Ashlee Vance in the NYT:

Businesses in the South Park district of San Francisco generally sell either Web technology or sandwiches and burritos. Bespoke Innovations plans to sell designer body parts.

The company is using advances in a technology known as 3-D printing to create prosthetic limb casings wrapped in embroidered leather, shimmering metal or whatever else someone might want.

Scott Summit, a co-founder of Bespoke, and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are set to open a studio this fall where they will sell the limb coverings and experiment with printing entire customized limbs that could cost a tenth of comparable artificial limbs made using traditional methods. And they will be dishwasher-safe, too.

“I wanted to create a leg that had a level of humanity,” Mr. Summit said. “It’s unfortunate that people have had a product that’s such a major part of their lives that was so underdesigned.”

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.

Porch and Sundial

Stephan Leacock and Po Chu-i, two strange
old men I've loved a long time in your words,

since lone boyhood, only today did I see
you talk together. Leacock on the sundial

of the calm house you built by Couchiching
two summer late, for by then Beatrix was dead,

you graved a motto of your mind: Breves
Horas—Longas Annos: hours are brief,

years long. From your own chair I've watched
the lake's deeper-than-Aegean sapphire flash

through oak and pine to where she would have stood
in the porch's grace. And I recalled you, Po:

“Next year I'll build a screen porch here on this side
for my treasure, my wife.” And later on you say,

in another poem, that “joyful people hate
the hours that rush away and unhappy people

can't stand the creep of the interminable years.”
You two agreed: frantic, desperate, joy

always will tip itself over into sadness,
and may god let the two things flicker

in us like gray and green of the aspen leaves,
not be all joy in youth and grief ever after.

by A.F. Moritz
from The Hamilton Stone Review,
Summer 2010, Issue 21

Nadeem Aslam in The Guardian:

To coincide with Granta's publication of its issue devoted to the best new writing from Pakistan, an extract from one of its standout stories.

In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion's mouth, its size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus. One night under the vast silence of a perfect half-moon and six stars, a mosque appeared on a wooded island in the river, and Leila was woken by the call to prayer issuing from its minaret just before sunrise. It was the day she was to be blessed with a son. As she knew there was no mosque within hearing distance, her initial impression was that the air itself was singing. Leila manoeuvred herself out of bed and went towards the door, making sure not to disturb her mother-in-law who had taken to sleeping in the same room as her in these last days before the birth. The servant girl appointed outside the door had fallen asleep, and as Leila moved past, a bad dream caused the girl to release a cry of fear.

Leila was fourteen years old, thin-framed with grey, glass-like eyes and a nervous flame always burning just beneath her pale skin. She pursued the song of faith drifting in the fifty-roomed mansion that had been in her husband's family for several generations. The river with its boats and blind freshwater dolphins and drowned lovers was half a mile away, and there was nothing but rocky desert and thick date orchards between the riverbank and the mansion. Long after the voice withdrew, she continued her search for its origins, now and then placing an ear against a wall. Earlier in the night she'd heard momentary fragments of other songs from the men's side of the mansion, where her husband was celebrating the imminent arrival of his first son in the company of musicians and prostitutes. No doubt they were all asleep by now.

More here.

Refecting on the changed nature of Europe 20 years after the collapse of communism, a perceptive British sociologist proclaimed boldly that “we are all post-communist now”.[49] This is to be understood not as a description of political reality in contemporary Europe, but rather as a challenge that European nations and their elites in both East and West must take seriously, if the European project is to succeed. In a similar vein, when Jerzy Buzek, on his election as President of the European Parliament, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that “there is now no ‘you’ (in the West) and ‘us’ (in the East): we live in a shared Europe”, it was a statement of intent, rather than a statement of fact.[50] Debates about key historic events and their meaning serve as a reminder that there are still significant divisions between the two parts of Europe that used to be divided by the Iron Curtain, just as there are divisions between the nations of Europe regardless of their geographic location. Yet, to accept that a Europe of 27 nation-states must live with discord is true to the legacy of EU founding fathers such as Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer, as much as it is to the legacy of the architects of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 such as Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel. With their mixture of idealism and pragmatism, these Europeans understood that the true meaning of politics consists in accepting dissonance while not giving up aspirations for more harmony.

more from Stefan Auer at Eurozine here.

