Category Archives: Miscellaneous

After the end of the world

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Artist Lori Nix creates painstakingly detailed miniatures of bleak, post-apocalyptic landscapes:

“I loved Towering Inferno, and it just happened the other day, in Dubai,” she says, referring to the 34-story tower that went up in flames on November 18th. The diorama, Control Room, which was inspired by Chernobyl, brings to mind Hurricane Sandy and New York’s flooded subways. While the collection started a few years ago, Nix has added new scenes along the way (the subway and anatomy classroom dioramas above were completed last month).

“Our life as we know it is spinning wildly out of control and we may not be able to finance our way back to a healthy planet,” says Nix. This is The City’s premise, though Nix doesn’t specify exactly how human beings have screwed up the planet–and, ultimately, become extinct. “It could be climate change, nuclear annihilation, a virus. I leave it up to the reader to decide. But if you were the last person left alive, these are the scenes you might find.”

Finally, a reason to visit the museum

Miscellaneous, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is now featuring video games:

In a blog post by curator Paola Antonelli, it was announced that the museum has acquired and will exhibit games including Pac-Man, Tetris, Out of This World, Myst, SimCity, Vib-Ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw,Passage and Canabalt.

“Are video games art?” asks Antonelli. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design — a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games will be exhibited as part of the museum’s Architecture and Design collection. It plans to add 26 additional games, to bring the total to around 40 in the near future, including Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Minecraft.

The games are selected based not only on their visual quality, but the elegance of the code and the design of the player’s behavior. They were looking for games that combined historical and cultural relevance as well as innovative approaches to technology. The curators have consulted scholars, critics and digital conservation experts to understand how to display and conserve these digital, interactive artifacts.

Omaha

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Kathleen Massara reminisces about growing up in Nebraska’s biggest city (although, as in New York, the capital lies strangely elsewhere). As an Omaha native who moved to the East Coast at the age of nine but then spent four additional years in the suburbs of Chicago later on, I can confirm the validity of her observations about the Void:

Which brings up the point: to grow up in Omaha is an exercise in confronting the void. The Void should be capitalized, though, because it is a big deal. Here, the buildings are stout, the streets are wide, and there are twice as many bars as there probably should be for a mid-sized city. In the winter, when the surrounding farmland lies fallow, the only thing in your rearview mirror will be sky—ominous, gray-streaked winter sky with giant clouds hanging low. It reminds you of your insignificance, of how fucked you would be if your car broke down.

It is a city bifurcated by I-80, the interstate running from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey, which means that you can coast along at 60-plus miles per hour to get from downtown to more residential areas in a matter of minutes. It also makes it easy to enter and exit the city without stopping. Omaha is a rest stop, a short break on your way to more exciting places. We all know this, and we resent you for it…

I left Omaha because the Void frightened me. The landscape was too large for my reptilian brain to handle, and I wanted to see a world outside of insurance agencies and tight military haircuts. It turned out, though, that I had stupidly underestimated the intelligence of Omaha’s good-natured citizens, and every time I come home I find my curiosity growing. When we’re not catering to the needs of those aging Americans who still order things over the phone, we’re figuring out what to do about Iran, or how to keep China in line. The people planning our geopolitical strategy and acting in the interests of national defense are living in a place you’ve probably never taken seriously. Welcome to The Good Life.

Oh, those horny liberal women

Miscellaneous, Religion, , , ,

Yup, it’s exactly what the headline says:

Here’s how we know. The NFSS posed this question to respondents:

Are you content with the amount of sex you are having?

Respondents could answer in one of three ways: (1) Yes; (2) No, I’d prefer more; or (3) No, I’d prefer less. Now, before you throw around claims of misogyny, take some comfort in knowing that I don’t think answer #3 is somehow inherently more correct than #2. Good grief. My job here is interpretation.

Here are the simple numbers: 16% of “very conservative” women say they’d prefer more, compared with 29% of conservative women, 31% of moderates, 47% of liberals, and 50% of “very liberal” women…

And, remarkably, it isn’t much affected by how much sex they’ve actually had recently. That is, while greater recent frequency of sex predicts less desire for more sex, it does nothing to diminish the link between political liberalism and wanting more sex. And women of all political stripes report statistically-comparable frequency of sex.

In regression models, the measure of political liberalism remains significantly associated with the odds of wanting more sex even after controlling for the frequency of actual intercourse over the past two weeks, their age, marital status, education level, whether they’ve masturbated recently, their anxiety level, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, depressive symptoms, and porn use. Many of these are significant predictors of wanting more sex. And still the political thing matters.

