack of them, about 50, leaned against the wall beside the fireplace. The sinuous figures were done in heavy black line and primary colors.

“Who’s your influence?” I asked. They reminded me of abstracts from the 1950s.

“Paul Klee,” he said, pleased that I wanted to know.

More here.

Michelangelo Pistoletto. Trans Border Trans Limit Trans Gression, 2008.

From the series Mirror Paintings.

Silk screen prints on polished steel.

More here, here, and here.

by Haider Shahbaz

Dear M,

Today, Lahore is drenched. A shy sun has disappeared. The night hides in darkness muddy water invading the streets. It jumps from under car’s tyres on to unsuspecting pedestrians. It is mid-July; I am back from boarding school to watch a dirty, white, rather ungraceful minaret. There are strange things that the first sight, after three years, of a fog-covered minaret – the same minaret you watched everyday for fifteen long years – can do to a man, a boy. You are here to watch it with me, wearing that disgusting plaid you love, plastic glasses askew on your small nose, thin-lipped smile and a long neck. The nights of full moon have passed. We have just come back from our fifteenth trip to a bakery in fifteen days. I and you are in a search for the perfect dessert.

Yes, for the perfect dessert. Amongst low, Lahori rooftops, parallel Islamabad streets, ruined Greek cities, bright bakeries, semi-naked sword wielding emperors, and idlers, monochrome family pictures of uncles in stiff military suites, dilapidating Mughal art, grand old castles and wrinkled storytellers.

But will we ever find the perfect dessert? The perfect ending? The perfect good-bye? Maybe we shouldn’t, so we keep coming back to find it again.

To many more waves.

Much love,

************************************************************************

Well, can I kiss you, then?

Thoroughly unromantic. She thought.

But we’re friends. And I’m seeing someone.

Thoroughly unromantic. He thought.

But it’s just a kiss.

Pause.

Okay.

Forty minutes.

It’s never just a kiss.

************************************************************************

Read more »

UPDATE 3/21/11: The winners have been announced.

UPDATE 3/13/11: List of finalists.

UPDATE 3/12/11: List of semifinalists.

UPDATE 3/4/11: See full list of nominees: Voting round is now open.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Laila Lalami has agreed to be the final judge for our second annual prize for the best writing in a blog or e-zine in the category of Arts & Literature. (Details of last year's A&L prize, judged by Robert Pinsky, can be found here.) Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She attended Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College in London, and the University of Southern California, where she earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2006 and for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. She is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and the novel Secret Son. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. Dr. Lalami has also been responding to the recent upheavals in Arab countries, and you may see some of that work here. Her well-known blog is here, and you may also follow her on Twitter here.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm New York City Time (EST) on March 2, 2011. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Dr. Lalami.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

Details (please read carefully before nominating):

The winners of this Arts & Literature Prize will be announced on March 21, 2011. Here's the schedule:

February 23, 2011:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry or e-zine piece by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. (Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.)
• Blog posts or e-zine articles longer than 4,000 words are not eligible.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• We will accept poems and fiction, as well as book or art reviews, criticism, and other types of writing about arts or literature.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after February 22, 2010.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog or e-zine (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

March 2, 2011

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

March 11, 2011

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

March 21, 2011

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

I've noticed that in response to all the uprisings in the Arab world analysts, pundits and writers reaching for their copies of Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. Here's Will Self in The New Statesman:

It's been a fantastic three months for those of us gripped by the dynamics of crowds. First, we had student demonstrations here in Britain spiralling out of control; then, we saw Tunisians link arms to push out their corrupt regime; finally, millions took to the streets of Egyptian cities, pitting their sheer weight of numbers against the sclerotic – but still vicious – government of Hosni Mubarak.

Perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the crowd was the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, whose 1960 magnum opus, Crowds and Power, aimed to do for modern mass movements what Frazer's Golden Bough did for “primitive” ritual. To Canetti, both socialism and capitalism were political systems defined by “the modern frenzy of increase”, in which production led to ever bigger crowds of goods and consumers.

This sense of industrialised society as a crowd, at root, directs Canetti to his definition of power as the coincidence of the desires of the ruler(s) and the ruled.

By this view, it's easy to understand the presence of crowds of people on the streets as symptomatic of a disjunction between the two: only when the crowd has been reabsorbed into the social fabric has synchronous equilibrium been achieved. In Canetti's jargon, the crowd in Tahrir Square was “stagnating”, whereas the crowds of the quiescent Cairene unemployed before the revolt could be characterised as “rhythmic”.

