Mr. Sammler’s City: Hip young residents of the revived Lower East Side or Williamsburg need to know that it’s possible to kill a city, that the streets they walk daily were once no-go zones, that within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. That’s why it’s worth looking back at Mr. Sammler to understand why that decline occurred: we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. [City Journal]

Who needs credit?: Surprisingly, perhaps the fleetest country of all has been Argentina. Since it emerged from the financial crisis of 2001-02, it has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. It is expected to expand faster than most of its neighbours again this year. How has such a perennial economic miscreant proven so resilient to the credit crunch? Quite simply, it barely has any credit. [Economist]

We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppresed People: Tracing these stolen goods back to where the thefts occur lands us in some of the most wretched places on earth. What these countries have in common is an abundance of natural resources and plentiful political violence and corruption. All suffer from what Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs call “the resource curse.” Here dictators and insurgents sell off the country’s resources to foreigners, terrifying the people into submission while keeping the wealth for themselves. [Cato]

Paris has the Louvre of pawnshops: Even Rodin went to Credit Municipal of Paris, also known as ‘auntie,’ when he was down on his luck. And as times get tougher, the institution has begun accepting wine. [LA Times]

Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex: How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think. [Wired]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Coming soon: The post-female American cinema: Nowhere is our irrelevance more starkly apparent than during the summer, the ultimate boys’ club. Over the next few months, U.S. cinemas - and many worldwide - will reverberate with the romping-stomping of comic book titans like Iron Man and the Hulk. The sexagenarian Harrison Ford will be cracking his Indy whip (some old men get a pass, after all, especially when Steven Spielberg is on board) alongside the fast-talking sprout from “Transformers.” Hellboy will relock and load, tongue and cigar planted in cheek. The girls of summer are few in number, and real women are close to extinct. [IHT]

Kazakhstan seeks identity on the big screen: If the satirical movie “Borat” spoofed an entire nation, then “Mongol” was a decent counterpunch, casting back 800 years to the glory of a world conqueror, and earning Kazakhstan its first nomination for a foreign-language Academy Award earlier this year. But “Mongol” was more than a big-budget Genghis Khan biopic, says Gulnara Sarsenova, the perfume and cosmetics magnate who helped bankroll the $23 million production. It also aimed to bolster the self-respect of a traditionally nomadic people aggressively Russified during 70 years of Soviet domination. [CSM]

Jewish culture, and anti-Semitism, on the rise in Hungary: It’s hard to know whether to feel disheartened by the large showing of neo-Nazis or encouraged by the larger opposition to it. It turns out that aside from the well-documented rise of the far right, Jewish culture has also been conspicuously on the rise here. [IHT]

Sex? Yawn. Politics? That’s Hot!: A FORMER editor of People magazine had some hard-and-fast rules: young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, television is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports. And anything is better than politics. Apparently that rule does not apply to the high-drama presidential campaign of 2008. [NYT]

May 8th, 2008 at 9:03 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Russian women make gold-digging an art form: They sit at nearly every table in Moscow’s smartest restaurants, wearing designer jewellery and smiles that show they know they are the envy of every girl in Russia. But for the wives and girlfriends of Russia’s super-rich oligarchs, the good life has just got a little bit harder – thanks to a slew of books telling other women how to follow in their footsteps. [Telegraph]

For the Elderly, Being Heard About Life’s End: Edie Gieg, 85, strides ahead of people half her age and plays a fast-paced game of tennis. But when it comes to health care, she is a champion of “slow medicine,” an approach that encourages less aggressive — and less costly — care at the end of life. [NYT]

Want to take a city’s pulse? Head for the graveyard: Forget landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building or the Colosseum; cemeteries are the punctuation marks in between, quiet islands amid the city racket. A great one is an architectural jewel in its own right, a Vanity Fair party of spot-the-dead-celebrity, a stark warning from history, a store of cracking anecdotes or a life-affirming communion with past generations. [Guardian]

May 5th, 2008 at 10:38 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

The Gospel of Consumption and the better future we left behind: But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them. It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones. [Orion]

Throw caution to wind, France told: A French doctor is urging his countrymen to give free rein to flatulence, sweating and other bodily taboos to reduce the risk of cancer. [Telegraph]

Lipstick Jungle: Ohmygod, the economy is, like, so bad right now. It’s really, like, wretched. I was in Bloomie’s the other day, and I saw this super-cute Nanette Lepore top, and I was totally going to buy it…and then I remembered: the scare of the downturn. It took all my willpower—but I put the shirt back on the rack. It was kinda, like, tragic. [CJR]

Japanese seniors go online to find love: You’re never too old to fall in love. That’s what Yoji Kawamura figured after retiring at the age of 62 and deciding that part-time work and his new hobbies of photography and computers weren’t enough to fill his days. Like a small but growing number of older Japanese singles, Kawamura has turned to an online matchmaking service in search of someone to share his “second life.” [msnbc]

May 2nd, 2008 at 9:27 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

It’s the Adultery, Stupid: Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race. It has the power to alter elections, undermine parties, and, possibly, change history. Barack Obama is running for president today because the ex-wife of his favored opponent in the 2004 Senate campaign in Illinois, Jack Ryan, said her husband took her to swingers’ clubs, handing the election to Obama. [Vanity Fair]

Back-to-basics biking movement takes hold in cities: But the most impressive piece of Woodroof’s outfit is his bicycle: A stripped-down race bike with no brakes and a single-speed, fixed-gear rear hub that, in effect, turns man into a cog of the machine. This is biking at its most primal – no stopping, no coasting with the pedals stationary, no helmets. It’s a ride built on adrenaline and danger, like walking across a lava flow in flip flops. [CSM]