In the far western expanse of the Sahara is the world’s longest continuous wall. It starts in Morocco and slithers down through the desert for 2,400 kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean. More than 130,000 soldiers line its perimeter. Made of sand and stone, it stands one and a half metres wide and between two and three metres tall, and has command posts every two miles. Motion sensors, barbed wire and several million landmines provide an extra layer of defence. For most of its course, it cuts across a sparsely populated region that Morocco regards as its southern provinces. On maps the area appears as Western Sahara. The UN calls it a “non-self-governing territory”. It is Africa’s last colony, where a near-forgotten liberation war lies dormant. The wall is sometimes referred to as Hassan’s Wall, after King Hassan II of Morocco, who annexed most of what was then called Spanish Sahara when Spain pulled out in 1976. About half of the indigenous population, the Saha­rawis, who had been promised a vote on self-determination by Spain, fled across the desert to refugee camps in an inhospitable corner of Algeria in order to escape Moroccan rule.

more from Xan Rice at The New Statesman here.

From The New York Times:

In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that had white fur like a polar bear’s but had brown patches, long claws and a hump like a grizzly bear’s. DNA analysis confirmed the animal was a hybrid of the two species.

While one might think that these oddities are examples of some kind of moral breakdown in the animal kingdom, it turns out that hybridization among distinct species is not so rare. Some biologists estimate that as many as 10 percent of animal species and up to 25 percent of plant species may occasionally breed with another species. The more important issue is not whether such liaisons occasionally produce offspring, but the vitality of the hybrid and whether two species might combine to give rise to a third, distinct species. While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.

More here.

In 1936 Mao Tse-Tung, then a cave-dwelling revolutionary, told Edgar Snow his life story. Snow recorded Mao’s self-serving autobiography in Red Star Over China, which for decades made the American’s name as the leading reporter in China. Back in China twenty-four years later, Snow was pestered by news agencies enquiring about mass starvation. The Snow of the 1930s had gone into the field to see for himself a prolonged drought in the north-west, where people were rumoured to be selling their children. But this time he relied on his access to top officials such as Premier Zhou Enlai, and foreigners who flacked for China such as the New Zealander Rewi Alley. In the book he wrote about that trip, The Other Side of the River, Snow stated, ‘I saw no starving people in China … Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.’ And most positively: ‘Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see.’

more from Jonathan Mirsky at Literary Review here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. July 2010.

Acrylics on canvas.

POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR in The New York Times:

Little did we know that it would take almost a full decade for the proverbial 9/11 fallout to fall out, for anti-Muslim xenophobia to emerge, fully formed and fever-pitched, ostensibly over plans to build an interfaith cultural center near ground zero. Even in New York, stronghold of progressive ethics and cultural diversity, my former home of 12 years, August 2010 became the evil twin of that still-innocent August 2001. In addition to the mosque, of course, there was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn Korans on the Sept. 11 anniversary, and who has yes-no-maybe-so reconsidered, after a hearty load of negative press and a dab of executive-branch headshaking. And, hey, what do you get when you put a drunk white college student, who had actually been to Afghanistan, into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? The wrong answer and a stabbing, allegedly.

It’s one test I would have passed. For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner. I am also a New Yorker, a deal that was sealed forever nine years ago. I had just moved from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan to shack up with a boyfriend. The studio was 25 floors up, with a nearly all-glass wall that framed a perfect view of the World Trade Center. Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

More here.

Errors

How wide the gulf between o and i:
He loves with his wife and daughter
in New Haven, his bio read.
An accident of the hands, funny
in the way wrecks often are.

But don't discount the hands,
the way they know the girl will return
one day from college with her arms spilling
like her mother's once did. How he'll see
her almond sweater and the snow

as it stops in the window, and he'll wish
he'd had sons. He'll be vigilant
from here on, aware of the sanctity of letters.
He'll realize as never before that his wife's
and daughter's names both begin with C—

that they are both about sight,
about water. The difference between live
and love will expand to dive and dove,
and he won't know present
from past, past from flying.

For now, he sometimes opens
his wife's shirt in the kitchen,
and wants but does not want
to find someone looking—his daughter,
the mowing neighbor, anyone—

as if to confirm, so that he may say
in the end: Once, there were two bodies
in the same place, and one of them was mine.

by Bethany Tyler Lee
from The Cortland Review,
Issue 48, August 2010

From Lensculture:

The idea of stopping time and preserving fleeting moments is, in many ways, at the heart of photography and central to human desire. Psychologically and emotionally, humans have always dreaded growing old, losing youthful vigor, and falling prey to the weaknesses of old age, faulty memories, morbidity, decay and death. These fears and anxieties are deeply rooted in our psyches, and have been played out in ancient myths, classical painting, modern poetry, theater and cinema, as well as in practically every other art form in the history of humanity, including digital gaming. We don’t want to grow old and weak, nor do we want our children and loved ones to grow old. We would like to stay forever young. We want to be beautiful, desirable, powerful and perfect like gods and goddesses. Or at least we think we do.

Vee Speers’ latest body of photo-based art, aptly titled Immortal, plays to these age-old sensibilities and timeless longings while riffing on the very contemporary convergence of similar ideas, ideals, and forms that have invaded our consciousness in our media-driven, technology-rich consumer cultures.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet people or albino ferret people. But human beings are a distinctly pet-loving bunch. In no other species do adults regularly and knowingly rear the young of other species and support them into old age; in our species it is commonplace. In almost every human culture, people own pets. In the United States, there are more households with pets than with children. On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense: Pets take up resources that we would otherwise spend on ourselves or our own progeny. Some pets, it’s true, do work for their owners, or are eventually eaten by them, but many simply live with us, eating the food we give them, interrupting our sleep, dictating our schedules, occasionally soiling the carpet, and giving nothing in return but companionship and often desultory affection.

What explains this yen to have animals in our lives?

An anthropologist named Pat Shipman believes she’s found the answer: Animals make us human. She means this not in a metaphorical way — that animals teach us about loyalty or nurturing or the fragility of life or anything like that — but that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man. The hunting of animals and the processing of their corpses drove the creation of tools, and the need to record and relate information about animals was so important that it gave rise to the creation of language and art. Our bond with nonhuman animals has shaped us at the level of our genes, giving us the ability to drink milk into adulthood and even, Shipman argues, promoting the set of finely honed relational antennae that allowed us to create the complex societies most of us live in today. Our love of pets is an artifact of that evolutionary interdependence.

More here.

(written by my friend Roman Turovsky)

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

Sam Anderson reviews Donald Sturrock’s new biography of Roald Dahl Storyteller, in NY Magazine:

Many of Roald Dahl’s book covers today come stamped with an official-looking logo proclaiming him “The World’s No. 1 Storyteller.” The declaration is, like Dahl’s fiction itself, simultaneously thrilling and absurd and puzzling and oddly disturbing. How, one has to wonder, was the ranking determined? Was there some kind of single-elimination global storytelling showdown, in which the creator of Willy Wonka, presumably as an eighth-seeded underdog, managed to out-yarn a bracket of, say, Jack London, Salman Rushdie, Isak Dinesen, Victor Hugo, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and—in what must have been a squeaker of a final—the mighty Dickens? And even if we do accept that result, isn’t the title somehow slightly patronizing? After all, we don’t celebrate Faulkner or Conrad or Shakespeare primarily as “storytellers.” It would be like calling a master chef “The World’s No. 1 Pan-Fryer”—a great compliment, but also one that immediately raises questions about his ability to bake, braise, roast, grill, stew, poach, and flambé.

Dahl was, indeed, a great storyteller: Anyone who doubts that can pull aside a random child on the street and start reading her James and the Giant Peach or Fantastic Mr. Fox. If an adult comes up to object, you can start reading him one of the short stories: maybe “Taste” (in which a dinner-party bet among wine connoisseurs spirals out of control) or “The Sound Machine” (in which a man can hear plants screaming). If a policeman intervenes, read him “Lamb to the Slaughter,” in which a woman kills her husband with a frozen lamb chop, then cooks and feeds it to the detectives who come to investigate. You could probably go on like that forever.

Dahl’s own favorite of his yarns was The BFG, a children’s book in which the eponymous hero, the Big Friendly Giant, walks around city streets at night blowing dreams through a long tube into kids’ bedroom windows. The giant keeps thousands of dreams stored in neatly labeled glass jars in his cave—with the good ones (what he calls “phizzwizards”) carefully segregated from the bad (“trogglehumpers”). “I IS ONLY AN EIGHT YEAR OLD LITTLE BOY,” runs one of the good dreams, “BUT I IS GROWING A SPLENDID BUSHY BEARD AND ALL THE OTHER BOYS IS JALOUS.” (The BFG is a self-taught writer: He learned to read from a borrowed copy of Nicholas Nickleby, whose author he identifies as “Dahl’s Chickens.”) One of the giant’s best dreams reads like a mission statement for Dahl’s career:

I HAS RITTEN A BOOK AND IT IS SO EXCITING NOBODY CAN PUT IT DOWN. AS SOON AS YOU HAS RED THE FIRST LINE YOU IS SO HOOKED ON IT YOU CANNOT STOP UNTIL THE LAST PAGE. IN ALL THE CITIES PEEPLE IS WALKING IN THE STREETS BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEIR FACES IS BURIED IN MY BOOK AND DENTISTS IS READING IT AND TRYING TO FILL TEETHS AT THE SAME TIME BUT NOBODY MINDS BECAUSE THEY IS ALL READING IT TOO IN THE DENTIST’S CHAIR.