Category: ideas

A new proposal from the blue-ribbon commission studying ways to rebuild New Orleans has suggested that any low-lying areas of the city which were inundated with floodwaters after the levees on Lake Ponchartrain failed should be abandoned, and Eugene Robinson says that you might as well begin writing the city’s obituary. The commission “envisions a city with lots of green space and a new light rail system; it sees revitalized schools and world-class medical research centers, all protected by invincible levees. It might be a nice place to live, but it won’t be the old New Orleans. In the old days, at a jazz funeral, the ‘second line’ of followers would sing and dance the departed to heaven. The music is still playing in New Orleans, but there’s nobody to form the second line.”

“Sound and visual artist Alyce Santoro has created Sonic Fabric, a cloth made from pre-recorded, recycled cassette tape combined with other fibers. Using a minimally hacked Walkman, the fabric becomes an audible reminder of its musical past. Sonic Fabric feels a bit like flexible plastic tarp, and is durable and hand-washable.” Of course, that’s no why it’s getting attention: if you run a specially mounted head from a cassette player over the fabric, it will literally play the music embedded in the tape. “[Santoro’s] latest creations play 20 tracks at once. She creates sound collages on a four-track, and the reader picks up five strands at a time.”

“In the realm of literature and the arts, honors have been pullulating like kudzu. Worldwide, the number of movie prizes handed out each year – about 9,000 – is more than double the number of full-length movies produced, and literary prizes are being hatched at a faster rate than new books. The rise of prizes over the last century, and especially their feverish proliferation in recent decades, is one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success.”

“Animal behaviourists in the UK believe they have found the first evidence of two-way teacher-pupil communication between ants, suggesting that teaching behaviour may have evolved according to the value of information rather than brain size.”

“Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago. But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years.”

“Newspapers used to have a monopoly on information, and it is taking them a long time to get used to the idea that they have lost it. A century ago, in every American city, various Heralds, Timeses, Tribunes and Gazettes may have competed with each other, but as a mass medium, the newspaper enjoyed total primacy. Everything about newspapering is negotiable these days: who writes, who reads, who pays, what should be covered and how. Even as they shovel the daily quota of prose, editors are pondering existential questions. What gives a newspaper its soul?”

“Yawning is an ancient, primitive act. Humans do it even before they’re born, opening wide in the womb. Some snakes unhinge their jaws to do it. One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back.”

“Over the past decade, Mozart has increasingly been placed in a role that is perhaps the most controversial of all: as healer of mind and body. In this New Age interpretation, Mozart is the ultimate composer-therapist whose music can help treat ailments ranging from acne to Alzheimer’s disease and even, it is claimed, make you and your kids smarter. Some of these claims are based on science.”

“Virtual reality” has come a long way in the last few years. In fact, it has come so far that most intelligent individuals would be hard put to give you a comprehensive definition of what it means, or to separate the first word from the second. “Right before our eyes, this thing that we call the world has been irrevocably altered, along with the ‘reality’ we have counted on. Virtual reality is so permeating our lives that one day soon we may find it impossible to distinguish the virtual from the real.”