Month: February 2011

by Zoe Pollock

Tara McGinley admires:

Intimate 1920s-era portraits of Australian criminals from the archives of the Sydney Police. It’s almost like these dark and moody mug shots came straight out of a Vogue fashion spread.

by Zoe Pollock

Dave Gilson profiles gaming guru Jane McGonigal:

McGonigal's ultimate fantasy is to create a 1,000-year-long game played by every single person on the planet, "achieving a new scale of cooperation, coordination, and cocreation."

What might this "Long Game" look like, and how would it suck in several billion players? McGonigal offers no solid answers, but she's sure that one-world gamer-ment will fix everything: "When every family in the remote villages of Africa, or in what today are the slums of India, or throughout Nicaragua—when they and everyone else in the world has access to The Long Game, that will mean greater access to education, culture, and economic opportunity as well."

If you can get past the manic wishfulness for a sec, McGonigal's basic point is worth considering: From chess to Angry Birds, good games are profoundly engaging—they dole out psychological rewards that keep us coming back for more; the result is not manipulation, but motivation. 

by Zoe Pollock

NYT reports:

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood joined other opposition groups meeting with Vice President Omar Suleiman on Sunday in what seemed a significant departure in the nation’s uprising and political history.

A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Nassar, said the huge and sometimes violent demonstrations that have paralyzed Cairo for 13 days, reverberating around the Middle East, would continue “until the political path can have a role in achieving the aspirations of the protesters” — an apparent reference to their goal of removing Mr. Mubarak.

AJE:

4:44pm As opposition leader Ayman Noor of the Ghad party says that protesters will not leave until Mubarak steps down, a young couple named Ahmad and Mona are married in the middle of Tahrir Square:

12:58pm Our correspondent in Cairo says there's a "renewed energy" among the crowds in Tahrir Square, with a heavy flow of people making their way into the square. Music is played and the crowds are chanting "Irhul, irhul", meaning "leave, leave".

The BBC:

1314: The carnival atmosphere is back on the square with woman and children joining in, but there is also a renewed sense of determination… "Nissren, a protester who is sleeping here in the square, had just told me how Christians and Muslim are in the square together with none of the old tension. She says unlike before the 25th [of Jan], there is no sexual harassment of women. She believes things have now changed in Egyptian society. She says they will wait in the square 'one day, one week, one month, one year', whatever it takes to get rid of Mubarak. She says they will not get bored."

The Arabist weighs in on Suleiman:

With Hillary Clinton's backing for Suleiman as the lead on a transition in Egypt, we are quickly heading towards the formation of another strongman regime that cannot be trusted to deliver on the changes needed in the political environment. There needs to be a mechanism to integrate the opposition into the heart of the state to grant full legitimacy to its demand, and reduce the perception (and reality) of Omar Suleiman being the sole man at the helm.

Mr. ElBaradei told Fareed Zakaria of CNN:

It's a question of credibility. While Omar Suleiman was talking about freeing all the detainees, all the young people who are being detained, I got nine people detained immediately after meeting with me at my home here. They were kept for a couple of days. They were just released yesterday.

Max Fisher tweets:

Egyptian military makes fatal error of detaining Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin. It's so on.

nolanjazeera via Twitter:

2 #aje correspondents now held by #Egypt army @SherineT @AymanM – #FreesherineT #Freeayman. Please retweet urgently!!!!

AJE on the religious atmosphere in Cairo:

11:19am In a sign of unity, crowds in Tahrir Square are chanting "We are one, we are one" ahead of the prayers to be held at noon for those killed over the past 13 days of protest. "Muslims and Copts hand in hand for a new dawn to rise" is another chant and NadiaE wrote on Twitter: "Off to Tahrir to attend Christian mass. My father – a 73-yr-old ill, bearded conservative Muslim – is with me."

