Even as a supporter of Gaza and the West Bank, I was immediately taken with the texture, shapes, and angles of designer Michael Tsinzovsky’s “Little Night Lamp For Sderot,” above, and below right. As the text on Yanko Design noted,
The lamp is created from a bomb shelter light switch as a gesture to the citizens of Sderot, Israel who have been living under siege for years.
Commenters on the site, though, don’t seen to feel Tzinzovsky’s politics. For example:
” the citizens of Sderot, Israel who have been living under siege for years”.
with my all knowledge of the middle-east history, I can’t recall such a period. Sieged by who?
Or this one, in reply:
Sieged by the Palestinians of course! With their.. rocks?
despite the stupidity of the gesture, its quite a nice piece of design. Perhaps a night light for the Palestinian children would be more appropriate.
It could be made out of the rubble of the houses they grew up in?
Dag: Everything in the Middle East is political, even home design. That’s why we gotta free Palestine!
That was my response Friday when a friend tweeted me with news that President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unguarded as my words were, though, similar sentiments would soon reverberate across the land as incredulous newswatchers wondered the same question aloud. Like him or not, what exactly had Obama done during his first eight months in office to deserve what is, arguably, our species’s highest honor for reconciliation?
TIME.com writer David Von Drehle remains one of the incredulous, apparently. As he ponders next year’s Nobel, and the list of presumably more deserving recipients, the journalist has reached an odd, yet captivating, conclusion:
If the Nobel Committee ever wants to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, its members will award a Peace Prize to the bomb.
Von Drehle is not kidding in the least. In his adroitly titled, “Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel,” he argues
that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, [right] when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser’s army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million or 78 million — somewhere in there.
So when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing one another with such feverish efficiency that they couldn’t keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet averaged about 3 million dead per year. Why did that stop happening?
It did, Von Drehle says, for one reason: Thanks to nuclear weapons,
Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high.
Is Von Drehle right? It’s an old argument, that the power of the nuke is not explosive, but aversive; that no one really wants to see one go off. And although there’s exactly zero chance the Norwegians will give a Peace Prize to the Peacekeeper, the notion has got to have the inventor of dynamite—Alfred Nobel—cracking up in his grave.
It’s on panopticist, an intriguing blog run by Vanity Fair contributing editor Andrew Hearst. As well as being a man of letters, Hearst is the son of chess royalty. His dad, Eliot, grew up in New York City, and
was one of the top players in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, eventually earning the title of Life Senior Master. Both he and Fischer spent time at the Marshall Chess Club, which is still located on West 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, as it was back then.
Hearst the Younger admits he’d always fantasized about going to Iceland and introducing himself to Fischer, who lived there during the last years of his life.
Fischer is buried in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reyjavik. I have an Internet pal in Reykjavik named Halldor, and he passed along these photos of Bobby’s grave. They were taken by an American friend of his named Judith Gans, a singer and Icelandic music expert.
When 19-year-old computer geek Shawn Fanning created and released Napster, his internet file-sharing application, 10 years ago, he had no idea that his little experiment would completely overturn the massive, multi-billion music business. He just wanted a way to share digital music with friends. But what started as an experiment by a bored college student quickly became the loose bolt that would yank the industry from its rapidly rotating axle.
Fanning and Napster were quickly lambasted by many, hailed as heroes by many more. But their story is only a small part of what Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot, in his new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, above, calls “the laptop generation”:
An uprising led by bands and fans networking on the Internet. Ripped tells the story of how the laptop generation created a new grassroots music industry, with the fans and bands rather than the corporations in charge.
after the incredible wealth and excess of the ’80s and ’90s, Sony,
Warner, and the other big players brought about their own downfall
through years of denial and bad decisions in the face of dramatic
advances in technology.
Greg Kot and Steve Knopper are guests today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, October 2, at 2 pm ET.
provides a legal and business roadmap to artists, music industry professionals, entrepreneurs and attorneys. It focuses on the rules pertaining to the music business and the new digital music industry, how artists and entrepreneurs can use the new technologies to succeed, new business models, plus interviews with artists and entrepreneurs who are inventing the future of the music business.
You can hear Kot’s, Knopper’s, and Gordon’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
In your piece, however, I couldn’t help but notice the following excerpt:
Where Mr. Allen lost me (well, he never really had me but I was going in with an open mind since I highly respect the person who referred me to his article), was when he spewed forth this nonsense:
The familiar, sky-blue font is there, but the usual, loud, hyperventilating, all-caps text is not.
Instead, last night on his blog, Kanye West gave the apology that, perhaps, fans and foes had wanted to hear all along.
Comparing himself to Gaylord “Greg” Focker, the luckless character played by Ben Stiller in the 2000 film, Meet the Parents, West admitted that, with his bum rush of the MTV Video Awards on Sunday, he’d “messed up everything.”
That was Taylor’s moment and I had no right in any way to take it from her. I am truly sorry.
Will hip-hop vocalist / producer Kanye West, as one blogger has insightfully observed, become the next African-American male to live his public existence as a symbol of the race divide’s vitriol? Will he become a scapegoat for white obsessions over the threat Blackness purportedly represents?
The virtual flood of racist, expletive-laden tweets that followed the artist’s brief rant at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards suggest a strong “Yes.”
As many know, West interrupted singer Taylor Swift during her “Best Female Video” honor and acceptance speech, taking the mic to tell her, and all watching, that, “Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’m gonna let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all-time. One of the best videos of all-time!”, referring to Knowles “Single Ladies,” which had also been nominated.
West’s rude and abortive outburst drew loud, droning catcalls from the audience, while an embarrassed and stunned Swift stood, shocked and still, before being escorted gently from the stage.
Excellent NY Times pic by photog Christopher Polk, above top, documents Kanye West’s September 13, 2009 bogart of MTV’s Video Music Awards 2009 stage. The act led to his web site apology, above, that same night, but not before he was ejected from Radio City Music Hall.
Best part: Taylor Swift’s “Huh?” expression, and the fact that the hostess in the back doesn’t even know what’s happening yet, either.
After disrespectfully yelling out “You lie!” to the President of the United States, in the middle of Obama’s address to Congress last night, Republican South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, above, quickly received the contempt of the body’s fellow members, on both sides of the aisle. (“Stand with me against liberal attacks: Today I need your help more than ever before,” he urged from his home page on Twitter, shamelessly plugging for money.)
Wilson may actually do all right in that department because, according to TwitterCounter.com, as of today, he also has more than 6,000 new followers on the popular social networking site.
Commenters on the site, though, don’t seen to feel Tzinzovsky’s politics. For example:
that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, [right] when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser’s army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million or 78 million — somewhere in there.
