Michael Herbert Miller reviews ‘The Love Song of Jonny Valentine’ by Teddy Wayne · LRB 21 March 2013 The pop star Justin Bieber was born in London, Ontario, the son of two teenagers. His mother was a high-school dropout who liked beer and LSD, and his father an amateur musician. Jeremy Jack Bieber, also a heavy drinker, was in the local jail the night his son was born. ‘Anything is possible,’ Justin Bieber writes in Just Getting Started, his second ‘100 per cent official’ memoir, published last year. Bieber became a star in 2007, when his remarkable vocal range was discovered by a former Atlanta club promoter called Scott ‘Scooter’ Braun, the 31-year-old son of a dentist and an orthodontist from Greenwich, Connecticut, while he was browsing YouTube. Gotta change my answering machineNow that I’m alone’Cuz right now it says that weCan’t come to the phoneAnd I know it makes no sense’Cuz you walked out the doorBut it’s the only way I hear your voice anymore. It was only a matter of time before somebody wrote a novel about him.
Swords Into Silverware - Carnegie Mellon Today In the beginning was the Waffle Shop. And it was good. But man and woman do not live by breakfast alone. So they said, "Let there be lunch." What you notice most when you ask Carnegie Mellon art professor Jon Rubin to tell you the story of the creation of the Conflict Kitchen is how easy he makes it sound. For the Waffle Shop, think of a breakfast diner combined with the old television show Candid Camera, only there are no pranks and people aren't unwitting participants. Now, with the Waffle Shop well established, they were trying to figure out what new experience they could set into motion. And there you have it. Because there were so many countries, as they put it, to choose from, Rubin, Peña, and Weleski planned to make Conflict Kitchen a rotating take-out restaurant that would stay open for four months, then close, then re-open as another country. Kubideh seemed to be just the thing-a traditional Persian sandwich that's a favorite in Iran the way the hamburger is in America.
Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy! We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. Enjoy! What’s the big deal about uptalk? In The College of William & Mary’s Tom Linneman took a look at how women and men both use uptalk in his new study, “Gender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation on a Television Game Show” in Gender & Society. The punchline? What is uptalk? “Uptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech,” explains Linneman. Jeopardy! How do men use uptalk? Linneman found that men use uptalk as a way to signal uncertainty. Men’s uptalk increased when they were less confident, and also when they were correcting women — but not men. How do women use uptalk? As Linneman explains, “One of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show.”
Urvashi Butalia | Childless, naturally Updated: Tue, Mar 26 2013. 08 01 PM IST Urvashi Butalia has been at the forefront of the feminist movement in India for many years. This essay, which appears in the just published collection, Of Mothers And Others: Stories, Essays, Poems, edited by Jaishree Misra, is a meditation on her life as a single woman and her decision to not have children. By Urvashi Butalia It has been two years since the man I nearly married and I decided to part. Of Mothers And Others—Stories, Essays, Poems: Edited by Jaishree Misra, Zubaan, 304 pages, Rs495. Thirty years later. My friend’s statement stays with me. I think back to my friends who talk about being able to love unconditionally. I’ve just got my first job. My mother and I are talking. I’ve set up my own publishing house, publishing books by and about women. My friend Judith has been trying to have a child for many years. Mona’s daughter, Ayesha, comes to visit me. A month later Bina is pregnant. Two years later, she runs away again. I’m at home.
Melancholy and The Infinite Sadness Edgar Degas, Melancholy (1874) Affect theory takes on sadness, but is just getting through depression good enough? Ann Cvetkovich Depression: A Public Feeling Duke University Press, 2012.In Ann Cvetkovich’s new “critical memoir,” Depression: A Public Feeling, the University of Texas professor seeks to “defamiliarize” depression within a genealogy of spiritual despair, while attending to the relationship of the psyche to the soma as illustrated by how different cultures or the working class are more likely to somatize their depression. Can we, Cvetkovich asks at the book’s beginning, engage with depression as the “product of a sick culture”? Subscribe to TNI magazine for $2 and get TNI Vol. 14: Time Wednesday. Cvetkovich’s work on political depression comes out of the cultural studies subfield known as affect theory, of which groups like Feel Tank Chicago are a part, which attempts to bring private feelings back into the public sphere. Please fill in all fields
Social discovery vs. sociability One of things Dan Slater reports on in Love in the Time of Algorithms is online dating’s evolution into “social discovery,” which is not a matter of algorithms and social media helping users find a romantic partner per se but about their helping users find people with common interests of any sort. In my review of the book, I argued that this was online-dating companies’ attempt to rationalize and subsume sociability in general. The implicit pitch of social discovery is this: You can’t just meet people in the wild for no preconceived reason at all, without corporate mediation — that would be inconvenient, possibly scary, and worst of all, unpredictably awkward. You should be able to choose the sort of social encounters you want the same way you choose the sort of food you want to eat. It should be a consumer choice driven by individual autonomy. Bersani’s argument, admittedly, gets a bit abstract at this point.
