By Tolu Ogunlesi

Every time I find myself at Lagos’ Murtala Mohammed International Airport, a glance at the foreigners’ queue makes me wonder how many of those sweating Caucasians are there on a mission to spill ink on Africa’s endless fires.

It is of course an open secret that the continent teems with ‘anonymous’ white men and women destined to build enviable reputations from material from the ruins of what the Economist Magazine once proudly termed “The Hopeless Continent”. In recent months I have become deeply fascinated by the possibilities of assembling images of Africa as painted by outsiders – the Gospel of Africa according to Saints Blixen, Kapuściński, Forsyth, Dowden, Maier, Wrong; to mention just a few.

“For the last 20 years the news from Africa has been unremittingly bad,” the second line of Anthony Daniels’ essay Not as black as it’s painted, (originally published in The Spectator) declares.

Daniels is to a significant extent correct. This was 1987. Twenty years before then would have been 1967, the year that the Nigerian Civil War kicked off. In those two decades Nigeria, self-acclaimed Giant of Africa, saw 30 months of civil war, four coup d’états, and one horribly mismanaged oil boom.

But he soon strays into dubious territory, adopting that deadly attitude (a potent mix of condescension and incontrovertibility) that the colonial adventure seemed to implant deep into the European DNA. A few sentences later, after a litany of peculiarly African woes – desertification, population explosion, AIDS – Daniels jokes: “Perhaps most depressing of all, one is now grateful for a President who, however dictatorial, does not actually eat his opponents.”

And then the guns emerge, blazing. Four examples:

“As I remarked, no doubt cruelly, to several young African radicals, even if Africa were to unite economically, it would still scarcely amount to Switzerland.”

“Africa is so technically backward that it would be cheaper to ship things from Mars than to produce them on the continent. An arms embargo on South Africa has produced an arms industry; an arms embargo on the rest of Africa would produce bows and arrows.”

“There is little in traditional African culture that is compatible with a modern economy, and much that is inimical to it.”

“Very few Africans have – can have – the faintest notion of the depth of the cultural and scientific tradition necessary to produce a Mercedes, or even a simple light bulb.”

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Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I was reading a slightly older profile of the magazine in the Telegraph. It had a quote from you saying that The Wire is best thought of as a magazine that does not cover certain types of music rather than a magazine that does cover certain types. So I'll put the question to you: what does The Wire not cover?

The stuff you could consider heavily featured in the mainstream media. Obviously there's some crossover with the mainstream media and the underground, noncommercial media, but generally we have no interest in covering stuff you just see on — if you go to a newsstand any see a range of magazines, be it music, culture, fashion, whatever, you see certain names cropping up over and over again. We just have absolutely no interest in being part of that interchangeability of faces, names, et cetera, et cetera. We'd rather focus on the music that interests us, and that most frequently is “non-mainstream” music, “underground” music, whatever that means.

That's kind of a very slippery word, you might say, because “underground” in a political sense is a whole lot different from “underground” in a Western sense. In London or, I should imagine, where you come from, almost anything goes. You can do anything without consequences. But last November I was in Leipzig for a festival of underground culture from the German Democratic Republic period, the communist period in East Germany that obtained between '48 and 1989 before the wall came down. Then, underground culture had a totally different meaning. It's a salutary reminder to know that sometimes music is as serious as your life, and you can end up in jail for playing it. That's not often he case here. Every so often I have to take one step back from the word “underground” and remind myself that it can be a far different thing to what perceive.
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My Life As A Crime Fighter: Absolute Prosecutorial Discretion – Part 1

Norman Costa

Note: This narrative was created from three true stories. Each character is a combination of more than one real person. I changed names and story elements to preserve the privacy of individuals.

Call in your troubles

My nephew, Samuel, called me from his home in Huntsville, Alabama at eight o'clock in the morning, an unusual hour for him to phone. I stayed quiet and waited. After a moment or two he spoke. He was hesitant and uncomfortable, asking if he could borrow $550. I gave an immediate assurance that I would lend him the money, and then waited.

“Uncle Norman, I got arrested for domestic violence.”

“WHAT!”

