When the Past is Always Present - Al Majalla.
Personal Stories. Nelson Mandela's Legacy. Ever since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after winning his country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the national anthem has consisted of two songs spliced—not particularly mellifluously—together. One is “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” or “God Bless Africa,” sung at black protest rallies during the forty-six years between the rise and fall of apartheid. The other is “Die Stem,” (“The Call”), the old white anthem, a celebration of the European settlers’ conquest of Africa’s southern tip.
It was Mandela’s idea to juxtapose the two, his purpose being to forge from the rival tunes’ discordant notes a powerfully symbolic message of national harmony. Not everyone in Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was convinced when he first proposed the plan. The chief task the ANC would have upon taking over government, Mandela reminded his colleagues at the meeting, would be to cement the foundations of the hard-won new democracy. And so it proved. In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness Of Roald Dahl. Angry Man by ALEX CARNEVALE The stories are brilliant and the imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately, there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.- Noel Coward Everyone knows Roald Dahl's last novel Matilda, his seemingly pro-female examination of a talented young girl oppressed by the provincialism of her parents.
What they usually do not know is that the original draft of the book painted the protagonist as a devilish little hussy who only later becomes "clever", perhaps because she found herself without very much to do after torturing her parents. Dahl's editor Stephen Roxburgh completely revised Dahl's last novel and, in doing so, turned it into his most popular book. In everything good there is also something bad, and this was not only the theme Dahl took up in much of his work for both children and adults, but it was also true of him personally.
I am all fucked out. At his writing desk Dear Roald, Love, I Love You Christopher Hitchens, You Irritating Bastard. Christopher Hitchens, along with Robert Hughes and Spy magazine's Michèle Bennett, first started me imagining that I would like someday to be a journalist and critic. These jaundiced observers of the follies of the late 1980s and early 1990s had in common an elegant style of attack, and a positive relish in the peppering, roasting, carving and dishing up of sacred cows.
Hughes, by far the most scholarly of the three, went on to produce magnificent books and documentaries (and to survive the terrible injuries he sustained in a super-hairy car crash in 1999); Bennett's true identity has never been revealed, but I hope he or she is thriving, and writing still. I like to imagine I've been enjoying the Bennett oeuvre all along, under some other august byline.
But Christopher Hitchens! Ach, Christopher Hitchens. How I have loved him, despite the ordeals he has put me through. In this VF piece Hitchens recounted with unmistakable delight the media rumpus occasioned by Hell's Angel. Really! Our Lives Are Not What We Think | Raptitude.com. Last week I asked the readers a simple question: Where are you right now in your life, at this exact moment? I tried not to lead people to answer in any particular way, just to share the moment they’re in and how they felt about it.
I was blown away by the response. So many colorful little corners of time and space. Right now there are 140-some and counting, not including a few dozen sent in email form. A lot of people said that it hadn’t really occurred to them to ask that very basic question (where the hell am I right now, exactly) and that it was quite a catharsis to take a minute or two to do just that. Let’s get something straight It’s hard to really observe the moment without its apparent context pushing in on it, that context being the rest of our lives, before and after. We often can’t help but view the present moment in terms of what it means for other moments in the “chain” and for the character that needs them all to go a certain way.
The beginning of time, at the dinner table. Philip Gould: 'If you accept death, fear disappears' | Politics. Philip Gould is boiling the kettle, chatting casually about football, when he says something that chokes me. "You know, this period of death is astonishing. " The once-imposing spin doctor looks terrible – cheeks hollowed, jeans unfilled, hair lank, a tube inserted into his stomach to feed him – but is talking with such tenderness, such love and hope. "The moment you enter the death phase it is a different place. It's more intense, more extraordinary, much more powerful. " In a way, he says, it's a privilege to be in his position – to have a deadline, to be given a chance to sort everything. Is he scared of dying? Gould, 61, has spent a lifetime spinning and strategising politics. He went to grammar school, left with one O-level, regretted his laziness and started again.
Today, he wants to talk about all he has learned, but it's a very different story to the one he expected to be telling. "It was only when I got my diagnosis that I realised how much she loved me," he says quietly. Murder Most Academic by Theodore Dalrymple. A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice. The Sun/Sipa Press Serial killer Stephen Griffiths In some modern societies—and certainly Britain is one of them—satire is prophecy. This makes effective satire difficult because reality so soon catches up with it.
