Ars Technica. LIFE MAGAZINE - THE SINS OF THE FATHERS - 905W-000-052. 221Q-278-027 Photograph by Grant Delin "I knew when I met the Damms I would never forget them,"says Mary Ellen Mark, posing for Jesse Damm. "I did this story to help these children and others like them. " Doing the Right Thing Eight years ago LIFE published a series of wrenching photographs by Mary Ellen Mark of Linda and Dean Damm and their two children--a homeless family in Los Angeles. Our readers rose to the occasion: You sent money, household goods, offers of help. You opened your hearts, and your wallets, to a family in need. Eight years ago LIFE spent a week with the Damms, a deeply troubled family in Los Angeles. 221Q-250-025 Crissy, her stepfather, Dean, and mother, Linda, nap in the afternoon.
Deep in the desert, two hours north of Disneyland, down a dirt track through the cacti, mesquite and Joshua trees, is a former pig farm. 221Q-197-019 Linda has 16 tattoos, including the names and birth dates of her fiercely protective older children. LIFE MAGAZINE - A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF A HOMELESS FAMILY - 905W-000-031. 210K-01X-01X Mary Ellen Mark helps homeless Crissy Damm get ready for school.
Photograph by Jeffrey Chong There are fine pictures in LIFE every month, but we want to call special attention to the contributions of three photographers in this issue. The remarkable range of Mary Ellen Mark has never been more evident. On the cover is her portrait of a provocative Meryl Streep. Inside, Mark's powerful picture essay on a homeless California family is gritty photojournalism at its best. Of her session with Streep, Mark says, modestly, "She understands how to work with a camera, so she makes you look good as a photographer.
" Spending a week with a homeless family is a long way from a studio session with a film star. Elizabeth P. A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF A HOMELESS FAMILYA WEEK IN THE LIFE OF A HOMELESS FAMILY by Anne Fadiman Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark According to the U.S. 210K-001-013 Jesse naps under Runtley's guardianship. The Trimar Blood Center. Big Tujunga Canyon. APERTURE - MARY ELLEN MARK -904I-000-003. TINY: I've known Mary Ellen for about fourteen years now. I like taking pictures with her. And she's nice, she's a different type of person-outgoing and free of the world. MH: Do you like looking at the pictures of you and your friends that were first published in her book, Streetwise? TINY: I don't know. 221Q-304-003 Mary Ellen Mark, Chrissy Damm and Adam Johnson, Llano, California, 1994. When I was photographing the Damm family, I would just spend all day. 200N-090-25A Mary Ellen Mark, The "tank" at the Houston County Jail, Texas, 1977 I was doing a story, one of those wonderful kinds of assignments that magazines would give me years ago. 215U-064-004 Mary Ellen Mark, Wildwood, New Jersey, 1991.
Sometimes writers fictionalize reality. 214U-403-005 Mary Ellen Mark, Mary Ann and Ophelia, Mississippi, 1990. "Commercial viability. " William Morgan. Where Have All the Hippies Gone? « The Dabbler. …Long time ago. Rita recalls some favourite American Eccentrics… For Americans, an enduring and beloved stereotype is the English Eccentric. Lauded in literature and film, the Eccentric retains his place of privilege in the pantheon of British life adored by Americans. The cast includes the Royals, cheeky Cockney lads, women with amazing hats, and little old ladies in thatched cottages serving tea and scones.
I knew my fair share of Eccentrics during my life in England, many of them in my own family. The first thing I learned was that, like so many of the differences between the two countries, English Eccentrics are born but in America they are self-made, often by ingesting large amounts of illegal drugs. These are some of the American Eccentrics I encountered in those years: The neighbor I first saw through a window, naked and covered head to toe in green paint. The spaced-out couple who declared their intent to start a family. Long time passing. WHERE THE WIND HOWLS. A Walk on the Wild Side: in a new series, Robert Macfarlane, acclaimed author of “The Wild Places”, walks the Mourne Mountains in Northern Ireland, formed 60m years ago... “Don’t travel in your walking gear,” David instructed me the day before I flew to Belfast.
