From Arts Admin:

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been collaborating together since 1990. It was during their formative study years that both artists, independent of knowing each other, began to introduce the living element of grass into their work. The time-based medium provided a compelling relationship between performance and sculpture in Heather’s early work and within Dan’s practice, grass became incorporated into a developing body of work to do with transience, alchemy and decay. In 1989 Heather and Dan met for the first time and a shared imagining of an interior ‘growing’ space reached fruition the following year. Their first collaborative project The Other Side activated an intense and productive artistic relationship that has subsequently led to exhibitions and commissions worldwide.

… Ackroyd & Harvey have created their most ambitious public artwork, FlyTower, on the National Theatre’s Lyttleton flytower. FlyTower sees the artists working directly on the exterior of one of London’s landmarks, transforming this iconic building into a living artwork of massive proportions.

More here.

Thanks to Brad Carlile for pointing out this work.

Lewis Smith at Times Online:

Bettina Menne, of the World Health Organisation, will outline today how climate change is causing some insect-borne diseases to spread to new areas as rising temperatures allow them to survive. The chikungunya virus reached Italy this summer, the first time in mainland Europe, through mosquitoes. Seventy-eight cases have been confirmed and 250 more are suspected. Up to now the virus has been present in East Africa, SouthEast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

Dr Menne will highlight the issue of malnutrition, which is expected to have its biggest impact in sub-Saharan Africa through crop failures and natural disasters, which are forecast to increase in number and intensity.

The predictions, at the meeting in London of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) come amid growing scientific concern about the way global warming will affect people’s lives. Scientists discussed a 980-page document containing the detailed findings of the IPCC Working Group II, which published a 15-page summary in April.

“The choice is now between a future with a damaged world and a future with a severely damaged world,” said Professor Martin Parry, of the Met Office and joint chairman of the working group. “It’s quite striking how big the challenge is. It’s not so long ago that we were all talking about how our children and grandchildren would be affected by climate change. Now, looking at this evidence, it’s in our own lifetimes.”

More here.

From Edge:

Last year, in My Einstein, a book of essays by twenty-four leading thinkers, I asked each of the contributors to share their thoughts on who is their Einstein. This led me to ask the same questions to the Edge symposium participants.

BRIAN GREENE: When it comes to Albert Einstein, his contributions are of such incredible magnitude that to get inside his head, and even for a moment to get a feel for what it would be like to see the world with such clarity and such insight, would be amazing. But if I was going to ask him one question, I would probably stick to one a little bit more down to earth, which is—he famously said that when it came to the general theory of relativity, in some sense he wasn’t waiting for the data to show whether it was right or wrong; the theory was so beautiful that it just had to be right. And when the data came in and confirmed it, he claimed he wasn’t even surprised, he in fact famously said that had the data turned out differently, he would have been sorry for the [dear lord?] because the theory was correct. That’s how much faith he had in theory.

So the question I have is, we, many of us, are working on Einstein’s legacy in a sense, which is trying to find the unified theory that he looked for such a long time and never found, and we’ve been pursuing an approach called super string theory for many years now. And it is a completely theoretical undertaking. It is completely mathematical. It has yet to make contact with experimental data. I would like to ask Einstein what he would think of this approach to unification. Does he see the same kind of beauty, the same kind of elegance, the same kind of powerful incisive ideas in this framework to give him the confidence that he had in the general theory of relativity?

More here.

From The New York Times:

The farewell ceremony for Chief Justice William Rehnquist at the United States Supreme Court in September 2005 offers the kind of monumental tracking shot authors adore. Neatly and conveniently arrayed that day on the marble steps leading into the building, standing, by tradition, in reverse order of seniority, the justices line up. As some of Rehnquist’s former law clerks (his soon-to-be successor, John Roberts, among them) carry his casket past his former colleagues, Jeffrey Toobin follows the procession, freezing on each of the justices, then introducing them in turn.

But to anyone who watches the court, or watches those who watch it, Toobin’s descriptions afford something else, arguably even more interesting: the chance to ponder which of those justices talked to him for this book, and which did not. And talk to him some of them clearly did. Without their off-the-record whispers, there would be no “inside” story of any “secret” world to tell in “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.”

Of course, the myth is that the justices sit sealed on their Olympian perches, forever mum. In truth, some talk when it suits them, to toot their own horns, unburden their souls, allay their loneliness or justify something they’ve done.

More here.

All grand churches, whether St. Peter’s in Rome or the Frauenkirche in Dresden, have a history; Cologne Cathedral has a career. Begun in the Middle Ages, the building stayed unfinished for centuries. Its facade remained without any real relationship to the chancel, and even after the bells were installed in 1437 the South Tower was still just a stump that – augmented by a crooked building crane – formed an eccentric urban landmark right through into the nineteenth century. Not until the Romantic rediscovery of Gothic and the Middle Ages did this torso become a magnet for patriotic yearnings and religious raptures. These – and Kaiser Wilhelm I too – we have to thank for the completion of the Gothic cathedral in its historic style, which was finally brought to an end in 1880. In this simulated perfection the cathedral became the symbol of German unification, and this is where the building’s career began. Cologne Cathedral – picture-postcard-perfect World Cultural Heritage – stands beside the Rhine, the German river, and as such it has come, especially for foreigners, to be the object that is identified most with German art and culture, comparable only with Schloss Neuschwanstein.

The sharp breaks and changing expectations of the cathedral’s history need to be mentioned, because it has now been enriched by a new and unexpected chapter that promises a career of a different kind: Gerhard Richter’s new window for the South Transept.

more from Sign and Sight here.

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying, and not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.”

In 1930, one crazy man wrote those words, and some thirty-five years later, he detonated that bomb—at least in literary terms.

In June of 1965, Henry Miller was the author of the top five bestselling books in America. There was a reason for it, of course. A tidal wave of publicity accompanied the 1963 Supreme Court decision lifting the decades-old ban on Miller’s more controversial works, and now they were available (legally) for the first time. On the downside, those five books (Quiet Days in Clichy, The World of Sex, and the three volumes of The Rosy Crucifixion)— even more than Tropic of Cancer, whose 1961 publication led to the Supreme Court case—solidified the then-73 year-old Miller’s reputation as The King of Smut. It was a grossly undeserved reputation.

more from Context here.

“A liberated woman,” said Karl Kraus, “is a fish that has fought its way ashore.” Even at the time, there were women, some of them among his cheer-squad of beautiful mistresses, who thought he was talking through his hat. Agree with him or not, however, you wouldn’t mind being able to say something that sharp. Kraus was famous for being able to do so whenever he wanted, but eventually, as with his hero Oscar Wilde, his fame as a wit was there instead of the full, complex, tormented and deeply contemplative man. As a writer and practitioner of the higher journalism, he is still up there with all the other great names of literary Vienna – Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth – but up there for what, precisely?

more from clivejames.com here.

For Justin:

[H/t: Roop]

From Scientific American:

With her tiny earphones and slim digital player, Jakarta office worker Mira Indriarti looks like any other young music lover — only she’s not listening to the latest tunes, but to a recording of the Koran. Digital Koran is increasingly popular in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, where such gadgets sell especially well during the fasting month of Ramadan when religious fervor is high and reading the scripture is an essential part of the observance.

Indriarti said she bought the gadget because she wanted to study the Koran to be a better Muslim. “I can listen to the recital or read the verses and the translation anywhere,” she said. “It’s uncomfortable if I read a Koran book on the bus and people around me may look at me in amazement.” The device, the size of an iPod digital player, carries the entire text of the Koran, in Arabic with an Indonesian translation, and its audio recitation. Fans say it provides a handy alternative to the bulky printed version of the holy book.

More here.

From Nature:

A trove of the oldest human skeletal bones outside Africa is reported in Nature this week — a find that will help researchers to improve their understanding of the biology of the 1.8-million-year-old hominins. The work, led by researchers from the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, describes three-dozen fossils from the skeletons of four primitive Homo erectus individuals found in recent years at Dmanisi in Georgia, central Asia.

H. erectus is thought to have migrated across Asia after coming out of Africa, where the oldest relative of man is traced to nearly 7 million years ago. H. erectus fossils have been found from Africa across Asia as far as Indonesia. Typically there are only a few scattered fossils at one location. A single site with so many bones from so many individuals is rare. And they date back to very soon after H. erectus’s exodus from Africa.

“Dmanisi is a real gift, because nothing in the world exists like this for this time,” says lead author David Lordkipanidze.

More here.

Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books:

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO₂.

More here.

From Wired:

Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and onetime atheist), rejects the notion that science is sufficient to disprove the existence of God. Biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin’s Rottweiler, insists that anyone who believes in an omnipotent creator is suffering a “delusion.” Can the gloves of God defeat the punch of proof?

Go here for more, and to vote.

Stephen Colbert interviews the brilliant Naomi Wolf:

From the Oxford University Press blog:

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Jonesin’ Crosswords we have a fun way for you to discover the new words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. To learn more about the SOED check out Ben Zimmer’s columns here and here.

“In the Language”–*New entries from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition.
by Matt Jones

Solve the puzzle here.  [Thanks to Rebecca Ford.]

Recent parliamentary elections have cast doubt on whether Morocco is the model of Middle East reform the United States is hoping for.

