The New Look of School Integration: A controversial Supreme Court decision overturning race-based integration programs in Louisville, KY, and Seattle, WA, has produced a positive result. A new initiative in Louisville does something even better for children — it integrates them by class. [American Prospect]
Warrior pose turns Indian yoga soldiers into deadly foes: Those who assume yoga is for peaceniks should prepare to have their prejudice shot down. The Indian Army is poised to adopt the ancient practice after a trial showed that it makes for a deadlier fighting force. [Times]
Gallery: The World’s Most Impressive Subways: Subways are as much a part of big-city living as high-rises and gridlock, and they get about as much love. For many people, subways are crowded, noisy places only marginally better than being stuck in traffic — and most of them are. But the best of them are not only efficient, they reflect the character of the cities they serve and the people they carry. [Wired]
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
France relaxes its old wine rules to fight off New World challenge: After long scorning the international appetite for “vulgar” wine, France joined the fray yesterday and allowed growers to make and market their product in the fruity fashion of the New World. Wood chips, added tannin and other “foreign” techniques will be tolerated in a new category of mid-quality wine that will be defined by grape variety rather than origin. [Times]
An age of transformation: America’s suburbs are ethnically and demographically mixed—sometimes more so than its cities. Many are less dormitories than economic powerhouses. Among the most changed is one of the most famous. [Economist]
Painted red and with bows ready – a tribe hidden from rest of the world: Amazon Indians from one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world have been photographed from the air, with a striking image showing them painted bright red and carrying bows and arrows. [Times]
May 30th, 2008 at 10:55 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
Forever Mamma’s Boy: New York graphic designer Danielle Oteri recalls meeting a striking 28-year-old adonis at an eatery in Sicily and lingering over a romantic glass of wine. But just when sweet poetry began to flow from his lips, a cell phone erupted into song. “Ehm… just a minute,” he whispered. “It’s Mamma. She wants to know when I’ll be home.” For Oteri, the Italian stereotype of mammismo—the exaggerated bond between Italian men and their mothers—was confirmed. A whopping 37 percent of Italian men aged 30 to 34 still live with their parents. [Psychology Today]
Racial Shift in a Progressive City Spurs Talks: It has been true across the country: gentrification, which increases housing prices and tension, sometimes has racial overtones and can seem like a dirty word. Now Portland is encouraging black and white residents to talk about it, but even here in Sincere City, the conversation has been difficult. [NYT]
Singing their way to stardom: Auditions (and just goofing around) on MySpace and YouTube vault amateur rockers into gigs with storied bands. [CSM]
May 29th, 2008 at 10:56 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
Parlez-vous SMS? A new threat to the French language: The baccalauréat exam season approaches, and with it ritual agonising over the standard of French spelling. These days, fingers are pointed not only at progressive teaching, the decline of the dictée or the legacy of May 1968. The new culprit is text-messaging. [Economist]
Cricket’s new wicket: American high schools: The first league, which has its championships next week, is fully subscribed by teens from the far reaches of the former British Empire. [CSM]
An icon reborn: ITS fearless crusade against Pablo Escobar, a notorious drug baron, turned El Espectador, a Colombian newspaper, into a journalistic icon but cost it dearly. Its editor was murdered, its offices bombed and its distributors threatened. A recession then forced the battered paper into turning weekly under new owners in 2001. This month, bucking the global decline of newspapers, El Espectador relaunched as a daily. [Economist]
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:16 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
House prices force Americans to sleep in cars: Organisers of the programme say they are seeing ever more unlikely people living out of their cars in the exclusive beachfront city of Santa Barbara, where the average house costs more than $1 million(£500,000). Many hold down part-time jobs while bedding down for the night in their vehicles. [Telegraph]
Our Electric Brain: If you’ve been fussing over a birthday gift for the sci-fi nut or armchair transhumanist in your life, consider a ticket to Lausanne, Switzerland. That’s where, in one corner of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, an IBM supercomputer is quietly making some fitful first steps toward consciousness. Its name is Blue Brain. Its job is to simulate, at the cellular level, the interaction of neurons. [Adbusters]
Thrills and spills: The Michael Jackson phenomenon represented a golden age - the peak of the music industry. The only way was down. [New Statesman]
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success: Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process. [NYT]
Britons flock to Mexico for euthanasia drug: The lax controls on the drug’s distribution has helped to make Mexico a macabre destination for euthanasia “tourists”. [Telegraph]
The Birth of the Nuppie - High-end designers target nomadic urban professionals: Created by two German designers, Casulo is an almost magically compact trunk crammed with enough stylish furniture to outfit a studio apartment. [Reason]
Disabled lonely hearts find love online: With scores of dating Web sites catering for the bold and the beautiful, a growing number of niche sites are emerging for less fortunate lonely hearts, those struggling with mental or physical problems. [msnbc]
May 21st, 2008 at 11:51 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
Price rises send New Yorkers delving into dustbins for free food: Soaring food prices have led to a growing number of middle-class New Yorkers joining an unusual organisation that “dumpster dives” in rubbish bins for food. The trash tours form part of a growing movement called “Freegans”, which is rapidly increasing in popularity as New Yorkers find it harder and harder to make ends meet. [Times]
Stranded in Suburbia: And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea. Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon. [NYT]
The Big Easy Rebuilds, Bottom Up: New Orleanians have achieved much of this success by doing what New Yorkers couldn’t do after 9/11: ignoring the potentates and eggheads hankering to turn devastation into conceptual art. They’ve been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree—and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master. [City Journal]
The Rise of Bodysnarking: Lilly Jay, a 16-year-old sophomore at a private school in Washington, says Facebook has made her peers much more comfortable commenting on each other’s appearance and has magnified the cruelty already commonplace among teenagers. “When people look weird or bad in pictures, they are often tagged with ‘Hahaha.’ ” Miss Jay says that social-networking sites mean teenagers now focus even more on how they look. [WSJ]
The mystery of violence: The most violent weekend, April 18th-20th, saw no few than 36 shootings—15 of them gang-related—and nine deaths. As Chicago prepares for the summer, when violence usually tends to rise, two questions linger: what has caused this outburst, and what can be done about it? [Economist]
May 19th, 2008 at 8:37 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
Remember ‘go outside and play?’: Overbearing parents have taken the fun out of childhood and turned it into a grind. [LA Times]
Kidneys for Sale: “What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need. [Reason]
Republic of Montana: Several dozen Montana politicians, including Secretary of State Brad Johnson, have adopted an unconventional take on the Second Amendment case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: They’ve threatened secession. [Reason]
Bridging a cultural Gulf promises a new media era in Middle East: The past two years have seen the beginnings of a transformation in media in the Gulf, helped by rulers willing to risk a hands-off approach towards English-language television and, now, from newspapers. Media freedom is far from complete, but early signs are encouraging in a region where there is a limited tradition of free media. [Times]
The very sexist guide to being the perfect wife (but it was the 1930s): Is your wife “slow to get into bed”? Does she flirt with other men at parties? Or is she “a good hostess – even with unexpected guests”, ever ready to “react with pleasure and delight to marital congress”? If so, fill in below and give her a score. Psychologists in America have discovered a “Marital Ratings Scale” from the 1930s that allowed husbands to assess their wives. [Independent]
May 15th, 2008 at 10:31 am
This article is filed under Blog, Society.
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.
