Illustration by Milo Winter, from Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1930 edition From American Scientist: To follow global energy affairs is to have a never-ending encounter with new infatuations. Fifty years ago media ignored crude oil (a barrel went for little more than a dollar). Instead the western utilities were preoccupied with the annual double-digit growth of…
Read MoreChicago is the most self-conscious of cities. In its origins it represented the dream of New York–based capital, a terminus for Great Lakes–borne commerce that would develop, in its own right, into the most formidable metropolis of the mid-continent. In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1871, the city’s army of ambitious capitalists…
Read Moreby Julia James The hexagonal world of Die Siedler von Catan, with its little wooden cities and its alluring rock quarries and wheat fields, first appeared on my radar in 2006, when I was a senior in college. Since then, the English version of the board game has exploded in popularity, and I’ve spent countless…
Read MoreFrom Environment360: As instability in the Middle East pushes oil prices past $100 per barrel and gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon in the U.S., the need to find better ways to fuel our vehicles has never been more urgent. Some advocates see electric cars as the most promising solution and are urging policymakers to…
Read MoreBird Man or Falcon Dancer, Mud Glyph Cave From Slate: Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate cave-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some…
Read MoreN30, Seattle, 1999 by Nitasha Kaul These are despairing times for ever increasing numbers of people around the globe who are fighting for jobs, food and shelter. The fundamental questions of economic justice are violently propelled back on the world’s agenda after a lost decade of ubiquitous security and terrorism concerns. Addressing these questions of…
Read Moreby Justin Willis Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (African Systems of Thought), by Anne Kelk Mager, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 232 pp. There is already a considerable scholarship on alcohol in South Africa, which in many ways has guided the development of academic work on alcohol elsewhere in Africa. Until recently, this has…
Read MoreSuperman in the Fortress of Solitude From The Boston Globe: You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us…
Read MoreGlen Canyon below the dam From The Design Observer: We are bewitched, as a culture, by a high entropy concept of quality and performance. Our lust for speed, perfection and control blinds us to the fact that we live in a catabolically-challenged world. Catabolic, here, is a great word used by one of my favourite…
Read MoreAlien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue…
Read MoreFinal of Miss Russia 2010. In Soviet times, beauty contests were unknown. Ideologists considered such public displays of the female body as decadent bourgeois behavior. by Elena Fanailova A couple of years ago I was part of a group of young female writers on an Oxford University course called “Open World”. It took place in…
Read MoreBen Heine by Biagio Bossone In the years leading up to the global crisis, the IMF routinely failed to detect the vulnerabilities that brought the global economy to its knees – even once the turmoil had begun. How could the organisation mandated to oversee international finance stability have been so blind? Here one of the…
Read MoreVladimir Potanin in Кандидат or Kandidat by Peter Pomerantsev In 2006 I was invited to take part in one of the great adventures of modern broadcasting – conquering the booming Russian television market. The company I was hired by, Potemkin Productions, had been founded by Tim, a British executive producer, and Ivan, a Russian entrepreneur…
Read MoreAugmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, still, Keiichi Matsuda, 2009 by Greg J. Smith Keiichi Matsuda is a multidisciplinary designer based in London and Tokyo who garnered widespread attention last year for Augmented (hyper)Reality, a speculative video series that explored near-future media environments. His short films Domestic Robocop and Augmented City 3D scrutinize how our experience of home…
Read MoreSchool of Athens, Raphael, 1510-1511 Posted by kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10). The Berkeley forum is webcast here and the UC Irvine version can be…
Read MoreAdrián Sánchez Galque, Mulatos de Esmeraldas, 1599 by Tace M. Hedrick Afro-latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, by Kathryn Joy McKnight, Leo Garofalo, (eds), Indianapolis: Hackett, 377 pp. Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Agustín Laó-Montes, (eds), Lanham: Lexington Books, 420 pp. Although a discussion of book…
Read MoreFrom The New York Times: In the summer of 1978, when he was 9 years old and growing up in the Marcy housing projects in Brooklyn, Shawn Carter — a k a Jay-Z — saw a circle of people gathered around a kid named Slate, who was “rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he…
Read MoreFrom Bookforum: Giacomo Leopardi may be the most erudite, philosophically astute, and linguistically refined poet you’ve never heard of. Part of the blame lies in Leopardi’s historically inclined vocabulary and style, which draw heavily on Greco-Roman authors ranging from Theocritus to Virgil as well as early Italian masters, especially the fourteenth-century Tuscan poet who was…
Read Moreby Russell Bennetts Simon Ferrari is a doctoral student in digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He recently co-authored Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer. Simon blogs about gaming at Chungking Expresso. Berfrois What are Newsgames? Are they closer in nature to journalism or video games? Ferrari …
Read MoreFrom Bad Subjects: In the lot behind MOCAD the Mobile Homestead demi-house rested upon a trailer drawn by a truck. As noon approached the various speakers at the dedication began to assemble and mill around inside it, until they realized it was unsuitable as a green room in which to wait their turns. The dedication…
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