VersoBooks.com Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today. The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. It is clear however that there is no necessary connection between these features. For 'the people' as such does not exist. Is this epidemic unleashing of blind crowds led by charismatic leaders really a contemporary phenomenon in countries such as ours? These measures are supported by an ideological campaign that justifies this restriction of rights by the evidence of failure to exhibit certain features that characterize national identity. Marine Le Pen's recent outburst is instructive in this respect. And so neither the 'populists' nor the people as presented by ritual denunciations of populism actually match their definition. Translated from French by David Fernbach. More in #Articles
Anarchism and the City Just a random thought before making dinner. I often find myself reflecting on Book IV of Plato’s Republic and how he cautions against the city becoming too large. What is the problem, I wonder, with a large city? In the context in which Plato was writing, I suspect the problem was one of the materiality of media. To form a collective, the elements that make up your collective must be able to relate to one another. In Plato’s context, these relations can be forged by sound-waves/speech or writing. Things fare better with writing. read on! This is the major argument against anarchism. The question is whether or not this medium or telephonic switchboard is still necessary in our current historical moment. The tenor of these politics has been anarchist through and through insofar as they haven’t relied on either the Party or the State. Like this: Like Loading...
Treasure troves of history and diversity Billions of dollars are being spent by the Gulf states on cultural projects and museums, including ones dedicated to photography, cars and calligraphy. However, the most important of these projects are the so-called ‘national’ museums, that ideally would tell the story of the country. Major projects are in the pipeline such as Qatar’s $434 million National Museum covering 46,000 square metres, that was awarded in September 2011 to South Korean firm Hyundai and is due to open in 2017. Abu Dhabi is expected to soon award a contract to build the 66,000-square-metre Zayed National Museum. Riyadh, Kuwait City and Manama host larger national museums while smaller ones exist in Muscat and the various emirates of the UAE. Many of the museums in the Gulf are not referred to as national museums per se, but they do play a part in portraying the narrative. In my repeated visits what I find even more interesting about what is shown in these national museums is what isn’t on display.
Race, Class, App.net: The Beginning of ‘White Flight’ from Facebook & Twitter? White flight happens both online and offline. What is it with some white people? Recently mentions of a new “real-time social feed” called App.net have been creeping into my Twitter feed. Just as the quietly simmering Diaspora and the running joke that is G+ were geared to seize on collective Facebook malaise, it seems App.net is trying to seize on some degree of unrest among Twitter users before taking on Facebook as well. At first, this struck me as a reasonable enough idea; I’m pretty much always willing to pay for the upgraded version of an app or service rather than be bombarded with ads (though in this case, my particular Twitter client and the AdBlock Plus add-on have already solved the problems of “promoted tweets” and Facebook ads). When I got to the $50 price point (pre-paid) of joining App.net for a year, however, I started to see the service a bit differently. Newsflash: People of Color use Twitter! Uh-oh, Grandma’s on Facebook. Ah, the suburbs.
Handkerchief Maps Tags: maps | second world war I have three half-metre-square maps of southern Europe framed on my living-room wall. Printed by the American air force on acetate rayon – lightweight, waterproof and hard to tear – the ‘handkerchief maps’ were given to my father-in-law, Howard Walker, who flew with the Australian Air Force during the Second World War. He started operational flying from Brindisi in October 1944, in Lancaster bombers that dropped supplies – guns, explosives, food and clothing – for partisans in northern Italy, Yugoslavia and northern Greece. ‘My job,’ he says, ‘was to ride up in the perspex nose of the plane to pick out landmarks of any sort that would help the navigator affirm or correct the plane’s course.’ They were frequently shot at. The detailed maps were a crucial escape aid in case the plane was shot down.
Paternity testing: Personal genomics companies will reveal DNA secrets Photo by Catherine Yeulet First Jackie learned her brother Alex was her uncle. Then things got a little weird. Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate. In the spring of 2012, the 34-year-old and her older sibling (their names have been changed) spit a few milliliters of saliva into plastic tubes and shipped them off to 23andMe, a personal genomics company, for consumer-grade scans of their DNA. Alex wasn't quite so into it. The two agreed to look over their reports together, though. When Jackie wrote about the glitch on the 23andMe message board, she got a quick reply: That's not an error, another user wrote; it means that you and Alex are more distantly related than you think. Alex, who is eight years older than his sister, refused to believe the news. Jackie had sent in her DNA to learn something new about herself but ended up more confused than ever. Last December, 23andMe announced that it would be cutting prices for its genome scans. If this is good or bad it's hard to say.
On Un-publics: Former Publics, Future Publics, Almost Publics, Observers and Genealogies The Diversity of “Non-Publics”: Former Publics, Future Publics Publics are far from constituting a monolithic ensemble, an obedient army marching in good order. The nature of their concerns allows defining at least three types of publics. Aesthetic publics (the reading publics of literature, the active publics of theater, the connoisseur publics of music and the arts) have always been singled out as exemplary by theorists of the public sphere, and by Habermas in particular. Of course, the three types of publics outlined above are ideal types. A Matter of Life and Death First of all, publics can die a natural death. Publics can disappear because they have been made invisible. Publics can also disappear because they stopped being visible on their own; because they chose to become invisible. Most of the “non publics” discussed here tend to be publics that used to exist and exist no longer. No. But there is yet another form of “non public.” Both result in observable facts.
8==> « I don’t have a LinkedIn page but if I did it would be filled with dick jokes. When you get a LinkedIn page you get a LinkedIn Body—it’s you, reconstituted as a linear aggregate of achievement. A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money. The LinkedIn Body is promiscuous, and its promiscuity is purely professional—professionally pure. I don’t want to have a LinkedIn Body and this is why I don’t have a page on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Body’s look persuades follow professionals that it never has funny thoughts about dicks. What does Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, have to say about this? What Zuckerberg is saying here is that he thinks we should all have LinkedIn Bodies. What does Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan, have to say about this? 4Chan is a community of affinities of what the LinkedIn Body holds in privacy—a water cooler in the dark. 4Chan lives in symbiosis with the LinkedIn Body. You only live once. Lots of people out there hate Life. APPENDIX: Sample CV