It made no sense, at all. In a more subdued voice, I asked him to tell me what happened. He said that he had pushed his wife, Kara, and she had fallen over a chair. He said it was an accident; he didn't mean to do it; but, it was his fault since he pushed her. Samuel was going to plead guilty to a criminal offense, agree to probation and anger management counseling, and pay a fine of $550. After twelve months his record would be wiped clean, if there were no more incidents.

And then Samuel started to cry. Inside a few seconds he was sobbing.

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Your correspondent has wrangled a place in the first elevated row, just behind the backless futons reserved for buyers. The Three Quarks Daily seat is adjacent to the New Indian Express (Calcutta) and The Man (monthly). Black bleachers cascade all along on either side of the runway. There are bells suspended above one end, just above the backboard with Payal Jain's name on it. On the other end, the jostling mosh-pit of camera men in five, no six layers, like the green toy soldiers that you may remember from childhood: sniper flat on the ground, aiming and firing on one knee, mortar loader, aiming while standing, platoon leader yelling.

The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about.

Payal's models are wearing hoodies and head-scarves of many designs, and occasionally smocks that look also like Iranian chadors. Her literature says that the collection is inspired by the monastaries of Laos, which God love her, is surely exotic territory for all of us. The music is vaguely Enigma, perhaps remixed by Laotian monks.

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by John Edwards

I was in Cote d'Ivoire, working for a financial mag covering the African Development Bank in West Africa, when some co-workers and I set off on a trip to nowhere in particular: specifically, somewhere in Ghana. At the Ghanaian embassy, they informed us: “No journalists allowed!” When we told them we were editors, not journalists, they lightened up a little. “If you say you are computer programmers, maybe we can let you in to Ghana.”

So newly christened as “computer programmers” (even though I thought “microchips” were ingredients in miniature toll house cookies), we prepared to travel around like knuckleheads in the country of Kofi Annan. To go gonzo in Ghana. A black American woman, who was also procuring a visa at the embassy, said with a faraway smile, “I just love Africa. You can really get into the rhythm of the people!”

The only rhythm I noticed so far, however, was the knocking and swaying of the crowded bush taxi–crammed with Christian iconography and blasting Highlife music–as we took off into the hair-raising hinterlands. We decided to bypass Accra and head to the beach, a place called Dixcove, which had an old fort that was a site in the past for the infamous Gold Coast slave trade.

When we finally arrived, a small boy led us past groups of sweaty shouting men waving maniacally at us to stay in their makeshift “hotels” (which featured no beds). We were wading through some sludgy water from a slow-moving stream on the beach, obviously drainage from toilet facilities, hoping that it didn't contain the dreaded “guinea worm,” which can wrap and coil itself in your body for reputedly miles and miles.

“There is a place on the beach where you can also get something to eat,” the boy quothed in the Queen's English. He led us to what looked like a large concrete bunker right on the beach, with a bar filled with tattered Guinness posters. An old man wearing clothing stitched from burlap sacks, who looked a little like Geoffrey Holder with a hangover, gladly accepted our business.

That night he asked us what we wanted for dinner, and one of the more imaginative of our group (jokingly) said, “lobsters.” And lo and behold, the old man did indeed barter with fishermen and cook us lobsters with a creole tomato sauce, and we began to wonder what was up with this so-called rudimentary hotel in paradise, where we were savaged by insects in our sleep and where huge waves broke on the shores of the end of the world.

What would a postcard home from here sound like? “News from Nowhere: Wish you were here…”

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by Daniel Rourke

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is 'other'. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.

Encounters like this, hashed together from memories that span my childhood and adult years, represent the closest many of us will come to meeting a Neanderthal. Encounters built upon out-dated science and the desire of museums to authenticate experiences which, in reality, are as far away from 'true' anthropology as those glass eyes are from windows on the soul. In a recent Archaeology.org article a question was put forward that made me think again about these encounters:

Should we Clone Neanderthals? : I could not help but probe the proposition further.