A Better Way to Fight Crime: The brilliance of DNA swabbing: In June 2006, a minor brawl erupted at Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, England. In the aftermath, police arrested Mark Dixie, a chef at the pub, who surprised them by breaking into tears. He had good reason. As a standard practice in arrests, a DNA swab was taken from him. What the authorities didn’t suspect, but he did, is that his DNA would match that of the man who raped and murdered an 18-year-old woman nine months earlier. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison. [Reason]

Why New York City’s Iconic Pizza Is So Tough to Replicate: Pizza may have been invented in Italy, but it was perfected in New York City. And whenever I go home to visit, I return with a sizable doggy bag from Arturo’s in Greenwich Village. That’s because the pizza in San Francisco sucks: flaccid crust baked in positive energy, its cheese and tomato sauce buried under bushels of organic artichokes and salad greens. Even when you can track down an unadorned pie — the pure, ideal form — it just doesn’t taste right. [Wired]

May 1st, 2008 at 10:06 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

The New Economics of Hunger: In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect — one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam’s Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice. [Washington Post]

Philippines bans ‘transplant tourism’ : The Philippines has banned kidney donations in an attempt to end a booming industry in “transplant tourism” from developed countries including Britain. The move comes after the country was branded a transplant “hot spot” by health experts for selling some of the cheapest kidneys in the world. In 2006, 436 wealthy patients received kidneys from unrelated living donors. [Times]

April 29th, 2008 at 9:51 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Rearming the world: With much less fanfare than the early days of the Cold War, the world is entering a new arms race, and with it, a dangerous new web of military relationships. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks international armed forces spending, between 1997 and 2006 global military expenditures jumped by nearly 40 percent. Driven mainly by anxiety over oil and natural resources, countries are building their arsenals of conventional weapons at a rate not seen in decades, beefing up their armies and navies, and forging potential new alliances that could divide up the world in unpredictable ways. [Boston Globe]

Poland’s Jewish community flourishes: Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, Poland’s Jewish community is flourishing again with Poles rediscovering their roots and synagogues filling with new members. The number of Jews is 30,000 - up from about 5,000 only a few years ago, Jewish cultural association Beit Warszawa estimates. Tomorrow, Prince Charles will open a Jewish centre in Krakow aimed at providing cultural support to the expanding population in a city which was once the capital for Poland’s pre-war 3.5 million Jews. [Telegraph]

April 28th, 2008 at 10:28 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Outsourcing Childbirth: Surrogacy itself seems to have come out of the mommy closet, to judge from recent media coverage. The New York Times and the Boston Globe have both reported on the practice of outsourcing wombs to poor Indian women. On a recent cover of Newsweek, the abdomen of a pregnant woman appeared with the words “Womb for Rent” emblazoned upon it. The issue’s lead story, “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” ignited a small media frenzy with its sensationalistic revelations about military wives cashing in as surrogates — in part by bilking their government-provided health plans. The attention has rekindled the debate over the morality of renting wombs. [WSJ]

Brand names ‘as old as civilisation itself’: The urge to brand products with images of macho men and curvaceous women is as old as civilisation itself, according to a new analysis. Bottle stops used five millennia ago in ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the birthplace of cities and writing, carried symbols that marked them out as the earliest evidence of branded goods. A London based archaeologist believes that they were promotional logos, along the lines of those used by Microsoft and Nike. [Telegraph]

April 25th, 2008 at 9:04 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Vengeance Is Ours: Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed. Such contradictions confuse us deeply. Neither pacific ideals nor wartime hatreds, once acquired, are easily jettisoned. It’s no wonder that many soldiers who kill suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. When they come home, far from boasting about killing, as a Nipa tribesman would, they have nightmares and never talk about it at all, unless to other veterans. [New Yorker]

Is Your Daily Life Enslaved by the Electronic World?: Future historians may very well look back at the beginning of the 21st century as an era in which the human mind developed into a split screen, with one eye on real space and the other ogling the electronic mirror. This morning on a crowded bus I counted six people within my immediate view, texting, talking on the cell phone, checking e-mail, listening to iPods. In other words, they were trying to keep the bus from being their only space, their only reality. And what was I doing? I recorded what I observed in my laptop, of course. [AlterNet]

‘Disneyland’ comes to Baghdad with multi-million pound entertainment park: Llewellyn Werner, a California investor, admits he is facing obstacles most amusement park developers never have to deal with. Such as insurgent attacks and looting. But when the amusement park you’re building lies in downtown Baghdad, those risks come with the territory. [Times]

April 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Nomads at last: AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café’s wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads. [Economist]

Autopsy, a new era: Autopsies were once standard procedure in U.S. hospitals. A few decades ago, doctors would recommend one even when the cause of death seemed certain, because it allowed them to gauge the effects of treatments and find out to what degree a disease had progressed, says Dr. Harry Bonnell, a fellow of the American Society for Clinical Pathology and a pathologist in private practice in San Diego. But today, fewer than one in 10 deaths in the U.S. is followed by an autopsy, in part because of its high cost (which Medicare and most insurance companies won’t cover) and because many doctors believe — erroneously — that modern imaging techniques such as the MRI have rendered the autopsy obsolete. [LA Times]

Syria tunes in the West on Madina FM: Popular ‘Good Morning Syria’ host Honey Sayed and others on the airwaves are mixing thumping music and racy U.S.-style talk shows, providing a rare cultural bridge in the Arab world. [LA Times]

April 22nd, 2008 at 9:25 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.