The Haunting of Payless. N+1: Mr. Hamrah, thank you so much for talking to us today. A. S. Hamrah: Call me Scott. n+1: Scott, what do you think of the new Payless logo? ASH: This Payless logo change is not good, and it reflects the usual branding problem of deciding to change a logo after it’s already too late to make a meaningful change. N+1: Yes-the change seems oddly timed in part because we seem to be in the midst of a ’70s revival. ASH: Perhaps. N+1: It would still look like Halloween if the blue were black.
ASH: Would it? N+1: Is that a term semioticians use? ASH: It’s a term I use. n+1: What’s another example of haunting? ASH: I don’t know if you can picture the Lipton’s tea box. N+1: By retaining the orange. ASH: And by making it ghostly and apparitional-as opposed to aspirational. N+1: Maybe by making the “Payless” sort of ghostly and rounded and inconsequential, “Payless” becomes just another one of those words that doesn’t mean anything. ASH: Exactly. ASH: That’s their name. N+1: Eh, I don’t know. N+1: Wow. Fuck for Forest Documentary Sees Failure in Carnal Idealism. The activists have been living in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain for the past seven years. First, there were three of them: Tommy from Norway, Leona from Sweden and a German woman named Natty.
Later, they were joined by Dan, from Norway, and Kaajal, a woman from India. They collect their clothing and food from dumpsters and think that drugs are a waste of time. "We're looking for people who enjoy sex and nakedness," they say. Their lives are disjointed, their apartment is a mess, their sex is a free-for-all -- and they call it freedom. These are neo-hippies, and they resemble rare plants. They can't sing, but they do it anyway. The group calls itself "Fuck For Forest" (FFF), and Polish director Michal Marczak naturally chose the same name for his recently released documentary, for which he accompanied them for a couple months with camera in hand.
Idealism Gone Wild Marczak shows all of this with a great sensitivity for the epic dimension of what is transpiring before his eyes. 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. A LinkedIn Body makes you into money—the contacts and connections are the lubricants of your professional mobility, and you, as a LinkedIn Body and a product on a networked market, are easily exchangeable, measurable in value. LinkedIn contacts aren’t people; people on LinkedIn are contacts.
The LinkedIn Body doesn’t sweat or piss but it does shoot out bots—via email—to invite more contacts. The LinkedIn Body is a vessel that incubates new connections in the big collective networked body of LinkedIn. 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. You only live once. Lots of people out there hate Life. 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. First there are political publics, which could be called following Dewey’s model “issue driven” publics. Political publics are flanked on one side by taste publics or aesthetic publics, which are oriented towards “texts” or “performances.” They are flanked on the other side, by recognition seeking publics for whom the dimension of visibility tends to be a major goal (Dayan 2005, Ehrenberg 2008). “Recognition seeking publics” (such as those of soccer or popular music) use their involvement with games or performances in order to endow themselves with visible identities. 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.
No. Both result in observable facts. 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. Their family has a long history of cancer, alcoholism, and bipolar disorder, and Jackie, who happens to work for a biomedical research lab, wanted to learn all she could about her health risks and propensities. 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. 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. In this case, App.net promises that “users and developers [will] come first, not advertisers”; in an era of “if it’s free, you’re the product”—remember that the much love/hated Facebook “[is] free and always will be”—App.net proposes to offer a Twitter-like social feed (and eventually a “powerful ecosystem based on 3rd-party developer built ‘apps’”) on a paid membership basis instead. 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! Wearing Stigma. Village Life. 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. The volume, as a whole, offers alternative views to the conventional images of motherhood.
Issues of adoption, surrogacy, bereavement and abuse appear in poems, stories and essays by Manju Kapur, Jai Arjun Singh, Jahnavi Barua, Mridula Koshy, Kishwar Desai and Anita Roy, among others. 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. Conflict Kitchen. 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.
He abandoned the family when Bieber was ten months old and went on to pursue a career as a martial arts fighter, often missing visits to his son, resurfacing now and then with a guitar in tow as the boy got older. Justin Bieber grew up very poor and very Christian with his mother, Pattie Mallette. She’s now 38, believes in family values (she is the executive producer of a new anti-abortion film), and recently admitted on American television to being celibate since the mid-1990s. She’s waiting for marriage. ‘Anything is possible,’ Justin Bieber writes in Just Getting Started, his second ‘100 per cent official’ memoir, published last year.
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. " And they made kubideh. And it was very good. 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. He was kicking around ideas with another professor, John Peña (A'08) and artist Dawn Weleski (A'09), who is in charge of the day-to-day operations as well as developing new ideas for the Waffle Shop. 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. 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.” 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”? The subhead of the book—“A public feeling”—points to the author’s intellectual alignment with such groups as Lauren Berlant’s Feel Tank Chicago, and Cvetkovich’s originary situation of depression as public and political, a loss of hope.
Subscribe to TNI magazine for $2 and get TNI Vol. 14: Time Wednesday. Please fill in all fields. 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. 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.
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. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.
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? More in #Articles. Anarchism and the City.