In my own lifetime our understanding of these absolute 'others' has gone through several revolutions. What once were lumbering apes, incapable of rational thought, speech or the rituals of religious reverence, have become our long lost evolutionary cousins. Research from various quarters has shown that not only were Neanderthals quite capable of vocal expression, but in all likelihood they lived a rich, symbolic life. They had bigger brains than we did, or do, and were probably burying their dead with appeal to an afterlife 50,000 years before our ancestors left Africa. They cared for their young, lived in well established social groups and apart from their prominent brow and less mobile, stocky build, resembled humans in most other aspects. More recent evidence seems to show that far from being a completely separate species, it is quite possible that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. This astounding revelation, if it were ever verified, would mean that many of us – if not every one of us – carry within our genetic make-up a living memory of Neanderthal heritage.

But Neanderthals are more than scientific curiosities. They are the embodiment of the 'other', a reflective surface via which the human race may peer upon themselves. Human myth is filled with lumbering creatures, not quite human but every bit an echo of our deepest fears, our vanities, our failings, our memories prone to fade in time. With Shakespeare's Caliban, the feral beast of Prospero's burden, and William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who myth says was reduced to animal madness, being only two in a long list of sub-human characters. Along with these mythic creatures the Neanderthal has achieved the status of a linguistic archetype, carrying the weight of our inhumanity when admitting our limitations is too much to bear. For a very long time after their discovery Neanderthals were named as the very embodiment of our ineptitudes. To be violent, or brutally instinctive was to be Neanderthal Neanderthals stood as a fiendish remnant of the days before language, fire or social grace, before the borders between man and nature had been breached by the gift of free-will – a gift bequeathed to us, and not to them.

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Jonathan Dee is the author of four previous novels, most recently Palladio. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper’s, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

Provocative and Prescient

The Privileges grants readers a swift and deep plunge into the private life of a fictional Wall Street couple from their wedding day through middle age. Cynthia and Adam are likeable for their witty repartee and ardent love for one another. Adam plugs away at Morgan Stanley for four years while Cynthia elects to stays home with their two young children, but neither of them discovers the deeper satisfactions they had expected from life. Adam moves on to a smaller firm run by an independent maverick investor who loves Adam like a son from the first day. Cynthia’s spirit, however, flags as their good fortune rises. “…she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do…”, which provokes Adam’s fateful decision to step across the moral boundaries of financial commerce.

It wasn’t enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, lift it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony. That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in Adam’s makeup. He’d give their children everything too, risk anything for them. He knew what he was risking. But it was all a test of your fitness anyway. The noblest risks were the secret ones. Fortuna favet fortibus.

One Hour, Two Cappuccinos

Randolyn Zinn: When Lehman Brothers folded, where were you in the process of writing The Privileges?

Jonathan Dee: I was nearly finished. The timing of the book’s release was absolutely accidental. It’s kind of been a double-edged sword. I’m conscious of the fact that it helps me out, in that readers have an interest in these figures that they might not have been a few years earlier. But the reason that they have an interest in those figures is that they want to see them vicariously punished. Punished for their greed and punished for their presumed moral inferiority.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Ringed in by swirls of rope, I train for that golden fight. Without power, now, yes, yet, the night is lit up by a winking star within my reach. I stretch, I practice and I meditate. This, till Fajr’s first light. The sea breeze washes over Lyari at this time and as it comes into the Ali Mohammad Qambrani Stadium, it caresses my wet skin, the sweat cools and evaporates and my muscles ache as the heat inside me subsides. My lungs clear of the day’s petrol fumes that still burn my throat and eyes. Here in Lyari the name Qambrani means something: pride. The breeze, weightless as a fly, as soft as a feather, whispers and places a burden on me: be unique, be the one, be unparalleled, be unrivaled, be superlative. Be. That’s the cheer in every street in every alley here. Be unique! Be unique! Be without comparison! Be incomparable! Be! And I know what that means. Its meaning belongs to the poor. Be unique belongs to the poor.

A head injury may be the price to be golden to belong, to be, that way.

That’s the price for being caught in the web, the ropes of family ties, carrying on the family name, the family tradition, the family honor and pride. That’s the price of being a hero. That’s the price of limelight and being on the ropes.

Saima is afraid. She says that this will destroy my pretty face—I’ll get bruised and battered and get scars and a busted nose, lose teeth. She says if I get ugly she might not want to marry me. I know that she’s only joking.

