Month: April 2014

Mohan Matthen parses the philosophy of visual pleasure:

Aesthetic pleasure is pleasure in contemplating something. This pleasure could be sensory, like the enjoyment one derives from looking at a painting or listening to music. Or it could be intellectual, like the pleasure of reading the latest Robert Harris. In both cases, pleasure in contemplation has to be distinguished from wanting an object for other uses.

Immanuel Kant in the 18th century was among the first to understand this. His example was that of a palace. You might long to live in it, or you might hate it for its extravagance and want to destroy it. But both of these responses are distinct from the pleasure or displeasure derived from merely looking at it. Only the latter pleasure counts as aesthetic.

Discussing sexual selection, Charles Darwin wrote:

‘When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colours before the female … it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner.’ Assuming that he really means beauty, and not sexual attractiveness, this is a mistake. It confuses sexual desire with aesthetic admiration. According to Darwin’s own theory, when a female looks at a male that way, she is not getting pleasure from looking at him for the sake of looking at him; rather, she is driven to mate with him. Darwin wrongly equates the lustful gaze with simple looking. Kant’s point was that aesthetic appreciation is disinterested. It is pleasure just in looking.

On the above photo by Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji:

The stunning Nasir al-mulk Mosque hides a gorgeous secret between the walls of its fairly traditional exterior: stepping inside is like walking into a kaleidoscope of colors. Every day, the rays of the early morning sun shine through colorful stained-glass windows, transforming the halls into a dazzling wonderland of rich hues, patterns, and light that play on the floor of the mosque.

In addition to the glorious display of light and color through the stained glass, the mosque features other striking elements of design and architecture, including intricate geometric tile designs, painted arches and niches, and spectacular domes. The usage of beautiful rose-colored tiles in the interior design earned the mosque the nickname Pink Mosque in popular culture.

The mosque, located in Shiraz, Iran, was built from 1876 to 1888 by the order of one of the Qajar Dynasty lords. The beautiful structure was designed by Muhammad Hasan-e-Memar and Muhammad Reza Kashi Paz-e-Shirazi.

More stunning shots of the mosque here.

A reader writes:

I have a response to two different but related items at the Dish: the recent post about why we like sad songs, and the moving, thoughtful remarks about suicide prevention from Jennifer Michael Hecht.  I want to offer up one of the most poignantly beautiful songs about suicide that I know of, Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World.”  Written in response to a friend’s suicide, the song basically catalogues the many things the departed friend is now missing out on.  The song manages to express mourning for the loss of the person who chose to leave “this sweet old world” and also becomes a sort of meditation on things for which we should be grateful.  It’s a remarkable song. Here’s Lucinda herself performing the song [unembeddable]. And it happens that Emmylou Harris also did a very nice cover [above]. Here are the lyrics:

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips
A sweet and tender kiss
The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone’s ring
Someone calling your name
Somebody so warm cradled in your arms
Didn’t you think you were worth anything
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

Millions of us in love, promises made good
Your own flesh and blood
Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one
Didn’t you think anyone loved you
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

Sending thanks from NYC, a city where one can be surrounded by tens of millions of people and yet still feel quite alone …

A new study (pdf) from the Urban Institute suggests that access to cars makes low-income Americans more likely to escape poverty. Co-author Rolf Pendall explains the findings:

Our evidence comes from two Department of Housing and Urban Development demonstration programs: Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing and Welfare to Work Vouchers. Both were designed to test whether housing choice vouchers—that is, subsidies that allowed participants to choose where they live—propelled low-income households into greater economic security. …

The results? Housing voucher recipients with cars tended to live and remain in higher-opportunity neighborhoods—places with lower poverty rates, higher social status, stronger housing markets, and lower health risks. Cars are also associated with improved neighborhood satisfaction and better employment outcomes. Among Moving to Opportunity families, those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to remain employed.

Emily Badger considers the implications:

All of these findings are as much a reflection on the value of cars as the relatively poor state of public transit.

The underlying issue also isn’t so much that cars create opportunity. Rather, it’s that we’ve created many places where you can’t access opportunity without a car. Which also means that we’ve created places that punish people who don’t have one (or can’t afford to get one). That’s a much larger critique. …

How, though, would you increase car access among the poor in a way that doesn’t simply saddle families with even more unsustainable expenses? Car ownership, for any kind of family, comes with all kinds of related costs: in insurance, in repairs, in gas. The burden of those costs, though, tends to weigh even more heavily on the low-income. They’re more likely to access financing through a predatory loan. They may have less access in the neighborhood to a reliable mechanic. A family living in a low-income neighborhood with high crime by definition faces higher insurance rates.

After an Evanston, IL middle school banned leggings on the logic that they are “distracting to boys,” seventh grader Sophie Hasty spearheaded a civil disobedience campaign against the new rule. In an interview with Amanda Hess, the 13-year-old girl explains how the dress code fight came about:

Last year, I never really paid attention to the dress code. But this year, teachers started to get stricter about it and giving stupid reasons for it. The reason was basically: “boys.” It’s a lot like saying that if guys do something to harass us, it’s our fault for that. We’re the ones being punished for what guys do. My friends and I got mad about it, and we would talk about it often earlier in the year, but we didn’t think we could really do anything about it.

Girls caught wearing leggings are forced to put on their gym shorts over them, which draws much more attention than the leggings themselves:

It’s humiliating to walk around the hallways wearing bright blue shorts. Boys yell “dress code!” when they see you. They act more inappropriate when you’re walking around in blue shorts when you’ve gotten dress-coded than when you’re just wearing leggings. I asked a teacher to tell us about an incident where a girl was wearing leggings and a guy was getting distracted. There hasn’t been one.

Eliana Dockterman calls the no-leggings rule akin to slut shaming:

The argument being made by school administrators is not that distant from the arguments made by those who accuse rape victims of asking to be assaulted by dressing a certain way. We tell women to cover themselves from the male gaze, but we neglect to tell the boys to look at something else. That this has a sexist undertone is demonstrated by the fact that the girls who had more curves to show off were the ones more often disciplined. “Students who were getting ‘dress-coded,’ or disciplined for their attire, tended to be girls who were more developed,” Juliet Bond, a parent of a student at Haven, told the Evanston Review.

Lucy Shapiro, a 12-year-old at Haven, added that when both she and a friend wore the same type of athletic shorts, a teacher disciplined her but not her friend because, she was told, “I had a different body type than my friend…With all the social expectations of being a girl, it’s already hard enough to pick an outfit without adding in the dress code factor.”