One theory? Sex = religion for liberals. No, really:

1. More liberal women are less likely to be religious. (In the NFSS and other datasets, she’s correct in this).

2. Given that, more liberal women are therefore more likely to have a difficult time attributing transcendent value to aspects of life such as their work, relationships, children, and daily tasks. Some scholars speak of this as “sanctifying daily life.” In other words, liberal women are less apt to conceive of mundane, material life as imbued with or reflecting the sacred.

3. Nevertheless, most people experience sexual expression as–in some significant way–transcendent, or higher-than-other-experiences.

4. More liberal women therefore want to have more sex because they feel the lack of sufficient transcendence in life. If sex is one of the few pathways to it, then it’s sensible to desire more of it.

Black Friday and the Walmart strike

Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , , ,

Robert Reich explains why shoppers should stay away from Walmart today:

A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.

Today, America’s largest employer is Wal-Mart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Wal-Mart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference—including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits…

Is this about to change? Despite decades of failed unionization attempts, Wal-Mart workers are planning to strike or conduct some other form of protest outside at least 1,000 locations across the United States this Friday—so-called “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day in America when the Christmas holiday buying season begins.

At the very least, the action gives Wal-Mart employees a chance to air their grievances in public—not only lousy wages (as low at $8 an hour) but also unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, excessive hours, and sexual harassment. The result is bad publicity for the company exactly when it wants the public to think of it as Santa Claus. And the threatened strike, the first in 50 years, is gaining steam.

Josh Eidelson, meanwhile, notes that Black Friday may only be the start:

Expectations are high for a historic strike. Given Walmart’s role as the dominant employer of our era, the current wave of work stoppages is already among the country’s most consequential twenty-first century strikes. But in interviews this month, workers and organizers described today’s actions as a turning point, not a climax, in their struggle against the retail giant. “This is the beginning of something…” said Dan Schlademan, a United Food & Commercial Workers union official who directs the allied group Making Change at Walmart. “This is a new permanent reality for Walmart…2012 is the beginning of the season where retail workers are going to start to stand up.”

“There’s going to be more days that we’re going to strike,” said Rozier, “and it’s not going to stop. I’m not going to stop until they respect us and give us what we want.”

Andrew Sullivan has more.

A cynical giving of thanks

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Of course, it comes from Charles P. Pierce:

When you come right down to the bottom of the chafing dish, Thanksgiving is a holiday of great ambivalence. A day allegedly dedicated to thanking the great Whoever that enough white people survived the winter in Plymouth to kick off 300-odd years of continent-wide genocide. A day dedicated to celebrating the simple gifts that the great Whoever bestowed upon this land, yet one that we mark by going crazy over cheap, Chinese-slave-labor produced crap at 12:01 a.m. the very next morning. Also, too: the Detroit Lions. Sometimes, America is a very tough room.

What I choose to celebrate this year, however, is how, in the face of our own internal contradictions, and our own internal hypocrisies, and our own eternal ability to bullshit ourselves into believing almost anything, we retain the indomitable notion that, somehow, we can get things right. You can call this optimism, or you can call this delusional, and I wouldn’t disagree with either one. I know, it sounds sappy, but I really believe that, buried beneath all the nonsense and avarice and plain meanness with which we too often manifest our politics, there is a feeling of a political commonwealth that is worth getting back to and, having arrived there, worth preserving. I believe that is the case with the people I watched wait five hours to vote, arranging the events in their daily lives so that they could stay there in the face of brutish bureaucratic inertia. I believe that is the case with the people who believe that Agenda 21 is a UN plot to steal all our golfs. We believe nonsense in America, and we occasionally act on it, which is infinitely worse, and we occasionally believe that there can be no consequences to believing nonsense, and that is the worst thing of all. But there is something tiny and hopeful beneath all of our credulity, and our shouting at each other. And that is our stubborn optimism about our ability to fix things about ourselves, and about our poor, benighted relatives who don’t believe what we do, but would, if only they would put down the damn cranberry sauce and listen…for…a..minute. I believe that is true of all of us who are spending Thanksgiving celebrating the fact that the country did not hand itself over to Willard Romney, and I believe it is true of those people who are spending it pondering seriously the idea that all the country really needs to come back into the light of grace is Sarah Palin in the White House.