Boxing belongs to the poor. Yes it does. Look at the conditions in which we still become champions. What would happen if we had resources? Just look at the RCD club run by the Olympian and National Coach Jan Mohammed Baloch. He also started boxing at the Muslim Azad Boxing Club back in 1959 under the coaching of the late Ustad Ali Mohammad Qambrani and became junior champion at the age of fourteen. Ustad Jan Mohammad spends his time coaching the young at RCD coaching club near Ranchore lane. Here for so many years he has produced Olympians, and national and international level boxers. He served as national boxing coach and achieved hundreds of International medals for Pakistan. He qualified for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and represented Pakistan in the boxing tournament. Of those games in Munich he recalls the tragic event on September 5, 1972 and the gunning down of Israeli athletes. A terrible moment for everyone. And he talks about how Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was very fond of him. “Bhutto sahib often visited me and he visited our coaching camp in Hasanabdal.” Under his coaching boxers qualified for 4 Bronze medals in Bangkok and 4 Bronze in Atlanta and 5 bronze in Athens. Even now his club produces players of international standard.

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Merlin Mann is a writer, speaker, blogger, podcaster and student of the creative mind. He's the creator of 43Folders, a popular web site devoted to time, attention and creative work, as well as the man behind such varied projects as The Merlin Show, Kung Fu Grippe, 5ives, the 43Folders podcast, one-third of the crazy-successful comedy podcast You Look Nice Today, and lord knows what else. He's also currently working on his first book, Inbox Zero. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

There has rarely been a man to whom the title “productivity guru” has been applied so often who has less wanted to be called a productivity guru. What's your relationship to that label these days?

Oh, man. The thing is, if you're like me and you hear the word “guru,” you expect it to be in a headline with either “swindle” or “ponzi.” It's a tremendous compliment when people say that. I think people say that because the 43Folders web site became fairly well known for trying to help people with the same kinds of problems that I have historically suffered from. It becomes a little bit of an albatross at a point, because — I'm not sandbagging — I honestly don't consider myself anywhere near the level of expertise that would qualify me as a guru. I think the reason people like what I do — I hope — is because I'm not saying, “Here's how to be great like me.” It's like, “Here's how to hopefully suck less, like me, some days.” For the kind of stuff I'm talking about, that's pretty different than a lot of the “gurus.” I just don't want to give people the wrong idea.

How much was that the need that 43Folders tapped into when it first became really successful? How much was that honesty part of it — or what need were you tapping into with the site?

There's a couple parts. One is definitely is the timing. It's funny; there's these certain things that come along where, after it's been around a while, you start to think, “Oh gosh, that's probably been around forever.” You hear Nirvana and you go, “Oh my gosh, how have we not had Nirvana forever? It seems so obvious now.” At the time, it seemed pretty crazy to have a web site about Mac software and life hacks and personal productivity and these goofy programs like Quicksilver that I like a lot. At the time I thought, “This has got to be the most insane idea in the world.”

Different people liked the site for very different reasons. I think I really hit a zeitgeist; I was standing in the right line at the right time. The topics of attention management and wanting to deal with this feeling of being overwhelmed by information and calls on our attention became a hot topic around the time I started doing it. I think I helped contribute to the popularity of those ideas, but I think it was good timing. The voice was part of it. I think that's true for blogs; I think that's true for podcasts; it's definitely true in radio. A lot of people don't care about a topic as much as they care about the voice of the person talking about it, for better or for worse. I hope that's why people enjoy it.

When I first became a reader of your site and when a lot of my friends did, we came to it because these topics have a very broad appeal. Who doesn't want to be more productive? But I found myself virtually among your fans, and what I saw around me was a lot of guys with chunky glasses. They love Apple products and they like to write in their Italian notebooks and they care a lot about the kerning of the font Helvetica. Could you enrich this mental image I have? Who are these people?

That's interesting. So you're doing some audience segmentation? You'd say that's part of my demo?
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by Frans de Waal

Yesterday in a restaurant in Tokyo, someone at the table next to us lit up a cigarette. I asked my Japanese host if no one ever asked smokers to go outside. His answer took me by surprise: one is not allowed to smoke on the street. Inside is fine, outside is wrong. It’s the opposite of what we are used to in the West.

The point is not so much the reason for the Japanese rule (which is that a walking smoker often holds his or her cigarette at children’s eye level, hence may accidently blind a child – apparently, this has happened!), but the fact that cultural differences often baffle us. This is because we assume our own perspective to be the only one that matters or makes sense. The same applies very much to my field of primatology, which owes much to Japanese pioneers.

Today I met in Kyoto with my old friend Toshisada Nishida, who is a student of the late Jun’ichiro Itani, who in turn was the most prominent student of Kinji Imanishi, the founder of Japanese primatology. Imanishi was interested in the connection between primate behavior and human evolution well before Louis Leakey and others in the West, and had fewer inhibitions to speculate about it. In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture. [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]

Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.

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by Olivia Scheck

I am embarrassed to say that before this weekend I had never visited Edge.org.

I was first directed to the site on Friday by a post on 3QD, and I have remained there ever since, devouring responses to the 2010 Edge Annual Question, “How is the internet changing the way you think?”

There are many wonderful ideas to glean from this incredible collection of essays, but I was especially interested in what the replies suggested for the future of journalism and – perhaps a separate issue – the future of journalists.

In an article on Edge that is not actually part of the 2010 Question, the financial journalist Charles Leadbeater uses the example of open source software to suggest what the internet may allow in other cultural realms.

“The more people that test out a programme the quicker the bugs will be found,” Leadbeater explains. “The more people that see a collection of content, from more vantage points, the more likely they are to find value in it, probably value that a small team of professional curators may have missed.”

The application of this analogy to journalism is obvious and, to varying degrees, the concept has already been put into practice. The blog/traditional news hybrid site, Talking Points Memo, for instance, invites readers to contribute leads and even comb through government documents on their behalf. TPM’s crowdsourcing strategy has allowed the website’s comparatively tiny staff of reporters to break several major stories, including the U.S. Attorney firing scandal. There is also The Huffington Post, which famously employs unpaid “citizen journalists” and “volunteer bloggers,” in addition to paid editorial staff.

More generally, the surge in claims and opinions that now appear on the internet would seem, by sheer probability, to have increased the amount of accurate or useful information that is available to the public. Of course, for every instance like the TPM U.S. Attorney story, in which the work of amateur internet journalists has had beneficial consequences for society, there have been, one assumes, many more instances of misinformation, slander and inanity. There is also the problematic tendency of independent online publishers to redistribute professional content without compensating authors.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

The main thing you need to grok about the 37th richest person in America is that his media properties are as pervasive as global warming. The same with his worldview. Rupert Murdoch is a Godzilla-sized propaganda shunt in the shape of a dildo jammed up the interior of humanity, pumping in a daily dose of the trance-inducing drug BOFTRAP — bend over for the rich and powerful.

Is Rupert Murdoch some new kind of semi-Satan? I would argue yes. “J'accuse,” as Emile Zola thundered on the front page of L'Aurore. Here's my case.

Murdoch brings you Fox News, the 24-hour cable news channel he launched in 1996.

It is the most successful 24-hour news channel in America.

It is the most successful news channel because it gives its ultra-conservative bias an outrageous tabloid spin.

It is responsible for a standard of political reportage and commentary so crass, it sinks many levels beneath the deepest mud in Lake Victoria. And it's got countless Americans hooked on their daily shot of BOFTRAP.

Fox News has brought the news itself — let alone news opinion — to a bizarre new low. A shameless, dumb and immoral low consisting of at least five parts of poison.

One, an agenda to the right of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Two, facts more misleading than Faust's best friend. Three, suspicions more dire than those harbored by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Four, outbursts as hysterical as the ranting of Elizabeth Taylor in “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” And five, lies more mendacious than those splooged by Shakespeare's Iago.

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by Alta Price

It's the Ides of March, and thanks to daylight savings having stolen an hour from me today, my brain is tired. It's been months since I finished compiling a long series of texts to be included in the anthology portion of The Infinity of Lists, the third installment of Umberto Eco's “illustrated essay” trilogy, but bits and pieces of them keep coming back to me. Most notably, as I came to excerpt 59 of nearly 80 on the polymath's long and oft-revised list of literary lists, I found one that—although it seemed banal at first—has only grown in significance for me.

