[AUDIO] LUCRETIUS – A 1st century BC philosopher who conceived of atoms, astronomy, atheism and evolution almost 2000 years before others
Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) was an Epicurean poet writing in the middle years of the first century BC. His six-book Latin hexameter poem De rerum natura (On the nature of things) survives virtually intact. As well as being a pioneering figure in the history of philosophical poetry, Lucretius has come to be our primary source of information on Epicurean physics, the official topic of his poem. Among numerous other Epicurean doctrines, the atomic ‘swerve’ is known to us mainly from Lucretius’ account of it. His defence of the Epicurean system is deftly and passionately argued, and is particularly admired for its eloquent critique of the fear of death.
Virtually lost during the Middle Ages, it was rediscovered in a monastery in Germany in 1417.
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Lucretius anticipated the core scientific vision of modernity.
The Answer Man
An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.
by Stephen Greenblatt
August 8, 2011
When I was a student, I used to go at the end of the school year to the Yale Co-op to see what I could find to read over the summer. I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted titles for ridiculously small sums. They were jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage until something caught my eye. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs—the bodies were missing—were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe.
Ancient physics is not a particularly promising subject for vacation reading, but sometime over the summer I idly picked up the book. The Roman poet begins his work (in Martin Ferguson Smith’s careful rendering) with an ardent hymn to Venus:
First, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind. (more…)
[VIDEO] WHEN AMERICA WAS AN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRY: Historian David McCullough has a new book’ “The Greater Journey”, which is about American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects who travelled to Paris in the years between 1830-1900. At that time, Paris was the medical capital of the world and far advanced in the arts. These Americans were strongly patriotic and studied there to excel in their own fields before returning to America.
Amazon.com Blurb:
The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, “Not all pioneers went west.” Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life.
Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. From something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home his momentous idea for the telegraph.
Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched his spectacular career performing in Paris at age 15. George P. A. Healy, who had almost no money and little education, took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects whatsoever in Paris became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham Lincoln.
Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in “being at the center of things” in what was then the medical capital of the world. From all they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow “medicals” were to exert lasting influence on the profession of medicine in the United States.
Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all “discovering” Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday throngs strolling the city’s boulevards and gardens. “At last I have come into a dreamland,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom’s Cabin had brought her. Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His vivid account in his diary of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first time) is one readers will never forget. The genius of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the son of an immigrant shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, three of the greatest American artists ever, would flourish in Paris, inspired by the examples of brilliant French masters, and by Paris itself.
Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris. McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens’s phrase, longed “to soar into the blue.” The Greater Journey is itself a masterpiece.
-Amazon.com Blurb
- Hardcover: 576 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (May 24, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1416571760
- ISBN-13: 978-1416571766
[FILM] “”True sexuality demands the destruction of the ego,” she says, …a kind of self-annihilation…, which is “the opposite to what Freud proposes.”—’A DANGEROUS METHOD’ –brings to mind the novel “The Interpretation of Murder”
I really enjoyed this film. Having been recently ruminating once more on the sociological pathology of Honour Killings and the necessity to control the chastity of young females in most patriarchical societies, this film made me wonder whether it was indeed the birth of the Austrian-’Jewish’ school of psychoanalysis which led to the advent of the liberation of female sexuality in Western society. This may be obvious to some, but I find the potential of this quite intriguing. Especially in light of my introduction to Otto Gross from this movie. He actually deserves a separate post on his own (soon). I think psychoanalysis may be owed a great debt by the Western Society generally, a society which today is quite distinct from its Victorian Era incarnation, having had so many taboos and inter-related psychic truths brought out of closets into the public to be acknowledged and dealt with. The writing in this film is quite erudite, making one almost want to take notes at times. Such as the questioning of WHY humans, while such sexual animals, have this overwhelming need to repress this sexuality at the same time. This of course, is what the foundation of psychoanalysis was all about–the search for an understanding of this unfortunate duality…which inevitably leads to emotional baggage in a great number of humanoids. This film is recommended for neurotic uber-ruminators. Perhaps as a elementary introduction to the history of psychoanalysis. Also do read The Interpretation of Murder.
-rudhro
Keira Knightley in ‘A Dangerous Method’ — Oscar-Worthy or Laughable?
