(via rkloving)
Dinka Boy with Long Horned Bull, South Sudan, photographed by Carol Beckwith/Angela Fisher
Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Airport (by hellogiggles)
London-based Zaha Hadid, widely regarded as one of the leading lights in the constellation of avant-garde architecture, has likewise become a superstar in China, where her latest designs radiate out through architecture schools and studios across the country. On a recent trip to Beijing, 15,000 artists, architects and other fans swarmed to a talk she gave for the opening of the futuristic Galaxy SOHO complex — just one of 11 projects she is designing across the country.
But the appeal of the Prtizker Prize winner’s experimental architecture, especially since the unveiling of her glowing, crystalline Guangzhou Opera House two years ago, has expanded so explosively that a contingent of pirate architects and construction teams in southern China is now building a carbon copy of one of Hadid’s Beijing projects.
What’s worse, Hadid said in an interview, she is now being forced to race these pirates to complete her original project first.
What happened, in brief, is that my wife and I had hired a young man named Antonio to give us a tour.* We’d spent the morning chugging around in an ancient Moskvich sedan, with another young man driving as Antonio pointed out the sights and delivered a running commentary about what he called “the reality of Cuba.” We’d visited an Afro-Cuban cultural museum, toured the old Spanish fort, bought contraband rum. We’d gone back to Antonio’s tiny concrete box of a home, met his wife and mother, sipped beers, talked some politics, and taken pictures. In the late afternoon, he and another friend had led us to a lovely little restaurant at the base of Santiago’s landmark Padre Pico steps. We’d eaten grilled lobster, drunk more beers, and traded jokes and vows of eternal friendship.
At the end of the meal, I’d given the waiter CUC $80 and received CUC $10 in change, and as I stood there with the ten-peso note in my hand Antonio grabbed and pocketed it. I shot him a confused look, and he responded with a half shrug that seemed calibrated somewhere between What’s it matter? and You know the score. I hadn’t intended to give him the money, but he decided he deserved it. Hours later, on the rooftop patio of the Casa Granda, drinking a mojito that cost nearly half the amount I was obsessing about, I wondered what that shrug really meant.
(Source: ircats)
All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call Rudolph names, and the scars from the bullying stuck with him. He was insecure about his appearance even among friends and he avoided being in photos. Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say, “Just get in the picture. I’ll take a few and you can delete the ones you don’t like.”
At community meetings as commissioner, Bealefeld listened to agonized citizen monologues about the drug dealers and the ruin that accompanied them—the casual display of guns, the crazed addicts. But when Bealefeld really pressed them, trying to identify the source of their fear, he realized they weren’t worried about the drug trade itself but about the violence. To Bealefeld, it started to seem as if the pre-drug-war way of thinking might still apply. What if being a good cop didn’t mean turning yourself into a soldier in the drug war? What if the drug war was actually a distraction?
[…]
Quietly, in experiments in a few influential police departments around the country, a new set of tools for policing is being tested, as cops have come to realize that violence tends to be driven not by neighborhoods but by small and identifiable populations of exceptional individuals. Working with arrest records on the crime-ridden far West Side of Chicago, a young Yale sociologist named Andrew Papachristos discovered that he could create a social map of violence (including only people who were arrested together with other members of the network) that encompassed just 4 percent of the people in the neighborhood but virtually all of the murderers and murder victims. Each time you “co-offended” with another member of the network, it turned out, you grew 25 percent more likely to be murdered. The universe of the violent and the vulnerable, Papachristos found, was far tinier than the universe of people involved in drugs, or in gangs; it was a small circle of people who all knew one another.
What Happens Now That the War on Drugs Has Failed? — New York Magazine
This, I feel, is the fundamental lesson of Why Society Still Exists: most people, most of the time, just want to get by.
The same premise applies to the ‘War on Terror’. Creating terror is easy, but almost no one has any interest in doing so.
You’ve got to eat to live and got to work to eat. That’s coercion. The fact that the coercion arises from a state of nature might mean that we can’t blame anyone for the coercion itself, but it certainly doesn’t prevent us from blaming those who exploit it. And capitalism doesn’t just permit that coercion, it can’t function without it. The distinction between someone who puts a gun to my head and says “you must work for me or die” (bad coercion, to libertarians) and someone who points to my certain starvation if I don’t work and says “you must work for me or die” (good coercion, to libertarians) is almost entirely irrelevant to how I actually experience life and liberty. And the latter condition afflicts many millions of people. The reality of death due to starvation and exposure might be a state of nature but the exploitation of that state of nature to satisfy self-interest certainly is not. But this exploitation is at the very heart of the libertarian and capitalist project.
In 2007 she captured global attention as the Hiccup Girl, a 15-year-old who spent nearly six weeks searching for a remedy for her non-stop bout of hiccups – a journey documented by multiple visits to NBC’s Today.
Now, Jennifer Anne Mee, 19, is making headlines once again, this time for being charged with first-degree murder.
![The turkeys are raised in the same fashion as turkeys designated for slaughter, but are selected “at birth” for pardoning and are trained to handle loud noises, flash photography and large crowds. Because most Thanksgiving turkeys are bred and raised for size at the expense of longer life, they are prone to health problems associated with obesity such as heart disease, respiratory failure and joint damage. As a result of these factors, most of the pardoned turkeys have very short lives after their pardoning, frequently dying within a year of being pardoned.[3]
(via National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdwn1xb40Y1qz7r0mo1_500.jpg)
The turkeys are raised in the same fashion as turkeys designated for slaughter, but are selected “at birth” for pardoning and are trained to handle loud noises, flash photography and large crowds. Because most Thanksgiving turkeys are bred and raised for size at the expense of longer life, they are prone to health problems associated with obesity such as heart disease, respiratory failure and joint damage. As a result of these factors, most of the pardoned turkeys have very short lives after their pardoning, frequently dying within a year of being pardoned.[3]
(via National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
It’s true—no rippling sinews are visible on James Deen’s body. There are probably 12-year-old girls who could take him in a fight. And this, Deen tells me, is partly thesecret of his success. He is not the traditional porno man, no overbulked squat-thruster spray-broasted from the Darque Tan booth. He is sort of wimpy-looking. With luminous blue eyes and well-structured, stubble-flocked cheekbones, he is handsome, but in an everyday, non-Hollywood way. “Not horrible to look at” is how Deen describes his appearance. “I’m like a guy a chick might actually meet in a bar.”
That Deen’s very ordinariness is somehow a virtue in the industry is, one could argue, a symptom of pornography’s journey from unsanitary movie theaters and paper-windowed bookstores to every computer screen the free world over. A theory: Back in the days when the culture could pretend that porn was being exclusively consumed by sex criminals and raincoaters, viewing pornography was actually a multilayered form of voyeurship. The chief thrill was, of course, watching people screw, but salting that thrill was a Lovelace-ian paratext of unhappiness, addiction, disease, etc. The fact that the performers were doomed and loathed, if hypocritically, by mainstream culture made them more exciting to watch. That female performers should be made to couple with satanic reptiles like John Holmes or Ron Jeremy was just, fitting, gross, and perversely harmonious with the moral aesthetic of the age.