It's an unassuming little list included in Georges Perec's 1978 text Je me souviens, which has yet to be published in English. Like so many of his writings, I expect it may never appear in translation, as most of its puns and rich wordplay riffs would be lost in the process. But thanks to Eco's having selected it, present-day readers can get a little taste of what he was up to. Because the Internet as we now know it didn't exist when Perec passed away in 1982, I decided to spice it up with hyperlinks and illustrations—after all, I think the warm reception Eco's ideas have earned are due in large part to the timeliness of such reflections, as many of us are still learning to wade through (and often ignore) the tidal wave of images and information we're barraged by each day.

I remember that all numbers that add up to nine are divisible by nine (sometimes I’d spend an entire afternoon checking…).

I remember a time it was rare to see any trousers without turned-up cuffs.

I remember Porfirio Rubirosa (Trujillo’s son-in-law?).

I remember that “Caran d’Ache” is a Frenchified transcription of the Russian word (Karandach?) for “pencil.”

I remember the two Contrescarpe cabarets Le cheval d’or (“The Golden Horse”) and Le cheval vert (“The Green Horse”).

I remember Bob Azzam and his orchestra’s version of Chérie je t’aime, chérie je t’adore (“I Love You Dear, I Adore You Dear,” also known by the title Moustapha).

I remember the first movie I saw starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin was called Sailor Beware!

I remember the hours I spent—in my senior year of high school, I think—trying to retrofit three houses for electricity, gas, and water without having all the pipes cross (as long as you’re in two-dimensional space, there’s no solution; that’s one of the most elementary examples of topology, just like Koenigsberg’s bridges or playing-cards’ colors).

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by Sam Kean

For those of us that like drastic solutions and saltational mutations, one way to fix the perpetual crises (existential, and otherwise) that colleges and universities seem to find themselves in would be this: get out the axe. Axe the business school, axe all the engineering programs, axe the professional programs, axe even (hard as it is to say) the fine arts programs. So no more accounting majors and no more civil engineering majors, no more masters of public health, and no more dance majors, or creative writing majors, or bassoonists, either.

The thing most of those programs have in common is that they’re crafts—things better learned by doing than by sitting and discussing the doing. As for the business and engineering programs, old-fashioned apprenticeships seem appropriate, and for anything they can’t learn by doing (calculus, perhaps), firms should educate their workers themselves for a few years, just as they train people in other ways. Anything but that amounts to a massive subsidy that society pays to businesses to train their workers for them. (Besides, what business wouldn’t be happy to add to the assets side of the ledger an extra $30k a year in tuition from prospects?) If fine arts people need training and tuning and nurturing and aren’t quite ready to get out there and slug it out for themselves, there are better models than a university—like Julliard. The hard cases are medical schools and law schools because those professionals really do need extended exposure to the material to gain the extra skills. But you can sell the medical school to a nearby hospital, and most law firms could certainly afford to train their own or, better, jointly fund a school that would.

The other thing most of those programs have in common is that students enter them expecting not so much to learn anything as to get a job. It’s a pervasive notion nowadays, that college = employment. Aside from it not necessarily being true right now (thanks to the economy) there’s a dubious assumption there, that the point of higher education is to make cash. Because let’s be frank: most of the students who attend college—especially those (and I don’t mean to pick on them; they’re just the obvious examples) business folk and engineers who attend college looking for jobs—don’t give a crap about broadening themselves. It sounds nice to say that future business leaders of America need to read Homer, but most don’t want to, most don’t care to, most don’t benefit from doing so. The ones who do want to, who need to read Homer will find him on their own. The ones who don’t want to read Homer will either forget him immediately or remember only the resentment they feel both for having to read it—and for the people in their classes who seemed to like it.

What would a university that followed this advice be like? Much smaller for one, which is good. Far too many students attend college nowadays (partly because we denigrate manual labor) and many colleges end up having to babysit students between the time they’re eighteen and twenty-one. (As one wag put it, college is really just a way for parents to ensure that their children take drugs in suitable company.) Under this scheme, the remnants of the university, those few that really want to study there, would focus on the liberal arts—what most people think of as the humanities and the social sciences. I’ve always argued to include the sciences as well, and in fact, that’s how most schools were once organized: if you wanted to study chemical engineering, you went to one school; if you wanted to study the fine art of chemistry, however (or biology, or physics), you remained in the college of liberal arts.