“Even now, it’s still not quite wise to turn up at the airport with a pair of boots and an English accent.” His worries continued once I’d landed. We drove south towards the Mournes, the small granite mountain group that lies in the south-east of County Down, close to the border with the Republic. David had filled up with petrol before leaving, and picked his roads with care. David and I have known each other since we were eight. The mountains of Mourne are probably most famous for sweeping down to the sea in a stickily sentimental song of the same name, written in 1896 by Percy French.
We parked up close to the sea. Inland and westwards, though, the summits of the Mournes were cloaked in cloud. Photograph Gary McParland. Khmer Rouge. Adam Yauch and Paul’s Boutique: How dumb court decisions have made it nearly impossible for artists to sample the way the Beastie Boys did. Frazer Harrison. The death on Friday of Adam Yauch, best known as the Beastie Boys’ MCA, surely sent many of us back to old albums we may not have heard for a while. And anyone who threw on Paul’s Boutique, the Boys’ best album, was surely struck by the sense that they don’t make records like that anymore.
That’s not just because tastes and styles have changed. The entire album is based on lavish sampling of other recordings. “Shake Your Rump,” which leads Slate’s #MCATracks playlist, features samples of 14 songs by 12 separate artists. Perhaps the main reason—and certainly the saddest reason—that it still sounds distinctive is that a rapidly shifting legal and economic landscape made it essentially impossible to repeat. In the late 1980s, sampling occupied a legal gray area. Hip-hop sampling began as a live technique, with DJs working turntables at parties and clubs. 1990 saw the release of both M.C.
Sports and Pop Culture from Bill Simmons and our rotating cast of writers. Summer Is The Goddamn Worst. The Rust Belt of France: Montpellier. My wife and I have been living in France for the past nine months in a city near the Mediterranean coast. But it’s not quite what you think. It’s not Paris, or the French Riviera, or some quaint little town surrounded by vineyards in the countryside. We live in Montpellier, the largest city in France’s poorest region, the Languedoc-Roussillon, which has the highest jobless rate in a country that just hit a twelve-year high for unemployment. In other words, we live in the Rust Belt of France.
Before we moved here we had, like most Americans, imagined France to be a place of bustling outdoor cafés, sprawling esplanades, grands chateaux, fois gras, and day-drinking. And we’ve found this to be partly true. We live in the heart of Montpellier’s well-kept medieval centre ville, in the fifth-floor apartment of an 18th-century building with stone floors and a spiral staircase. But there’s another France down here in the Languedoc-Roussillon that permeates our idyllic France. It didn’t work. IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon. The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 14.1 (Spring 2012).
This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details. Last year The Economist published a special report not on the global financial crisis or the polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Article after article cited one big number after another to bolster the claim that we live in an age of information superabundance. The data are impressive: 300 billion emails, 200 million tweets, and 2.5 billion text messages course through our digital networks every day, and, if these numbers were not staggering enough, scientists are reportedly awash in even more information. Some see this as information abundance, others as information overload. Two Narratives Each of these narratives points to real changes in how technology impacts humans. Endnotes. Tehran Politics: Are the Mullahs Losing Their Grip?
“You are not a wise man, you tyrant,” raps the Iranian female singer Bahar. “Why do your clothes smell like blood? . . . Why do you crush this cry for justice? The people don’t deserve such disdain.” Throughout Iran’s history, political power has clustered around strongmen—often shahs or kings until the Islamic revolution of 1979—rather than institutions. As the executive center’s authority has grown, the president and his supporters have come to believe that the “period of religious politics will soon be over” (in the words of Ahmadinejad’s controversial and secularist chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei), leading them to hazard acts of increasing independence from the theocrats in both domestic and foreign affairs.
Related Essay Unraveling the Mykonos Killings In her painstaking new book, Roya Hakakian recounts the Tehran-backed 1992 assassination of Iranian exiles in Berlin—and the legal and diplomatic complications it spawned. Jamsheed K. The Browser | Writing Worth Reading. Consuming Women. The first lap dancing club in the UK opened in 1995. Since then lap dancing has become part of mainstream culture, with the 300+ lap dancing clubs nationwide visited by well-known figures such as Stephen Hawkings and Rihanna. Jennifer Hayashi Danns, 28, worked as a lap dancer for two years whilst studying at university. She spoke to Ian Sinclair about the industry and her new book Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing, which she co-authored with Sandrine Leveque from feminist campaigning group OBJECT. What factors have driven the rapid increase in lap dancing clubs in the UK? Many feminist groups believe that the rise in lap dancing clubs is related to a piece of legislation that allowed lap dancing clubs to open under the same licensing regulations as cafes or karaoke bars.
