10 Most Inappropriate Album Covers Ever
10 Most Inappropriate Album Covers Ever
There’s a palpable incongruousness between the title of this album and the happy-homestead snap. Barry, we’re baffled.
Has the internet killed local music scenes?
‘Titanic Awards’ Salute Travel’s Greatest Failures
Travel writer Doug Lansky sees a disconnect between the articles he reads about exotic destinations and the stories he and fellow writers trade over beers at the bar.
Glossy tales of lying on the beach drinking coconut milk make it into the magazines, he tells NPR’s Liane Hansen, but privately, travel writers like to swap war stories: “juicy nuggets of when you were trapped on this island and the ferry stopped working, or [the] toilet from hell.”
So Lansky decided to change that. In The Titanic Awards, he delivers a lighthearted shot across the bow of the travel industry, celebrating the biggest underachievers and funniest failures in travel.
Naughty by nature: Why has Britain become so rude?
Naughty by nature: Why has Britain become so rude?
In the Bawdy section of the Rude Britannia: British Comic Art exhibition which opened this week at Tate Britain, there’s a disembodied fibre-glass arm. It pokes rudely out the gallery wall, attached to a metal spring that causes it to move, rhythmically, up and down. The arm ends in a hand whose fingers are closed around an invisible object – but there’s no mystery about what the object might be. The title of Sarah Lucas’s piece is Wanker.
Many of us, I’m sorry to say, will have seen that slow, strumming gesture sketched in the air by drivers who have just overtaken us on the M4. It’s a masterstroke by Ms Lucas to select it as an embodiment of British rudeness, for it does several things with admirable economy. It accuses us of habitual masturbation (much ruder and more personal than calling us a fool or a cuckold), it shakes an aggressive fist, it impersonates a large and intimidating phallus, and it gesticulates at its enemies with a kind of insulting slowness.
Holy Terror: The Rise of the Order of Assassins
Holy Terror: The Rise of the Order of Assassins
For almost two centuries, from 1090 until 1273, the Order of Assassins played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East. A small Shiite sect more properly known as the Nizari Ismailis, the Assassins were relatively few, geographically dispersed, and despised as heretics by both the Sunni Muslim majority and even by most other Shiites. By conventional standards, the Assassins should have been no match for the superior conventional military power of any of their many enemies. But near the end of the 11th century, the charismatic and ruthless Hasan-i Sabbah forged this small, persecuted sect into one of the most lethally effective terrorist groups the world has ever known. Even the most powerful and carefully guarded rulers of the age—the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs, the sultans and viziers of the Great Seljuk and Ayyubid empires, the princes of the Crusader states, and emirs who ruled important cities like Damascus, Homs, and Mosul—lived in dread of the chameleonlike Assassin agents. Known as a fida’i (one who risks his life voluntarily, from the Arabic word for “sacrifice”; the plural in Arabic is fidaiyn, or the present-day fedayeen), such an agent might spend months or even years stalking and infiltrating an enemy of his faith before plunging a dagger into the victim’s chest, often in a very public place. Perhaps most terrifying, the Assassins chose not only a close and personal manner of killing but performed it implacably, refusing to flee afterward and appearing to welcome their own swift death.
Fanatical and disciplined, Hasan-i Sabbah and his successors were brilliant practitioners of asymmetric warfare. They developed a means of attack that negated most of their enemies’ advantages while requiring the Assassins to hazard only a small number of their own fighters. As with any effective form of deterrence, the Assassins’ targeted killings of hostile political, military, and religious leaders eventually produced a stable and lasting balance of power between them and their enemies, reducing the level of conflict and loss of life on both sides.
When Germ Warfare Happened
Jiang Chun Geng’s poisoned right leg, with its suppurating wounds, hangs limply over the gray wooden bench in the medical clinic here in Dachen, a village in China’s province of Zhejiang. Twice the size of his left leg, the limb is too tender to touch during my visit. Instead, Dr. Zhu Jian Jun gently dabs the putrid wounds with an alcohol-drenched swab. Jiang’s heavily lined face tightens as Zhu wraps the fiery stump with a white bandage and unhooks an intravenous antibiotic drip. Another treatment is over.
Jiang, a 70-year-old farmer, can’t remember a time when flesh-eating ulcers didn’t cover his legs. “They never go away,” he tells me. “They just get drier. Sometimes they hurt less.” He doesn’t know for sure how he got them, but his father told him that the wounds first appeared in July 1942, soon after the Japanese army passed through his village. His entire family developed the festering sores. His mother and younger brother died in unbearable pain a decade later as the untreated, mysterious infection crept up their legs.
We Need a General Theory of Individuality
We Need a General Theory of Individuality
Needed, an oxymoron: a general scientific theory of individual differences. To focus upon individuality is to celebrate particularity, whereas any general theory must, by definition, submerge the individual case in a wider sea of pattern. Each of us cherishes our own separate, individual personhood, making much of the “fact” that we are different from everyone else (while also insisting, of course, that we aren’t all that different). But attention to individual differences runs the risk of being unscientific, insofar as science aims at generalizing, raising our heads above the individual trees to recognize the forest. Yet the need is there. When Kierkegaard insisted that his tombstone say “That Individual,” he was identifying both an existential truth and a profound scientific dilemma.
One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology (with intervening stops at physiology, political science, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology) is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences. It can be argued that that is what generalizations are: statements that apply to a larger class of phenomena and must, by definition, do violence to individuality. But since science seeks to explain observed phenomena, it should also be able to explain the granular particularity of such phenomena. In fact, generalities lose potency if they occur at the cost of artificially leveling otherwise significant features of reality.
Temp Nation: The demise of “lifetime employment” in Japan
Temp Nation: The demise of “lifetime employment” in Japan
For decades, Japan’s big firms were famous for their deal with employees: The corporation was a big family that looked after its workers for life. In return it expected total dedication.
That was the Japanese way, and part of the popular 1980s American media narrative on the rise of Japan, Inc.
It’s no longer true. Instead, more than 17 million people in the world’s second largest economy are now “irregular” workers, or temps, according to government statistics.
That’s nearly 34 percent of the workforce, up from 25 percent in 1999 and just 15 percent in 1984.