Among other things, New York is a city of eavesdroppers; trust me, becoming one is unavoidable.  Sam Anderson in Slate considers the issue.

“If we could somehow pool the combined eavesdropping of the entire city, we’d probably hear things never before spoken in human history.

This seems to be the ambition of the Web site Overheard in New York, which enlists a large volunteer army of informants (around 350, by my count) to report the conversations they hear on the street. As the site has become increasingly popular—media attention, a book in the works, an official spinoff, and many unofficial imitations—the virtual chatter has thickened into a steady roar. Two years ago, the site posted just one quote per day; now it posts 12 or more. Its archive has grown well into the thousands.

The site takes its motto from a comment overheard in Greenwich Village: ‘Anytime you overhear people, if you only hear a second of what they say, it’s always completely stupid.’ (Take a moment to bodysurf on that tidal wave of meta-irony.) But the motto is misleading: The site isn’t just a gallery of stupidity. Most of the comments achieve something more remarkable—they manage to be both massively stupid and infinitely meaningful . . .”

(Hat tip: Maeve Adams)

David Barash in Evolutionary Pyschology:

“Just as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, it abhors true altruism. Society, on the other hand, adores it. A dose of evolutionary biology not only helps clarify the origins of this ancient conflict between individual and group, it also points out how often the two are ultimately the same, since groups are frequently made up of relatives. . .

Part of the difficulty of being human is the often agonizing need to decide where to draw the line between self and society. And part of the delight of our best stories is the opportunity to watch others struggling to do just that. There, by the grace of evolution, go a large part of “ourselves,” part hungry octopus, part Tyrone Slothrop, part selfish sinner and part altruistic saint, by turns big-hearted and narrow minded, self-actualizing and groveling groupie. In his “Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope concluded, with some satisfaction,

Reason and Passion answer one great aim

That here Self-love and Social are the same …”

In The Nation, an interview with Arthur Danto:

The art world today is highly globalized. More and more, the same artistic values are globally shared, which must mean that ultimately other values will be shared. In this respect, things have changed drastically in art since I began writing. Recently, I got a letter from Khalad al-Hamzah, an artist in Jordan, who received funding to execute a conceptual work based on some of my philosophical ideas. I was quite overwhelmed that in a country where we mostly are aware of political matters, the avant-garde works with concepts that would be grasped by the avant-garde anywhere and everywhere. Islam prohibits images, but is open to conceptual art–and today most art is conceptual. The landscape is made to order for philosophers!

Being the most prominent journalist in Uganda is a little like having the best arm in the New York Mets’ bullpen–the honor is a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. But in a country where reporters are customarily bought off, threatened, or shunned by public officials, Andrew Mwenda is someone unique: a figure larger than most of the people he covers. Mornings, Mwenda’s byline appears in Uganda’s main independent newspaper, where he routinely exposes stories of government skullduggery and scandal. Evenings, he conducts a rollicking political talk show on a popular radio station, hosting everyone from shady generals to exiled presidents to Western visitors like foreign aid activist Jeffrey Sachs. In the hours in between, Mwenda can be seen holding court beneath a shady tree at an outdoor Indian restaurant in downtown Kampala, attired in a tailored suit, trading gossip and spouting opinions. Imagine Bob Woodward and Chris Matthews wrapped into one diminutive, thirtysomething, hyperactive, pipsqueak-voiced package, and you start to get the idea. When the Ugandan police came to arrest Mwenda last week, on charges of sedition, a lot of his friends wondered, “What took them so long?”…

more from TNR here (registration required).

From a piece at McSweeney’s entitled: THAK, THE MOST ORGANIZED MEMBER OF THE PARTY OF ROUGHLY 70 PEOPLE WHO ORIGINALLY SETTLED NORTH AMERICA.

OK, I know it’s difficult to plan for a trip like this. Everyone’s running around like a reindeer with its head cut off.

But we had a whole lunar cycle to coordinate. I know nobody wants to stand around outside on the tundra making small talk only to find your lips and eyeballs have frozen solid, but … “What are you bringing to eat on the way there? Oh, really? I was going to bring a small handful of rabbit organs, too! Maybe one of us should bring something different!” You know, a little gossip never killed anybody. I suppose it killed Gorf. More accurately, a sharp rock thrown by Ooni’s husband killed Gorf. But I digress.

Museums across the US are opening their doors and asking Americans to take a look. But what do museum directors do when they’re off the clock? The Monitor asked leading curators which exhibitions have wowed them this summer.

more from The Christian Science Monitor here.

The New Scholarship on Star Trek and Pedophilia: ‘Don’t Let Her Touch Your Wand, Jim!’ In May, Yale cyberlaw expert Ernest Miller noticed an astonishing tidbit in a Los Angeles Times story on the Toronto police Sex Crimes Unit’s pursuit of pedophiles:

All but one of the [over 100] offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.

Miller was skeptical but the cops basically stood by their story–at the least, a “majority of those arrested show ‘at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest.'” Not just an interest in science fiction generally, mind you. But Star Trek.

more from Slate here.

From Scientific American:

Shifts in climate that occurred in Africa between three million and one million years ago may have played a pivotal role in the speciation and dispersal of early humans, scientists say. Conventional wisdom holds that our hominid forebears evolved under increasingly arid conditions in East Africa. But the results of a new study suggest that this drying trend may have been interspersed with episodes of humidity, forcing humans and other mammals to adapt to their fast-changing environs.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

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

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

More here.

From Morning News:

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

More here.

From MSNBC:

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

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

More here.

Eleni Sikelianos tells a few Creeley tales at Brik.

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

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

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

A book and an exhibition:

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

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

more here

From Haaretz:

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

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

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

More Here

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

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

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

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

From NY Arts magazine.

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

From Scientific American:

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

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

More here.

From Science:

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

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

More here.

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

Joel Stein in The New Yorker:

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

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

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

More here.