Satire is also dangerous and perhaps even irresponsible, for no idea is too absurd, it seems, for our political masters and bureaucratic elite to take seriously and put into practice—at public expense, of course, never their own. Sometimes reality is far in advance of satire when it comes to absurdity. The results, however, are not always funny. Stephen Griffiths is 40. The doctors were right. He remained violent toward women. Such was the man whom the University of Bradford selected to pursue a doctorate in homicide studies, a subdivision of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies, with fees and living expenses paid by the government. One of the three victims was 43-year-old Susan Rushworth. A Hanging. This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books. It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard.
We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two. One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Well, quick march, then. We set out for the gallows. “Wriggling about, eh? Eyewitness to an Execution.
Mother’s boys: conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis. I often observe them in court. They sigh and observe how their son – accused of 15 murders – has lost weight. They wink at him furtively. They beg the guard to loosen his handcuffs, oblivious to the voice of the prosecutor: ‘…demonstrating their own superiority over people of non-Slavic origin, they attacked the victim K., whose external appearance indicated Asian ethnicity, and struck him with a knife no less than 26 times in the head and other parts of the body, causing wounds to the chest, which penetrated the right and left pleural and abdominal cavities with damage to the right and left lungs, the left part of the diaphragm, the spleen, the third and ninth ribs on the left, and the chest, as a result of which the victim died from severe loss of blood’.
I want to ask: did you know, did you guess, did you support this? What were you thinking when they were arrested? Do you believe the judges? Have you come to terms with this? Elena Krivets, academic, mother of Vasily Krivets. The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce.
I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid. In the room is a VCR. No one sets a clock, but there is a sense of time passing. The things not to think about are: the money you are spending. When it is complete you screw on the forest-green lid, write your name and your wife’s name on the label, put it all in a biohazard bag, and ring the buzzer. The worst thing that can happen in that room is “failure to produce.” The nurse will take the biohazard bag to a room filled with machines. My wife has purchased a half-dozen pairs of lucky socks that she wears to the clinic.
Three years of waiting. My wife has purchased a half-dozen pairs of lucky socks that she wears to the clinic. I lose some weight. 'Free Sperm Donors' and the Women Who Want Them. My Fertility Crisis. Things I have learnt from and about IVF. Encouraged by Belle & Tedra’s recent posts, and just loving Jim Henley’s recent comment: “I’d just like to say that all the ladyblogging about ladyparts and ladyissues only of interest to ladies around here lately has been awesome. I’m learning a lot from it”; I’m going to share some observations as I near the end of my third round of IVF.Embryos are not babies You might think someone so eager to have children as to undergo months of difficult and expensive treatment would have a hard-core view on embryos and babies.
You’d be right. Twice now, I’ve had two embryos placed in my uterus. Despite what we went through to create these embryos, I am left with the cold conviction that they were opening gambits, and no more. I believe more firmly now that an embryo is a step along the way to becoming a human, but it’s not a human. During IVF, women have frequent trans-vaginal ultrasounds to see how their ovarian follicles are developing and to measure the lining of the uterus. ***P.P.S. The Virgin Father. America’s First Great Global Warming Debate | History & Archaeology.
The Secret History of Guns - Magazine. The Last of the Aryans. Nobody knows of their real origin or if they are indeed Aryans. But, regarded as long-lost members of a purebred ‘Master Race’ settled in the Himalayas, Brokpas attract curious visitors, some of who try to satisfy their fantasy of having pure Aryan babies In 2007, filmmaker Sanjeev Sivan released his documentary Achtung Baby: In Search of Purity on the phenomenon of German women travelling to Indian villages by the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir to get impregnated by men they believe to be racially pure Aryans.
These villages are inhabited by a tribe called Brokpas, who are rumoured to be the ‘last pure specimens’ of the Aryan race. Across the world, several people still regard Aryans as the ‘Master Race’—tall, blue-eyed blondes endowed with superior intelligence and values. Shooting the documentary was far from easy for Sivan. With the help of an Indian colonel, he traced a German lady holidaying with a Brokpa man in a resort in Leh. The film doesn’t reveal the German woman’s face. Our Experiments with Fasting. A dharna, Wikipedia informs us, ‘is a fast undertaken at the door of an offender, especially a debtor, as a means of obtaining compliance with a demand for justice, such as payment of debt.’ Clearly then, at the very root of our most potent symbol of political protest, lies the fast. But in its original form, the idea is not a modern or medieval invention, it is part of a much older Indo-European tradition. To turn to Wikipedia again, ‘Fasting was used as a method of protesting injustice in pre-Christian Ireland, where it was known as Troscadh or Cealachan.