[VIDEO] Slavoj Zizek: The Monstrosity of Christ
The Monstrosity of Christ
Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank
Edited by Creston Davis
What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.
—John Milbank
To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.
—Slavoj Žižek
In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion’s illusions; in the other corner, “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries–and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.
Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century’s greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek’s turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others.
Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with “paradox.” The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation.
Short Circuits series, edited by Slavoj Žižek
About the Authors
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press).
John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books.
Creston Davis, who conceived of the encounter between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, studied under both men.
ENDORSEMENTS
“The contemporary return to the theological most dramatically occurs in this book, as Zizek fully realizes his earlier Hegelian and Lacanian theological work, a work that Milbank can essentially know as a uniquely modern expression of nihilism. Nonetheless Milbank enters into a genuine theological dialogue with this nihilism, and a truly new theological discourse occurs. This effects a paradoxical union between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and between radical orthodoxy and radical heterodoxy, which is perhaps the deepest motif of the contemporary return to the theological.”
—Thomas J. J. Altizer, author of Godhead and the Nothing
“In this dazzling dialogue, Zizek and Milbank change words and cross swords, until the point where both recognize that Christ and Hegel, in their monstrosity, look very much alike. A phenomenal achievement!”
—Catherine Malabou, Maître de Conferences, Philosophy Department, Université Paris-X Nanterre
[FILM] GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS. Gloria Steinhem’s life and the Women’s Movement.
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CLICK MOVIE POSTER TO WATCH FULL DOCUMENTARY
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Despite decades of opposition from the right, and recent personal setbacks, Gloria Steinem remains one of the most outspoken and visible symbols of the women’s movement today. Produced and directed by Emmy®-winning documentary filmmaker Peter Kunhardt (HBO’s “JFK: In His Own Words” and “Teddy: In His Own Words”), GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS blends interviews of Steinem in her Manhattan apartment, archival footage, photographs from throughout her life and clips from press interviews over the years. Among those interviewing Steinem in the film are Barbara Walters, Helen Gurley Brown, Phil Donahue and Larry King. The documentary also features archival footage of such prominent women’s movement figures as National Organization for Women (NOW) co-founder Betty Friedan, congresswoman Bella Abzug and civil rights advocate Flo Kennedy.
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS chronicles Steinem’s emergence as a driving force in the modern women’s liberation movement. She recalls beginning her career as a journalist in New York City in the early 1960s and making headlines with an expose on the working conditions of Playboy Bunnies, noting, “I learned what’s it’s like to be hung on a meat hook.”
Having had an abortion at age 22 (which she kept secret at the time), Steinem’s political awakening accelerated when she covered an abortion hearing for New York Magazine in 1969 and learned of the horrifying and humiliating experiences women endured attempting to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. 
She began to seek out everything she could find on the burgeoning women’s movement and helped lead the nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality march on Aug. 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the enactment of women’s suffrage. It was, Steinem notes, “the first time in my life, and I think for many other women too, that we marched for ourselves.”
Since then, Steinem has been ever-present on the front lines of social activism, co-founding Ms. Magazine, where she continues to serve as a consulting editor, in 1972, despite media speculation about the publication’s viability. She recalls that at the time “there was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women.” Steinem became the public face of the women’s rights movement, participating in marches, making media appearances and also weathering the inevitable backlash, feeling she had to work twice as hard to not be judged by her looks. Indeed, Steinem would become almost as well-known for her distinct style as for her political activism, remembering that her streaked blonde locks were inspired by the character Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Her signature aviator glasses were about concealment, she reveals, saying, “The bigger they were, the more I felt I could hide behind them.” 
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS also explores Steinem’s early days. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, she studied tap dance as a child and watched her mother give up a career as a journalist to have children. Her parents had a rocky marriage and ultimately divorced. Steinem, who attended Smith College, wonders whether devoting so much of her time and energy to the women’s movement was a way to avoid the kind of suffering her mother experienced.
The film also looks at the challenges Steinem has faced in later years. Diagnosed with breast cancer soon after turning 50, she underwent surgery and radiation.
“The cancer served a real purpose, making me a little bit more conscious of time,” she observes. Taking a break from public life after decades of traveling nonstop, Steinem “hit bottom” and began to look internally, writing the self-esteem book “Revolution from Within” in the early ‘90s. Interviewed at the time, she noted, “Being a social activist can be a drug that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself.”