Shadi Hamid and Jeb Koogler in The American Prospect:

Earlier this month, Morocco — one of America’s closest Arab allies — held national elections. Touted as a bold step toward democracy, the vote was closely watched in the West. But the elections, rather than proving a success, have raised difficult questions about the future of Moroccan democracy and highlighted the flaws in America’s approach to democracy promotion.

In the lead-up to the polls, analysts painted the contest as a test of political Islam’s strength. Islamists had risen to power in Iraq, Palestine, and Turkey; many wondered whether Morocco would be next.

The main Islamist organization in the country — the Justice and Development Party (PJD) — was widely expected to win the largest number of seats, following the lead of religious-based groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the similarly-named Justice and Development Party in Turkey. But instead of securing a projected 70 – 80 seats, the PJD won only 47, coming in second to the secular Istiqlal Party. This is the first time an Islamist party has disappointed after an unprecedented series of electoral gains for Islamists throughout the Middle East.

But the story here is not about the impending failure of political Islam.

More here.

I head off to Europe as the dollar’s role as reserve currency becomes precarious:

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

“Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States,” he said.

The Saudi central bank said today that it would take “appropriate measures” to halt huge capital inflows into the country, but analysts say this policy is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to the collapse of the dollar peg.

As a close ally of the US, Riyadh has so far tried to stick to the peg, but the link is now destabilising its own economy.

The Fed’s dramatic half point cut to 4.75pc yesterday has already caused a plunge in the world dollar index to a fifteen year low, touching with weakest level ever against the mighty euro at just under $1.40.

There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the US bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of US bonds from $97bn to just $19bn in July, with outright net sales of US Treasuries.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

On August 15, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that America’s senior intelligence authorities were preparing to vastly expand access to classified satellite reconnaissance and other remote sensing data.

Initially, the National Applications Office (NAO), a newly created office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will confine itself to homeland security and traditional civil applications. Officials will be able to request satellite data to enhance border security, defend critical infrastructure and coordinate disaster response. Next year, the department plans to give satellite data to state and local law enforcement agencies.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a major force behind the creation of the NAO. According to the Journal, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell officially authorized the project in a May 25 memo to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

When DHS first announced the creation of the NAO for disseminating classified information from America’s spy satellites on August 15, it hadn’t bothered to notify the House Committee on Homeland Security beforehand.

At this point one may ask: is Plato’s critique still valid today, and if so, what are the practical consequences of ignoring it? Let us try to apply this critique to an overarching problem of modern Western Civilization, namely the principle of sustainable development. This principle would require that we change the way we live our lives. We should distinguish what we truly need from what we want, as Aristotle teaches in The Nicomachean Ethics. In other words, we the people would have to democratically agree to place a greater value on the future quality of the environment than on our present comfortable life-style. This is particularly true in the developed countries, the so called first world, such as the US and the EU.

This moral concept creates obligations not only for the common good of the present inhabitants of the world, but also toward future generations. There is a problem however: in a free market there is no normative standard of what constitutes a need and what constitutes a want. The only standard is one’s desires, as Madison Avenue well knows and as Plato intimated when he said that poverty is not measured by how little one possesses but by how big are one’s desires. In effect the idea that the majority of the people in a democracy would deprive themselves of their wants is redolent of one of Eco’s hyper-reality fantasies.

more from Ovi here.

This is a grumpy old man’s book. Specifically, it’s a grumpy old lefty’s book. The right wing will dismiss it as the paranoid ravings of a madman (as they dismiss Harold Pinter, quoted with approval here). But they will be wrong. First because history has a way of showing that the most shocking ideas were right after all; and secondly because Diary of a Bad Year is much more than just ideas.

The ideas belong to C, a distinguished South African writer living in Australia. He has been invited to contribute to a book called Strong Opinions, in which six eminent writers pronounce on what’s wrong with today’s world. Evidently C is a well-known and practised moaner; he accepts with alacrity, and lays about him with a will.

more from Literary Review here.

Matthew Barney has been called the American Damien Hirst. You may be surprised at the level of fame this implies because you have probably barely heard of him.

Whatever media excitement has been whipped up around his first major British exhibition, which opens today at London’s Serpentine, Barney is only really famous among curators, critics and other artists. The most pop-cultural thing about him is being the boyfriend of the Icelandic singer Björk. Barney’s 2005 film Drawing Restraint 9, on which most of the works are in some way parasitic, portrays the two of them dismembering one another in a deathly consummation of love aboard a whaling ship. It’s best enjoyed as an extended Björk video: a bit of a comedown for an artist whose audacious, epic series of symbolist films, The Cremaster Cycle, was one of the most striking works of art to come out of America in recent times.

more from The Guardian here.