This is how an American soldier is made. For 27 months, Ian Fisher, his parents and friends, and the U.S. Army allowed Denver Post reporters and a photographer to watch and chronicle his recruitment, induction, training, deployment, and, finally, his return from combat. A selection of photos from Ian’s journey are posted below. (via Captured Photo Collection » Ian Fisher : American Soldier Photos)
Every year, Black Friday rings in the yearly holiday shopping season, with hundreds of thousands of people getting up before sunrise to queue for bargains and deals; when the doors are unlocked, the stores being besieged by their own customers. During Black Friday last year, security guard Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death by death crazed shoppers as he tried to hold back bargain seekers at a Long Island Walmart. Unfortunately, the uproar in the media was mostly over by the end of the weekend.
Picture Black Friday is a photojournalism project that aims to revisit and analyze a combination of forces- a worsening economy, financial desperation, excitement, fear, absurdity, and a distinctly American cultural tradition- that culminate the morning after Thanksgiving.
You can’t go to Asmara and not note the architecture. While most African capitals today are replete with drab, hulking towers from the 1960s and 1970s, the Eritrean capital, dating back to its days as an early-century Italian colonial pied-a-terre, is home to some of the boldest designs on the continent.
Benito Mussolini saw Asmara as an extension of his Fascist empire. He used the highland city, as Barney Jopson wrote recently in the Financial Times, as “a laboratory for bold architectural styles – rationalism, futurism, monumentalism – that would never pass muster in Italy. The result is a cocktail of convex façades, jutting balconies and porthole windows.”
Medvedev: Every historical figure is revered by some and rejected by others, and this holds true for Stalin as well. In my blog, I clearly defined Stalin’s deeds as crimes. Fifty million Russians regularly access the Internet — over a third of the Russian population. Thousands have responded. Some wrote that the head of state has finally taken a clear stance on the oppression and on Stalin. Others, on the other hand, refused to accept my views. They wrote that our country has Stalin to thank for its developed economy and free social services, and they said that there was virtually no crime under his leadership. They said that today’s Russian leaders should first of all try to match those achievements.
SPIEGEL: That doesn’t sound very flattering for you.
People may have obligations toward animals—to enforce these, there are laws against animal cruelty—but these obligations do not preclude ingesting them. Pollan contends that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless.” Similarly, the author and livestock expert Temple Grandin, who designs what are often called “humane slaughterhouses,” argues, “We owe animals a decent life and a painless death.” We “forget that nature can be harsh,” she has written. “Death at the slaughter plant is quicker and less painful than death in the wild. Lions dining on the guts of a live animal is much worse in my opinion.”
[Robert LaValva, the founder of the New Amsterdam Market] mentions Bo Bo’s Poultry, founded by Richard Lee in 1985 and run these days by his daughter Anita Lee. The company, which began as a live poultry market under the Williamsburg Bridge and expanded to its own slaughterhouse, owns farms in Pennsylvania and New York within a 200 mile radius from its plant in Brooklyn, and supplies Chinatown with the majority of its whole fresh chickens.
Bo Bo’s chickens are not certified organic. On the other hand, Anita Lee reads Michael Pollan, appreciates Polyface Farm principles, and gives her poultry quality grain and the chance to run around. Lee sells her chickens whole, plucked, with the head and feet intact. This means picky, thrifty shoppers can look each chicken in the eye and gauge its freshness, like a fish. How’s that for competition?
This is my friend’s company, with an awesome write-up in the Atlantic.
In his new book, “The City Out My Window,” Matteo Pericoli has sketched the views of sixty-three New Yorkers. All are people Pericoli felt had a strong connection to the city, either through their lives (Ed Koch, Mark Morris) or their work (Mario Batali, Richard Meier).
Mikhail Baryshnikov’s view: “It’s one of New York’s most beautiful buildings. But it looks better at night … like a woman.”
Slide Show: A Room With a View: The Book Bench : The New Yorker
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
…Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments. People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners. The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time. It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.
Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question
Broken Social Scene - Lover’s Spit (Redux)
I much prefer this version, with vocals by Feist, to the original on You Forgot It In People.
Fanfarlo - The Walls Are Coming Down
British band Fanfarlo sounds very much like Beirut in this song.
There was a fire in my hood last night, which literally went from smoke to raging inferno in minutes. Watch out for candles, people!