And after decades of remaining single, she married entrepreneur David Bale – father of actor Christian Bale – in 2000, but he died after they had been married just over three years. GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS is produced by Peter Kunhardt and Sheila Nevins; directed by Peter Kunhardt; editing and graphic design by Phillip Schopper; original music by Michael Bacon. For Kunhardt McGee Productions: executive producer, Dyllan McGee. For HBO: supervising producer, Jacqueline Glover.
Jane Jacobs and the Power of Women Planners
Roberta Brandes Gratz
November 16, 2011
Fifty years ago this month, Jane Jacobs published Death and Life of Great American Cities and changed the way the world understands cities. Yet even when she’s acknowledged as an important urban thinker, the ‘housewife’ qualifier is invariably included. When we talk about strategies for city growth and economic development, women aren’t often offered seats at the table. They hold jobs in the field but few posts as critics. Jane was the exception. But the rules didn’t change a great deal.
Jacobs broke into the national discussion about cities somewhat by accident. She was a reluctant stand-in for her Architectural Forum male editor at a cities conference in 1956. She had written some insightful articles about how cities work, particularly in Vogue, documenting how New York City’s fur and flower districts evolved organically.
Today, her early observations are considered pathbreaking. But happenstance thrust her into the public eye.
Jacobs’ early attention-getting articles in Architectural Forum and Fortune Magazine happened because she had as a champion a distinguished male editor William Holly Whyte. Whyte gained fame for writing The Organization Man and for espousing ideas similar to hers. But he had to overcome a sputtering, angry Fortune publisher who once asked, “Who is this crazy dame?”
A housewife without even a college degree was unacceptable. After all, Lewis Mumford’s scathing review of Death and Life was headlined “Mother Jacobs Home Remedies.” (more…)
Is Civilization A Universally Bad Idea?
Written by Adam Frank
November 15, 2011
The ice ages came and the ice ages went. For more than a half-million years Homo sapiens endured the changing climate by adapting. Then, deep in the frozen expanse of the last global big chill, something new happened. We woke up to ourselves in a new way.
We became self-conscious, creating art, culture and tools of far greater complexity than anything that had come before. When the ice pulled back yet again, we eventually took a step of even greater consequence. We domesticated ourselves and put the Earth to the plow.
With agriculture came surplus and with surplus came new social arrangements. Eventually, we built cities and far-ranging empires to support them. Human beings began buildingcivilization. In doing so we set ourselves and the entire planet onto a new trajectory.
But did anyone ever stop to ask if it was a good idea?
Now before you give in to the easy snort and chortle that accompanies a seemingly absurd question like this, I am going to ask you to take the long view. In this case long means billions of years, and billions of planets.
We don’t want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good — in the long term — for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)?
In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting. (more…)
[VIDEO] The mysterious book from the 1400s that can’t be read, has no author, has no point of origin, modern computers can’t decipher and appears to explore scientific knowledge from centuries in the future without a single error in penmanship: THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
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CLICK TO WATCH THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY IN FULL
(click on ‘continue as free user, after the few secs)
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This is remarkable. I personally would consider Autism, rather than the loons out there seeking Extraterrestrial origins. They should teach about these kindsa things in elementary to fire the minds of youngsters into the potential of humanity. Unfortunately, the European Jesus-heads who invaded Meso-America destroyed huge libraries of knowledge, assuming that it was Satan-worship—–and humanity lost a treasure trove of knowledge similar to this with the extinction of such awesome cultural relics. If this weren’t from Europe itself, I’d be surprised if it weren’t as well, similarly, destroyed. They should make perfect parchment replicas of this and sell em for $100–like that Tupac book that recreates his school books, back of napkin doodles and lyrical creation process…I would love to own one of these–talk about a conversation-starting coffee table book!
–rudhro
“The Voynich manuscript, described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript,” is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum pages,[notes 1] most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles an herbal of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript’s script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.”–wikipedia
[BOOK] Jed Rubenfeld’s “The Interpretation of Murder”: A spellbinding thriller featuring Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi searching for a diabolical killer in turn of the century New York.