Dubstep revolutions

Canetti showed a nice understanding of how masses of people make their own political weather when he caustically observed that “fire unites a theatre more than a play can” – but his vision was underscored by the apocalyptic mood music of mutually assured destruction. “Rulers tremble today,” he wrote, not “because they are rulers but as the equals of everyone else . . . Either everyone will survive or no one.”

David Papineau in The Philosopher's Magazine:

When philosophers study knowledge, consciousness, free will, moral value, and so on, their first concern is with these things themselves, rather than with what people think about them. So why exactly is it so important to philosophy to discover experimentally that people differ in their views on these matters? We wouldn’t expect physicists to throw up their hands in excitement just because somebody shows that different cultures have different views about the origin of the universe.

Experimental philosophers are surprisingly vague on this issue. If pressed, they tend to mutter something about discrediting the role played by “intuitions” in traditional philosophy, before rushing off to design their next questionnaire. But this is far too quick. Exactly what role intuitions play in philosophy is a matter of debate, and the details of this debate matter to the significance of experimental philosophy.

Experimental philosophy does itself a disservice by not stopping to explain what it is good for. My own view is that it has an important if limited contribution to make to orthodox philosophical debates, in ways I’ll explain later. But its advocates often claim much more, suggesting that their new method somehow discredits all traditional philosophy. Out with the old, in with the new! In the absence of any reasoned support for this radical manifesto, it is all too easy for critics to dismiss the movement as a fad without foundations.

Isn’t it enough that experimental philosophy is interesting in its own right? Aren’t we all fascinated by the quirks in human thinking that it uncovers? Maybe so, but this doesn’t explain why these findings matter to philosophy. The human mind is very quirky in its attitudes to snakes, spiders, and sex, in ways which are well worth studying, but nobody thinks that these quirks are the province of experimental philosophy.

The “official X-phi” website proclaims that “experimental philosophy involves the collection of empirical data to shed light on philosophical issues.” But how, to repeat the question I started with, do empirical data about everyday thinking help us with real philosophical issues? The comparison with physics is telling once more. Psychologists have done much to investigate everyday thinking about physical topics – “folk physics” as it is sometimes called – and their findings are certainly interesting. Who would have believed that everyday thought is so committed to outmoded Aristotelian laws of motion? But knowing about folk physics doesn’t help with real physics. So why should knowing about folk philosophy help with real philosophy?

Ken Siverstein in Foreign Policy:

The owner of the estate at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Road, which sits high above Malibu, California, calls himself a prince, and he certainly lives like one. A long, tree-lined driveway runs from the estate's main gate past a motor court with fountains and down to a 15,000-square-foot mansion with eight bathrooms and an equal number of fireplaces. The grounds overlook the Pacific Ocean, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, four-hole golf course, and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, and Kelsey Grammer for neighbors.

With his short, stocky build, slicked-back hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, the prince hardly presents an image of royal elegance. But his wardrobe was picked from the racks of Versace, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana, and he spared no expense on himself, from the $30 million in cash he paid for the estate to what Senate investigators later reported were vast sums for household furnishings: $59,850 for rugs, $58,000 for a home theater, even $1,734.17 for a pair of wine glasses. When he arrived back home — usually in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or one of his other several dozen cars — his employees were instructed to stand in a receiving line to greet the prince. And then they lined up to do the same when he left.

The prince, though, was a phony, a descendant of rulers but not of royals. His full name is Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue — Teodorin to friends — and he is the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a country about the size of Maryland on the western coast of Africa.

More here.

From The New Republic:

When artists of earlier eras become subjects of renewed interest, you can be sure that big changes are in the air. All too often relegated to specialized studies in the history of taste, such shifts in an artist’s fortunes are among our most reliable guides to current attitudes and values, a look into the dark glass of the past that can also function as a mirror in which we see reflected some aspect of ourselves. There is certainly as much to be learned about the present as about the past from two small and beautifully focused museum shows in recent months, one at the National Gallery in Washington devoted to the sixteenth-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the other at the Neue Galerie in New York devoted to the eighteenth-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

While the revival of interest in both these artists began a century ago, the impact that Arcimboldo and Messerschmidt are now having, among artists and art historians, is on a scale unknown a generation earlier. Both Arcimboldo and Messerschmidt are in many respects confounding personalities, connoisseurs of strangeness and disquietude, administrators of shocks and surprises who were in search of a form that almost by definition violated the norm. Are they just what we need in our seen-it-all-done-it-all era? Or are they merely the latest sideshow at the funhouse that the art world has become?

More here.