But I’m not so sure any more that science, at least as practiced today, should be included as a liberal art, and therefore whether scientists should go to college at all in this Plato’s Republic vision of the university.

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–– an experiment in small friction

An out-of-work adman named Daniel awickened from befogged sleep in the bright March sun of mid-morning. There was much to be done.

He reeled the news quickly while throwing on a shirt. Dolphins had been spotted in the East River. The spokesman for Al-Qaeda had been nabbed. American. The book of faces unspooled in a tickertape of whispers.

There was much to be done. There was the matter of the check. The check was late. A month late. Could it not find him? A dusty mound of mail bouldered like dung upon the mud-grunged stairwell. He read through the cellophaned windows – jury duty, unpaid child support, a Health & Sanitation notice stamped IMMEDIATE – all for skipped-out tenants of the crumbling loft. Yes; no. A telephone bill. The shakes––

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Ken Freedman is the general manager of Jersey City’s WFMU, the longest-running freeform radio station in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, Freedman and his staff have made WFMU’s name a byword for the modern freeform sensibility with a combination of, among other factors, early adoption of new distribution technology, avoidance of identity politics and pure, unadulterated unpredictability. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I'm here in the KCSB studio in Southern California, and you're over on the other side of the country, almost as far as you can get in the U.S. — you're in Jersey. You wonder, why would a Southern California radio station want to broadcast about an East Coast radio station, but in a way it doesn't matter at all. This show podcasts and gets most of its listeners that way. FMU is online, it streams, it podcasts, it was the first to do all of that stuff.

How do you envision FMU's audience? There must be some kind of cognitive dissonance based on the fact that you run what is ostensibly a radio station but is in reality a cultural entity that extends anywhere.

I don't think of us as a radio station, strictly speaking, anymore. We've definitely metamorphosed into some kind of hybrid radio-online entity.

When did that shift in your thinking change? Was it exactly when you guys went streaming in '97? How long a process has this been in your mind?

It's been happening steadily since we first launched our web site back in 1993. Then we started streaming in 1997. There were a lot of skeptics among our listeners and our staff members who felt that radio streaming was going to be something more akin to CB radio, as opposed to a new form of media. A lot of people said, “It's not even radio!”

But it was pretty clear when we started streaming full-time that, in fact, it was radio, that we were picking up the same types of listeners as we got over the FM band. But it really wasn't until much later, in 2000 to 2003 when we started expanding the offerings online to on-demand programming and podcasting as well as the blog and forums and message boards and then Facebook and Twitter, that we started realizing it was becoming something different. It's not, strictly speaking, radio anymore.

One example I can give you is on my own Wednesday morning radio show. Besides doing a live show, I'm also posting pictures along with every song that I'm playing, and listeners can also comment with me and with each other on the playlist page of the program. I started realizing a few months ago that a fairly good number of people were logging on to that playlist page every week, and they weren't even listening. They were there to see the pictures unfold, to see what music I was playing. The reason they weren't listening is they were at work, and their employer had blocked streaming audio through the company firewall. So they were doing the next best thing, which was simply logging on to the page so that they could see what songs were playing, look at the pictures and interact what other listeners. When I realized that I have these people logging on to this ostensibly radio show page every week but not listening, that kinda hit me over the head. This really has become something different.
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by Sara Firisen

My daughter is a true fashionista; every day brings a new, interesting outfit. The other day she was wearing her Minnie Mouse ears as a hair accessory. As we drove home from school, she took them off, read the words stenciled inside the band, and said, “I got my Minnie mouse ears in Paris, but they say made in China and it's written in English. Why is everything made in China?” And all I could think was, “she has no idea how true that is.”