After moving into my new tiny abode in a 1920s apartment buildingin Downtown Toronto last summer, I discovered a table in the basement laundry room where people were leaving one or two books to exchange. The first book I picked up and flipped to the first paragraph left me awestruck. I proceeded upstairs and did not put it down for the next several hours, perhaps days (i’m a slow reader). It begins in reality—-the historical reality, of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud arriving in New York City in 1909 for the first time, by ship. This actually happened. But after this trip, they had a incredible cleavage in their professional and personal relationship. This novel weaves an intriguing, spellbinding tale of what occurred during their time in America and evokes fascinating aspects of psycho-analytical thought in the process. Not to ruin the surprise (oops)…but after the whole tale is told, the author –who happens to be Mr. Amy Chua (another favorite thinker of mine, World on Fire etc), reveals that the dialogue between these psychoanalytic titans throughout this fictional tale was in fact faithful to their actual correspondence at the time, via mail etc., all documented in history.
I had until then never read such a wickedly captivating tale. Although a fictional murder mystery, it leaves you not only entertained and thrilled, but educated as well. I really enjoyed this read, although I’ve noticed online that it has not been received as enthusiastically as I myself would recommend it.
-rudhro
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“A puritan society should ban us,” Freud observes about America. “It will ban you,” Jung replies, “as soon as it figures out what we are saying.”
[AUDIO] “OBAMA WAS NOTHING BUT A BRAND”: CHRIS HEDGES IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ENRIGHT ON CBC RADIO’S SUNDAY EDITION: A COHERENT EXPLANATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF THE ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ MOVEMENT
HEDGES @ 8:30
CHRIS HEDGES
“It was the night that hope was re-born, Nov. 4th, 2008, Grant Park, Chicago.
That night the young President-elect told his country that everything was possible.
But one year from the next election, the fate of Barack Obama and his country is in serious doubt.
The U.S. teeters on the cusp of another recession; unemployment is up; home foreclosure rates are up; political dialogue is as divisive and diabolical as ever; the war on terror and resultant infringement of civil rights continue unabated.
For the writer and journalist Chris Hedges it is a time when hope turns to ashes in the mouth.
His all-consuming fear is that it is fast becoming too late to turn things around.”
–Michael Enright
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After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche — By Chris Hedges
CHRIS HEDGES: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
[VIDEO] CBC’s Kevin O’Leary to NYT’s Chris Hedges: “You sound like a left wing nutbar”
[AUDIO] MICHAEL LEWIS’ “BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD – GREECE, IRELAND, FRANCE, CALIFORNIA…” THE FUTURE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
CLICK TO WATCH VIDEO CLIP OF MICHAEL LEWIS INTERVIWED BY JON STEWART ON THE DAILY SHOW
October 4, 2011
Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass had made a fortune betting against the subprime mortgage market when it collapsed in 2008. And now Bass is set to make lots more — from a Greek default.
Bass’ story is chronicled in Michael Lewis’ latest book, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, which tells the stories of the fiscal recklessness in both Europe and the U.S. that led to the current debt crisis.
Lewis tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Bass realized that governments around the world weren’t ending the 2008 financial crisis — they were just delaying it. So Bass decided that they would also likely fail.
“What he saw was that the debts that had been accumulating in the banking system were too large for governments to handle in some countries,” Lewis says. “In Ireland, the debts in the banking system were eight times the size of government tax revenues. In Iceland, it was even worse. It was bad throughout Europe. So he basically said, ‘What happens the next time there’s doubt in the system?’ People are going to ask the question, ‘Can governments afford to bail out these banks?’ And the answer the next time is going to be no … and then it’s really ugly because there isn’t a backstop.”
Bass bought credit default swaps, which are essentially insurance policies on government bonds. What that means is that if a government like Greece becomes unable to pay its own debt, Bass gets paid.
“[When he bought them] it was pretty implausible that the governments would not repay their debts,” Lewis says. “[But] we’re in a situation now where Greece will not repay its debt. He’s been proven right. So when he made these bets, he was alone in the marketplace doing this. … His vision was apocalyptic. … He would tell you that it starts with Greece, then with Spain and Italy, and he thinks France has unsustainable levels of debt and the markets will turn on the French government. But exactly how it [will] unfold isn’t clear.”
On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, Lewis looks at some of the institutions and individuals involved in the financial crisis in places like Greece, Ireland and Iceland — to determine what went wrong and who was involved in the current debt crisis.