It was detailed in the contemporary civic codes, and had specific rules by which it could be used. The fast was often carried out on the doorstep of the home of the offender.’ For an idea to be shared between Aryavarta and Ireland, it must have had roots deep in the Indo-European past. Gandhi’s innovation was to bring a moral purpose to the fast that perhaps it never had before. The story in Punjab was somewhat different. An excerpt from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American businessman named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation: a minty, frothy toothpaste named “Pepsodent” that, he promised, was going to be huge. Hopkins, at the time, was one of the nation's most famous advertising executives. He was the ad man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles “with live steam” (while neglecting to mention that every other company used the same method).
He had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians. But Hopkins' greatest contribution would be helping to create a national toothbrushing habit. Before Pepsodent, almost no Americans brushed their teeth.
A decade after Hopkins' advertising campaigns, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a daily ritual for more than half the population. Why Storytellers Lie - Maura Kelly - Entertainment. A new book explains why humans like to spin yarns—and why we're so likely to stretch the truth when we do. Twentieth Century Fox In a new book out next week, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, author Jonathan Gotschall discusses why we humans have such a strong interest in stories, and argues that we're all storytellers—and all liars too, even if most of us don't realize it, even if most of us are lying primarily to ourselves.
As way of getting into the question of why we're so likely to bend the truth (and so clueless about doing it), let's first talk about why stories are so important to us. "Some thinkers, following Darwin, argue that the evolutionary source of story is sexual selection, not natural selection," Gottschall writes. "Maybe stories...aren't just obsessed with sex; maybe they are ways of getting sex by making gaudy, peacocklike displays of our skill, intelligence, and creativity—the quality of our minds.
" Better Off Dead. A stainless steel casket with cherry veneer inserts can set you back more than a foreclosed townhouse in the exurbs of Las Vegas. Then there’s the embalming, the funeral service, the cemetery plot, the headstone, the charge for digging a grave, the charge for filling that grave back up, the eternal lawn-mowing and weeding fees. These days, millions of us can’t afford to die, much less spend our afterlives slumbering in a suitable memorial property of our own. Instead, in this age of widening income disparity, all that most of us can hope for is two and a half hours in an 1,800 degree oven, then a time-shared hereafter on the living-room mantels of our surviving relatives, homeless for eternity in a discount keepsake urn.
This, at least, was the spin The New York Times gave to the rising popularity of cremation in a December 2011 article titled “In Tough Times, a Boom in Cremations as a Way to Save Money.” It was a rather funereal way of interpreting what is in fact great news. Why Go Out? | Brick Magazine. The Politics of FIFA and the Hijab - By Curtis R. Ryan.
The Ritz-Carlton of Failed States - By Michael Z. Wise. The Aid Bitchslap « Shotgun Shack. Words as Weapons. Touré: Inside the Racist Mind. Talking With Your Fingers. Under the Gaze of Theory. Night Moves. The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to “Urban Growth” Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation. Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative. THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH. Intoxicating Trends. Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness by Charles Murray. Deirdre N. McCloskey: Happyism. Adam Hochschild, Antiwar Critics Forgotten on Oscar Night. WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? Will Success Spoil the Chicago School? Why Elites Fail. I want to be alone: the rise and rise of solo living. How Smart Phones Are Turning Our Public Places Into Private Ones - Technology.
AS THE COACH AT A HIGH SCHOOL NEAR CHICAGO, MIKE POWELL - 02.13.12. Albena Azmanova: Critical Political Judgement. Smithsonian Magazine's Annual Photo Contest - In Focus. Among the asexuals. The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius. The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever. Wasting Away: Can a Gates Foundation-Funded Toilet-Design Initiative End a Foul Practice in the Developing World? Psyched Out - June 22, 2012. Porn’s taboo transsexual stars. One billion slum dwellers. Brothel, Washington DC. Paying To Play: Interview With A John. Charles Nicholl · ‘The Battle of Anghiari’ · LRB 26 April 2012. A Brief History of Anxiety. Uncomfortable in our skin: the body-image report.
Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of the arts | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2012. Apocalyptic Daze by Pascal Bruckner, City Journal Spring 2012. The Hemingway Papers / Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy. Why French Parents Are Superior by Pamela Druckerman. A Point of View: In defence of obscure words. Kids on the Internet: danah boyd’s controversial idea that kids should be allowed to roam free. Killer at 70,000 Feet | Military Aviation.