Robert Fisk analyzes:

The dark cynicism of the regime remains. Many pro-democracy demonstrators have noticed a strange phenomenon. In the months before the protests broke out on 25 January, a series of attacks on Coptic Christians and their churches spread across Egypt. The Pope called for the protection of Egypt's 10 per cent Christians. The West was appalled. Mubarak blamed it all on the familiar "foreign hand". But then after 25 January, not a hair of a Coptic head has been harmed. Why? Because the perpetrators had other violent missions to perform? When Mubarak goes, terrible truths will be revealed. The world, as they say, waits.

Kristof:

I’m so deeply moved by the grit that Egyptians have shown in struggling against the regime — and by the help that some provided me, at great personal risk, in protecting me from thugs dispatched by America’s ally. Let’s show some faith in the democratic ideals for which these Egyptians are risking their lives.

(Photo: Tahrir Square an hour and a half ago, by justimage via Twitter)

 

by Zoe Pollock

Ronald Dworkin philosophizes:

We value great art most fundamentally not because the art as product enhances our lives but because it embodies a performance, a rising to artistic challenge. We value human lives well lived not for the completed narrative, as if fiction would do as well, but because they too embody a performance: a rising to the challenge of having a life to lead.

by Zoe Pollock

Mark Edmundson sees the ultimate narcissism in our literary taste today:

[T]he media have another reason for not trying to shape taste: It pisses off the readers. They feel insulted, condescended to; they feel dumb. And no one will pay you for making him feel dumb. Public entertainment generally works in just the opposite way—by making the consumer feel like a genius.

Even the most august publications and broadcasts no longer attempt to shape taste. They merely seek to reflect it. They hold the cultural mirror up to the reader—what the reader likes, the writer and the editor like. They hold the mirror up and the reader and—what else can he do?—the reader falls in love. The common reader today is someone who has fallen in love, with himself.

 

by Zoe Pollock

Phil Plait shatters Bill O'Reilly's latest tirade (above):

Wow. I guess O’Reilly hasn’t discovered Google. Or any astronomy textbook written in the past thirty years. Because we know how the Moon got there (a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth a glancing blow about 100 million years after it formed, splashing debris into orbit which coalesced to form the Moon). And we know how the Sun got there (a small region of a vast cloud of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity, compressed in the center, ignited nuclear fusion, and Our Star was born).

It gets worse. He asks why we have a Moon, and Mars doesn’t. Pssst, Bill: Mars has two moons. …

Now it’s possible that Bill is being metaphoric; he doesn’t literally mean the Moon, or tides, or anything like that: he means rules and order in general. We have the laws of physics, and we don’t know why those exist the way they do.

That’s true enough, and an interesting field of exploration. But to jump to say, "God did it" is a losing bet. They used to say that about thunder. They used to say that about people getting sick. They used to say that about, oh, why the Moon and Sun are in the sky, and why we have tides. Say.

But now we understand those things. We understand them because we’re curious, we humans, and we developed a method of understanding the Universe. It’s called science.

by Zoe Pollock

Slate excerpts Jesse Bering's new book, The Belief Instinct:

If you've ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally "theorize" about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.

The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the "one big thing" that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Could it tell us something about how we find meaning in the universe?

 

by Zoe Pollock

"I had never given much thought to milk and bread and often had neither in my house, but now like other Chicagoans I found myself compelled to lay in supplies. There was a strange cheerfulness abroad, as if the heavens had made our everyday concerns irrelevant and demonstrated our common dependence." – Roger Ebert, remembering the great storm of 1967.

by Zoe Pollock

Gustavo Turner interviews director David Lynch on his foray into music and his career in film:

[T]ake George Lucas or Spielberg: They're doing, in my mind, what they truly love. But what they truly love, zillions of people love, so they're multimillionaires. I'm doing what I truly love, but the audience is way smaller. And Don Van Vliet was doing what he truly loved and the audience is hardly there at all.

But it's OK, because if you do anything that you don't love for money or fame, you die. You can't live doing that. It's hollow. It's a joke. So be thankful you're able to do what you love.

by Patrick Appel

Buzzfeed put together a gallery of "impossible celebrity couples." A Dish fave: