At Trevor Paglen’s website:

A number of military bases and installations exist in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote, in fact, that there is nowhere on Earth where a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to produce images of these remote and hidden landscapes, therefore, some unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques are required.

Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.

Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. In some ways, however, it is easier to photograph the depths of the solar system than it is to photograph the recesses of the military industrial complex. Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away), for example, there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series.

More here.

WALTER KIRN in The New York Times:

Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found that plaque accumulation in the arteries is greater in women who use birth-control pills than in those who never have. Plaque is the hardened fat and cholesterol that can clog arteries and lead to heart disease and stroke. Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium studied more than 1,000 women who had taken oral contraceptives for a period of time and then stopped. They found a 20-30% increase in the amount of plaque for every decade the woman was on the pill. The results were presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Florida, but have not yet been published.

Meanwhile, another study published this week in The Lancet confirms previous findings that the risk of cervical cancer is higher in women who are on the pill. That risk drops back down to normal levels within ten years of quitting the pill, they found.

More here.

Patrick West in Spiked:

But why marry a Beatle in the first place? The Beatles may have made some of the best pop music of the twentieth century, but they were largely horrible people who sent out a horrible message. OK, Ringo was just a nice simpleton who really can’t be blamed for much, and I did enjoy Thomas the Tank Engine. And, yes, yes, George Harrison was actually a decent cove, who wrote one of the great conservative anthems of our time, ‘Taxman’, and funded two of my favourite films: Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Withnail & I. But John Lennon was a truly horrible character: a drug-taking, allegedly wife-beating, air-headed utopian whose legacy is that ultimate Stalinist anthem: ‘Imagine.’

And then there’s Paul McCartney, the idiot, pouting sentimentalist who created the band Wings, sang about frogs and then did a clichéd bit of multi-racial rubbish with Stevie Wonder about ebony and ivory – which was not at all about black and white people living in harmony, but about two incredibly rich popstars playing the piano together.

More here.

Ray Fisman in Slate:

Another clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.

More here.

Zein Basravi and Brigid Delaney at CNN:

Pakistan has dominated headlines this week for violent demonstrations, declarations of a state of emergency, troops on the street and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto under house arrest.

Even before the violence that greeted Bhutto’s return to her homeland, Pakistan had an image problem: Terror training camps, violence against women, religious division and insurgency flare-ups are just some of the issues the country faced.

Leaders must have looked at India — its neighbor to the south — growing in prosperity and attracting investment and wondered if they could emulate its success.

This week, Pakistan’s leaders addressed the problem of “brand Pakistan” and asked whether the country needed an extreme makeover.

In a speech repeatedly broadcast on Pakistan state television in recent days, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz called on the people to help make the country a prosperous place by building the “brand of Pakistan.”

More here.

My sister Sughra and I have various jokes based on IKEA product names. David Byrne recently made his first trip to IKEA (with his sister). This is from his Journal:

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

More here.

Parts three, four and five can be found here.

In 1992, a year before starting her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker, then 22—and only five years from winning a MacArthur “genius” award—had an epiphany while looking at a nineteenth-century silhouette of a young black girl in profile. She later recalled that it “kind of saved me.”

Two years later, I had an epiphany in an MFA student’s studio in the same school, having just seen something—either a cutout silhouette or a drawing in what looked like chocolate—of a plantation worker. “What is that?” I asked. The young woman said, “It’s by my classmate Kara Walker.” I felt like a thunderbolt had hit the back of my head. This was an image of mad America. I was sickened, thrilled, and terrified.

There’s a good chance you’ll have some of those feelings, as well as a guttural jolt of what James Joyce called the nightmare of history, in Kara Walker’s bitterly beautiful, psychically naked, carnal charnel house of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The elevator doors open onto part of what saved Walker’s life—a 50-foot-long dream-doom-death machine, a tableau filled with a series of black-and-white cutout silhouettes. This is the first work Walker ever showed in New York. Seeing it here allows you to reexperience some of the toxic shock Walker released into the aesthetic air back then.

more from New York Magazine here.

DK It seems from your work that there is a notion of the sanctity of art. The theater world that forms the backdrop to the love story in A Book of Memories functions as a sort of sanctuary from reality.

PN I don’t think of art so much in terms of sanctity—but there is a very strong moral command that I think about executing when I write, and perhaps this is what comes across in the work. This moral command is related to the theme that I choose as well as the methodology. My friend reproached me—he said, “To you, writing is more important than anything else,” which I had never thought of, because it was self-evident. If it were my little family that counted most, I would have chosen another profession. I would have gone into the butcher profession instead. To be a writer is really not the most radical thing I could do because I do have some people around me. If were a dancer, everything would be excluded, because a dancer has nothing to do with anybody except his or her own little muscles. But in my next life that is what I am planning to do. To be a dancer.

more from Bomb here.

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

more from the LRB here.

How much trouble are we really in? Charles Zentay in Safe Haven:

Ben Bernanke: Hello, how may I help you?

Robert Rubin: Dr. Chairman, it’s your old friend Bob over at Citi.

Bernanke: Oh Bob, what a pleasure. It’s nice to hear from you again. What can I do for you?

Rubin: Well Ben, we’ve got some problems over here. Now I trust you will be discrete on this. We can’t let this get out in the market. I think we’re insolvent.

Bernanke: What?

Rubin: See we have about $65 billion in capital, but we have $55 billion in Super Senior CDOs, and no one will buy them from us.

Bernanke: No one?

Rubin: We can’t sell them for $1. I’m now being told that if no one wants to buy pieces of paper from you, it turns out they are worthless. Believe me. I’m as shocked as you are.