In Greece, he says, the government initially disguised the true state of its finances with the help of U.S. bankers. Goldman Sachs, for example, did off-market currency trades with the government of Greece.
“[Those trades] enabled the Greek government to book upfront a big profit, but down the road [the Greek government] would have to repay Goldman Sachs quite a bit,” Lewis says. “So [Goldman Sachs] lent the government money without saying that’s what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they’d be admitted to the euro[zone].”
After adopting the euro, Lewis says, Greece borrowed huge sums of money to do things like run the world’s most unprofitable railroad and pay people not to show up to their jobs.
“It’s a corrupt enterprise,” he says. “When a party came to power, they’d give away lots of goodies. You talk to, for example, Greek tax collectors and they say, ‘Our job is to be bad at our jobs. If you’re too good at trying to collect taxes from Greeks, you get fired.’ You talk to people who work for the government, and people are pretty clear that they regard these jobs as basically sinecures. It’s a horribly inefficient society, and the inefficiency has been encouraged by the financial markets.”
And Greece wasn’t the only country that hid its true financial state, Lewis says.
“This was not a one-off situation,” he says. “You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk.”
Michael Lewis is also the author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, The Big Short and The Blind Side. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. (more…)
[VIDEO] THE FUTURE AGE OF PERSUASION – CHRIS ANDERSON EXPLAINS WHERE TED TALKS AND ONLINE MARKETING IS HEADED
TED’s mission is ideas worth spreading. The dream behind the Ads Worth Spreading initiative is to find companies that want to communicate ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience.
Revealing the way a company thinks tells consumers what that company is and what it stands for.
“In our brave new interconnected world, the rules of marketing are changing fast,” says Anderson. “Ambush advertising is broken. We think there’s a better way, based on sharing powerful ideas. Most companies are teeming with amazing ideas that the rest of the world never gets to see. By letting some of those ideas out into the world in an authentic way, companies have a shot at transforming the way they are perceived. We’re looking forward to another fantastic round of entries from forward-thinking companies and people.”
We’re combining curation and crowdsourcing to find the best ads from every corner of the globe.
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The Age of Persuasion explores the countless ways marketers permeate your life, from media, art, and language, to politics, religion, and fashion.
[AUDIO] CBC RADIO’s Writer’s & Co. celebrates the 150th birthday of Rabindranath Tagore
An icon from India, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in virtually every literary genre, and he was also an accomplished painter. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with literary scholar Uma Dasgupta and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
BBC: THE STORY OF INDIA – written and presented by historian Michael Wood
This was one of the best BBC documentaries I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of PLANET EARTH and just as in depth and in vivid colour, but rather than the natural world, it focuses on the civilizations that occupied the subcontinent since the time of the first humans to leave Africa. Superb–and I’m not merely saying that due to a DNA connection, I would have enjoyed this were it from any corner of the world. This is an intense study of the history of mankind, and the journey we’ve all taken thus far.
–rudhro
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes.
An accompanying text was published by BBC Books.
As in most of his documentaries, Wood explains historical events by travelling to the places where they took place, examining archeological and historical evidence at first hand and interviewing historians and archaeologists, as well as chatting with local people. (more…)
“The Elusive Big Idea” – Neal Gabler says we are living in a “post-idea world”–I disagree
Bullshit. So he compares an annual list with a century of incredible ideas? That in itself is a straw man…Also, perhaps it’s just a phase we’re in–either societally as we have only just entered a new age of information, so we have to regroup, OR as individuals, including Gabler..perhaps at an older stage we can settle down, tune out and produce our own ‘ideas’ to add to the fishies above everyones heads.
And what about Chris Hedges? For just one example.
To me, Gabler reads like he had a thesis and wrote around it. Let’s all make a list on this wall of those we consider worthy contemporary thinkers, shall we? I continue with Alain de Botton, Slavoj Zizek…
–rudhro
WRIITEN BY: NEAL GABLER
August 13, 2011
THE July/August issue of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Take a deep breath. The ideas include “The Players Own the Game” (No. 12), “Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was” (No. 6), “Nothing Stays Secret” (No. 2), and the very biggest idea of the year, “The Rise of the Middle Class — Just Not Ours,” which refers to growing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Now exhale. It may strike you that none of these ideas seem particularly breathtaking. In fact, none of them are ideas. They are more on the order of observations. But one can’t really fault The Atlantic for mistaking commonplaces for intellectual vision. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.