However, this can only be part of the reason for their proliferation. The reason that I ended up writing this book was because of my perception of the depictions of the lap dancing industry in the media. Tokyo through the letterbox | Spike Japan. Reams have been written about the suicide-as-spectacle of novelist Yukio Mishima’s death; less, perhaps, about the cartographies and circumstances of his birth. He was born Kimitake Hiraoka, on January 14, 1925, the first child of a civil servant, of a family of what would once—then, indeed—have been called “very good stock”, and his wife, of a family of Confucian and Chinese scholars, in Yotsuya, once on the fringe but now already in the heart of a Tokyo that was rapidly expanding and shifting its center of gravity westward, in a district known then as Nagasumi-cho (永住町, “long dwell town”, although he would be gone from the neighborhood by the age of eight) but which was reorganized and renamed Yotsuya 4-chome in a municipal redistricting on April 1, 1943 (one would have thought they would have had better things to do), before being pulverized to smithereens by American air-raids less than two years later.
私の家は殆ど鼻歌まじりと言いたいほどの気楽な速度で、傾斜の上を辷りだした。 坂を下りて来たのは一人の若者だった。 He was right. Wang Hui · The Rumour Machine: The Dismissal of Bo Xilai · LRB 10 May 2012. ‘March 14’ used to be shorthand in China for the 2008 unrest in Tibet; now it stands for the 2012 ‘Chongqing incident’. It is unusual for municipal policy to have national impact, and rarer still for the removal of a city leader to become international news.
Some observers have argued that the dismissal of Bo Xilai, the party secretary of Chongqing, is the most important political event in China since 1989. Stories began to circulate on 6 February, when Wang Lijun, Chongqing’s police chief, fled to the US consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu. Neither the Chinese nor the American authorities have revealed anything about what followed, the US saying only that Wang had an appointment at the consulate and left the next day of his own accord.
As the stories multiplied, two main interpretations emerged. Both interpretations, one denying, the other privileging the political character of the Chongqing events, are partial. 27 April. Don't Like the Message? Maybe It's the Messenger - Justin Fox. By Justin Fox | 11:29 AM May 4, 2012 We all like to think we can evaluate information and arguments rationally, regardless of where they come from. But we don’t. As Yale Law School’s Dan Kahan, who has studied this stuff a lot, puts it: People feel that it is safe to consider evidence with an open mind when they know that a knowledgeable member of their cultural community accepts it.
When the information seems to be coming from or favoring the other side, all bets are off. In a famous 1950s psychology experiment, researchers showed students from two Ivy League colleges a film of an American football game between their schools in which officials made a series of controversial decisions against one side. To which I can only add that, although I know nothing about the 1951 Dartmouth-Princeton game other than what I’ve read in the cited article, I’m confident that if anything the refs went far too easy on Dartmouth. This was brought home by an experiment I inadvertently unleashed last week. Home. Khrushchev in Water Wings: On Mao, Humiliation and the Sino-Soviet Split | Past Imperfect. Khrushchev and Mao meet in Beijing, July 1958. Khrushchev would find himself less formally dressed at their swimming-pool talks a week later.
The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is that, standing just 5 feet 3 inches tall, he was the one member of the politburo who did not tower over the man he would replace, the 5-foot-6 Stalin. It is also possible that, had he been a better swimmer, the disastrous break between the Communist parties of Russia and China—the Sino-Soviet Split, which would help guarantee the west victory in the Cold War—might have been averted. On compromise “If you cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.” Sources. Project Syndicate - the highest quality op-ed ( opinion-editorial ) articles and commentaries.
Investigation, Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi. Journal home : Nature. Raphael Lis, Charles C. Karrasch, Michael G. Poulos, Balvir Kunar, David Redmond, Jose G. Barcia Duran, Chaitanya R. Badwe, William Schachterle, Michael Ginsberg, Jenny Xiang, Arash Rafii Tabrizi, Koji Shido, Zev Rosenwaks, Olivier Elemento, Nancy A.
Speck, Jason M. Gaseous emissions from dinosaurs may have warmed prehistoric earth. Pollution: the great leveller | Centre for Science and Environment.