Bernanke: But don’t you have a lot of cash flow? That’s what I’ve been hearing on CNBC.

Rubin: Well, in addition, we have $80 billion in SIV exposure, an additional $80 billion in conduit exposure, and a lot, lot more in derivative exposure that might not be worth what we said it was when we paid out our bonuses over the last couple years. I talked to some ex-traders, but they aren’t inclined to give back the bonuses. You add it all up, and we don’t have enough money to meet our liabilities.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

From Wired:

Where was this mesmerizing book when we were kids? We would have been obsessed with artist and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman’s collection of ultra-hi-res photographs of our fellow animals. Flawlessly lit and captured in hyperfrozen moments against a pure white backdrop, even the lowly goldfish is like you’ve never seen it before. The minimalist aesthetic makes for an immediate, emotional connection with the creatures. Confronted with such striking examples of evolved physiologies and behavior, we can’t help but ponder our own origins and place in the world. These images prove we are not so different from the mirthful warthog, the mischievous gray squirrel, or the Dr. Seussian slow loris.

More here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen have enchanted children the world over for more than two centuries with their verbal sorcery and expressive intensity. Now their iconic power has drawn the attention of a Harvard professor, who hopes to broaden our understanding of how those eye-widening fairy tales expand the imaginations of children.

The stories deserve serious intellectual investigation, says Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Tatar is taking a critical look at Andersen to show how these stories have become part of our folklore, playing a formative role in the shaping of childhood identities.

“We need to engage our critical faculties in order to understand what makes these stories so emotionally addictive. Why have these Danish cultural stories taken hold in the United States to become instruments for navigating childhood?” Tatar asks. “How do the stories enable the reader to get lost in the book, to drink the heady elixir of fantasy? And how do they arouse the intellectual curiosity of children?” According to Tatar, a strong moral message is not the key to Andersen’s appeal. Rather, she says, Andersen’s descriptive techniques create moments with “ignition power” that kindle the imagination.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

In a new book, “Inside the Mind of BTK,” the eminent F.B.I. criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He was the protégé of the pioneering F.B.I. profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972, and who was a protégé of Brussel—which, in the close-knit fraternity of profilers, is like being analyzed by the analyst who was analyzed by Freud. To Douglas, Brussel was the father of criminal profiling, and, in both style and logic, “Inside the Mind of BTK” pays homage to “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist” at every turn.

“BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January, 1974, when he killed thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, Julie, their son, Joey, and their eleven-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman. In March, 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. The city of Wichita was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. In 1984, in desperation, two police detectives from Wichita paid a visit to Quantico.

More here.

Michelle Tsai in Slate:

An 18-year-old in Finland shot and killed eight people at his school on Wednesday. The killer, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, then committed suicide by turning his .22-caliber gun on himself. Although gun violence is very rare in Finland, the country has the highest rate of firearm ownership in Europe and the third highest in the world, behind only the United States and Yemen. Why do so many Finns own firearms?

They’re hunters. The Finns have hunted and fished for food for thousands of years, with agriculture only catching up as a major food source in the 20^th century. Today, hunting (PDF) remains a popular weekend, or even after-work, activity. Finland is one of the largest European countries, and there are ample grounds for hunters. (Forests cover more than half of the country.)

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

Via boing boing, a “surefire strategy” for winning a game of Monopoly by Tim Darling:

* Always buy Railroads; never buy Utilities (at full price)*

* For every other property type, only buy them to complete a monopoly or to prevent opponents from completing one. Often this may mean buying as many properties as you can early in the game, but watch your cash reserves.

* At the beginning of the game, focus on acquiring a complete C-G (Color Group) in Sides 1+2, even if it means trading away properties on Sides 2+3. After acquiring one of these C-Gs, build 3 houses as quickly as possible: no more houses, no less!

* Once your first C-G starts to generate some cash, focus on completing a C-G and building 3 houses in Sides 3+4.

* Note: 3 houses is the “sweet spot” in the game as shown in Table 1 below. That’s where you’re making the best use of your money.*

* Single properties are the least good investment if you don’t build on them.

* The only exception to the above rules are when you need to acquire stray properties to prevent your opponents from completing their C-Gs to accomplish the above strategy.

The blog over at Lewis Lapham’s new journal, Lapham’s Quarterly (soon to release its first issue), is substantively and formally very cool, and jointly work to preserve, what for lack of a better phrase we’ll call, historic wisdom. Read this brief article on the new plans for an MGM casino in Atlantic City and click on the picture. [H/t: Kira and Timothy]

“ART cannot do the conceptual work we need if we are to understand ourselves,” philosopher Raimond Gaita said in a recent interview, arguing that moral clarity was best achieved by philosophical thinking. Hearing him speak of the danger of lucidity losing out to the seductions of literature, I wanted to ask if he had read Alex Miller.

I suspect that, for Miller, the search for moral clarity is something like the terrible climb up the escarpment in the Expedition Ranges in his latest novel, Landscape of Farewell. Two old and damaged men, one a German professor and the other an Aboriginal leader, exhilarated by their quest but full of self-doubt and fearful of what they will find, clamber up ridge after ridge in the stone country seeking a sacred cave. And because fact and fiction are refracted through art and the play of imagination, we are not simply observing their struggle from the plain below.

“As a novelist, I have been not so much a liar as a re-arranger of facts,” Miller writes in an author’s note for a recent reissue of his 1989 novel The Tivington Nott. “The purely imaginary has never interested me as much as the actualities of our daily lives, and it is of these that I have written … not autobiography in the conventional sense, it is nevertheless deeply self-revealing of its author.”

more from The Australian here.