I have written before about the fact China and India, and of course other places, are increasingly no longer merely dominating areas like customer service helplines and IT outsourcing, but that they are stepping up their game and starting to take our innovation mat from under our feet as well. Recently, Thomas Friedman wrote about his interview with the chief executive of Intel Paul Otellini. Otellini explained, “Smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American.” He quoted a 2009 by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness”. If you don’t think that is so bad, the study measured “‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future”, on this scale the US was rated last out of 40 nations. Last! If we really think that the state of education in the US isn’t a large part of this then we’re fooling ourselves.

Of all the criticisms that have been leveled at me since I started writing about innovation and education, one that really depressed me, was when I was accused of being an elitist. The actual criticism was “There is something very elitist about this whole article. We can't even motivate a large percentage of children to finish high school, and now we are supposed to prepare the (obviously elite) students to work toward better life goals.” This galled me because it so totally missed the point I was making: I’m very lucky, I can afford to send my children to a wonderful independent school where they are privileged enough to get the kind of progressive education that I believe will make them better prepared for the challenges of the truly global workplace that will confront them in 10 to 15 years. My question is, why doesn’t every child in the US get the same educational opportunities that I am lucky enough to be able to give my children?

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by Colin Marshall

Here we have a movie set on the spectacularly picturesque Yangtze River, each background a minor wonder of natural aesthetics, shot on the same digital video format used by cash-strapped film-student projects. It's a picture seemingly imbued with the hard realism of halting conversation and deep-seated yet somehow accepted character misery, yet it features a conspicuous flying saucer, a building launching off like a rocket, an out-of-place tightrope walker and inexplicable ballroom dancers on a bridge. Not only do its two searching protagonists, a man with a missing wife and a woman with a missing husband, never fall into one another's arms, neither one even gains awareness of the other's existence.

Clearly, Jia Zhangke, Still Life's director and a leading light of what's called the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, has the confidence for strong choices. Bred in an environment of meticulous state censorship, he and his cinematic cohort have acquired a skill set including, but not limited to, how to slip material of substance beneath the censors' radar and how to know when to say “Aw, the hell with it” — or the Mandarin equivalent thereof — and simply make the films one wanted to make in the first place. Yet another contradiction arises: despite being one of Jia's rare state-approved projects, it also looks through Western eyes like one of the most daming of his government's behavior.

The decaying riverside town of Fengjie plods through the process of gradual, deliberate self-destruction. As the Three Gorges Dam's construction grinds ahead just downstream, the water level rises, regularly rendering another, higher band of the city uninhabitable. Goverment employees show up to mark the newly projected water lines with plain, stern signage while de-construction workers tag the buildings slated for demolition with single characters in white spraypaint. Given its structures' pre-existing state of crumbliness and its people's air of thoroughgoing resignation, manually taking down Fengjie feels almost redundant.

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How would you choose to die if you could choose your own death? This isn’t a question that gets asked very often, but it’s an interesting and important one to consider. It’s probably safe to say that most of us would choose to die without suffering, at the end of a long life.

To some extent, we can choose our own deaths. When faced with an illness that is likely to be terminal, we don’t need to go out fighting. If one chooses instead to accept the terminal nature of the condition and make the most of his remaining time, palliative care may be the way to go.

If assisted suicide were an option, it would likely provide the most pleasant of deaths. Even with palliative care to minimize suffering in terminal illness, gradual demise can be unsettling for both the ill individual and for loved ones. Avoiding this experience could reasonably be a desirable option.

This is not to say that assisted suicide would be the best choice for everyone. If discomfort can be effectively managed through palliative care, the additional time could be valuable. One could get his affairs in order, make amends for regrets, and maybe do a few of those “things we’d like to do before we die”.

And, of course, do-it-yourself suicide in is always an option.

Most of us have a very strong aversion to death. Natural selection sees to it that those animals that are best able to avoid it survive longer and have more offspring. Aversion to death and strategies for its avoidance obviously confer survival benefits.

Aversion to death may also develop through associative learning. Death often follows painful and unpleasant circumstances, like illness or catastrophic injury. The temporal relationship with the distasteful circumstances reinforces the notion that death and suffering go hand in hand.

While our aversion to death is understandable, it isn’t entirely rational. The well established association between death and suffering is misleading. Death can be as easy as going to sleep. In fact, some people do die in their sleep.

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