They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was.
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. (more…)
[VIDEO] BETWEEN GANDHI AND HITLER –> NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE
This guy experienced more global intrigue than James Bond.
Sunday , June 5 , 2011
Excerpted with the permission of Penguin Books India from His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire by Sugata Bose
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To Emilie, with love
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| That Subhas Chandra Bose met and fell in love with Austrian Emilie Schenkl in Vienna in the 1930s is well documented. But in a new book on his granduncle, historian Sugata Bose explains why they chose to keep their relationship and marriage a closely guarded secret. Despite the ‘enormous, intense’ love that Bose felt for Schenkl, his ‘first love’ was his country. An extract | |
 WIFE AND DAUGHTER: Emilie and Anita, November 1948. Courtesy: Netaji Research Bureau From the second week of June 1934, [Subhas Chandra] Bose settled down in Vienna, since he had a contract from the publishing company Wishart to write a book on the Indian struggle since 1920. In the course of looking for clerical help with preparing the manuscript Subhas met a woman who would bring about a dramatic change in his personal life… It was June 24, 1934. A petite and pretty young woman named Emilie Schenkl arrived to be interviewed for the clerical job. Born on December 26, 1910, to an Austrian Catholic family, she knew English, could take dictation in shorthand and had competent typing skills. Jobs were scarce during the Depression. Her father, a veterinarian, was initially somewhat reluctant to let his daughter work for a strange Indian man, but in time her whole family — father, mother and sister — developed a warm relationship with Subhas. Emilie had a gentle, cheerful, straightforward and unselfish nature, which Su-bhas found appealing. He came to respect her strength of will and affectionately called her “Baghini” meaning “Tigress” in Bengali. “He started it,” Emilie states categorically about the romantic turn in their relationship. Their intimacy grew as they spent time together in Austria and Czechoslovakia from mid-1934 to March 1936… Subhas Chandra Bose, according to his close friend and political associate A.C.N. Nambiar, was a “one-idea man: singly for the independence of India.” “I think the only departure,” he adds, “if one might use the word ‘departure’, was his love for Miss Schenkl; otherwise he was completely absorbed. He was deeply in love with her, you see. In fact, it was an enormous, intense love.” … (more…) |
[VIDEO] RSA ANIMATE: Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,”
This lecture was given at the Royal Society of Arts in London (The RSA) and was commissioned by them as part of their “RSAnimation” series of videos.
Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? “Everyone should watch this.”
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.
“Ken’s vision and expertise is sought by public and commercial organizations throughout the world.”
BBC Radio 4 (more…)
HIMANI BANNERJI: “On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of “Canada”" AKA “RUDHRO, DON’T FORGET TO BRING SAMOSAS TO THE ‘WE LOVE MULTICULTURALISM’ PARTY!”
Copyright Trent University Fall 1996
On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of “Canada”
HIMANI BANNERJI
This paper is primarily concerned with the construction of “Canada” as a social and cultural form of national identity, and various challenges and interruptions offered to this identity by literature produced by writers from non – white communities. The first part of the paper examines both literary and political – theoretical formulations of a “two – nation,” “two solitudes” thesis and their implications for various cultural accommodations offered to “others,” especially through the mechanism of “multiculturalism.” The second part concentrates on the experiences and standpoint of people of colour, or non – white people, especially since the 1960s, and the cultural and political formulating derivable from them.
I am from the country Columbus dreamt of. You, the country Columbus conquered. Now in your land My words are circling blue Oka sky they come back to us alight on tongue.
Protect me with your brazen passion for history is my truth, Earth, my witness my home, this native land.
OKA NADA”: A New Remembrance, Kaushalya Bannerji
The Personal and the Political: A Chorus and a Problematic
When the women’s movement came along and we were coming to our political consciousness, one of its slogans took us by surprise and thrilled and activated us: “the personal is political!” Since then years have gone by, and in the meanwhile I have found myself in Canada, swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen of England, giving up the passport of a long – fought – for independence, and being assigned into the category of “visible minority.” These years have produced their own consciousness in me, and I have learnt that also the reverse is true: the political is personal. (more…)
