Butterflies and Wheels: Identity is That Which is Given
Kenan Malik writes that the attempt to preserve "cultural identity and authenticity" is largely an inauthentic act, one steeped in relativism and traditionalism, and more concerned with how individuals "should" act than how they actually do. Thanks to @kemp for the link.
"ClearRx is a trademark for a design for prescription drug packaging, designed by design student Deborah Adler as a thesis project and adopted by Target Corporation (with refinements by industrial designer Klaus Rosburg) for use in their in-store pharmacies." Very well done.
Gourmet.com: Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace)
Typically disinterested in the tourism of Maine's lobster festival, DFW gives a great history of the lobster. The bulk of the article, most interestingly, is dedicated to the ethics of boiling a living creature alive (or otherwise killing it) in order to eat it.
Matthew Parris: As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Interesting, though I do not totally agree. (Is Christianity not itself a tribe? An ideological one, at least, if not geographically contiguous.) There is the same food for thought here that I've been chewing on for years... it is a conundrum I cannot reconcile.
"'I thought I'd host an end of the world party, but the media might take it seriously.' —Stephen Hawking, reassuring that world was not due to end with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider."
A nicely designed list of the words of the year. Seems like half are from the election. Can't say I've ever heard of a "fish pedicure," but there it is.
Jim Carrey as a genius, the "representative jester of our time." "Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience."
"'Garden of Eden', 2007 by Wollle shows eight pedestals, each of which is covered with an airtight Plexiglas box. Via the internet, the latest air pollution levels in the capitals of the G8-countries are obtained. The system reproduces these levels artificially inside these boxes, each of which contains a lettuce that serves an indicator of the quality of the air inside the capsules."