31.01.12

The world's biggest and most vulnerable trees
Article and pictures here

30.01.12

Yiu Yu Hoi is an infrared photographer currently based out of Hong Kong, China.

24.01.12

Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Illustrations by Anna and Elena Balbusso
Slideshow here

"My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated. Did I really wear bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without a thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display, could be seen. Shameful, immodest."

22.01.12

The First Sexual Revolution
Article here

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.

Rembrandt, Detail from the Bed, 1646

19.01.12

Shot dead: Weegee's murder photographs go on show
Link here

14.01.12

Ezra Pound's daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet's legacy from fascists

The 86-year-old Mary De Rachewiltz is taking on a band of Italian neofascists who are using her father's name.
Article here

13.01.12

The Way Ahead For Publishing

Guardian article here

11.01.12

Guan­tánamo

Video and Article

Colonel Morris Davis, who resigned as chief prosecutor of the Guantánamo military commissions in October 2007 in protest at the use of evidence obtained through torture, the damage lives on. "Guantánamo is a stain on our reputation," he said. "The only way we can end that chapter is to close it."

The numbers, pulled together by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), speak for themselves. Of 779 detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo over the past decade, only six have been convicted. That's one less than the number of military prosecutors who resigned over the system's unfairness. Some 600 have been released, most under President Bush, raising the question of why they were there in the first place.

07.01.12 (iiiiiii)

New Worlds, the seminal science fiction magazine edited for many years by Michael Moorcock is back. SF Signal reports: The magazine will appear in both electronic and traditional print on paper formats and be backed up by an extensive website that will feature exclusive editorial features free to all interested readers.

Warren Ellis writes that it is "the most groundbreaking sf magazine of the last half of the 20th Century, if not one of the most groundbreaking magazines of any kind in the way it reshaped fiction and captured invention in the culture at large."

07.01.12 (iiiiii)

Guardian Books Podcast: Science Fiction now and tomorrow
Link here


In this week's new year books podcast, we look to the future. Science fiction has never been bigger, and publishers are falling over themselves to sign the next Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman. We talk to some of the genre's biggest names about the state of SF in 2012, and where they think the genre is heading.

07.01.12 (iiiii)

Hoto Fudo is a restaurant designed by Takeshi Hosaka Architects. The igloo-like building is located on the base of Mt. Fuji in the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan. Interestingly, with the moutain’s natural surrounding, Hoto Fudo allows air from the outdoors to circulate through the openings of the wall.

7.01.12 (iiii)

Jim Sanborn is a visual artist based out of Washington DC. His series are topographic lights that are projected on natural landforms. All of the pieces were photographed at night using long exposures. On moonless nights, the landscape was lit with searchlights. The landforms themselves are quite large, requiring the projector and camera to be, on average, 1/2 mile away from the subject landscape.

07.01.12 (iii)

Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany. Baselitz's style is interpreted by the Northern American as Neo-Expressionist, but from a European perspective, it is more seen as postmodern.

His career was kick-started in the 1960s after police action against one of his paintings, (Die große Nacht im Eimer), because of its provocative, offending sexual nature.

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Baselitz is one of the world's best-selling living artists. He is a professor at the Hochschule der Künste art academy in Berlin.


Dresdner Frauen. Temporary exhibition at Palais De Tokyo, Paris

07.01.12 (ii)

Louis Kahn

07.01.12

My favourite painting after visiting Palais De Tokyo in Paris

Metzinger, Loiseau Bleu

06.01.12 (iii)

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

06.01.12 (ii)

my PINTEREST

06.01.12

Hourglass Figure

A perfect waist is what men consider the most attractive feature in women, say scientists who calculated the ratio for the ideal figure in a female body.

"They calculated that a “waist-to-hip ratio” of 0.7, or a waist measuring 70 per cent of the hip circumference, was the “perfect” size".