"The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2008
Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2008
Source: Freedom House
From press release:
Increased corruption and controls on nongovernmental organizations placed Chad on a list of the world’s most repressive societies for the first time, putting the country on par with China, Zimbabwe and Syria. The finding is part of the Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2008, a new report released by Freedom House today.
Frederick Trap Friis, American (1865 - 1909). Woman Floating in a River Attended by Two Female Spirits, c. 1895. found in Exceptional Group of Drawings, Prints, and Rare Illustrated Books at the National Gallery
Digitized manuscripts: a call to the mysterious world of old books
A manuscript is far more valuable than a printed book. While an e-mail includes no extra value other than the work of the author and a printed book offers only the text created by the author and the page and cover design articulated on computers, a manuscript contains the artistic touches of several people: the author, the copier, the gilder, the marbling artist and the bookbinder. The Context of Unwanted Sexual Experiences
Source: University of New Hampship
From related Inside Higher Ed article:
The college social scene is the setting or context for much of the unwanted sexual contact that happens on campuses, as a new report by researchers at the University of New Hampshire, exploring the experiences of the university’s undergraduates, details.
May '68: a contested history
Despite the tendency of decennial commemorations to cement the "official version" of May '68, important questions remain unanswered. Chris Reynolds points out some blind spots in the increasingly stereotyped interpretation of the events in Paris forty years ago.City Journal, six authors recall a spring that shook the world, May 1968: 40 years later.
15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better
The A.V Club compiles "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will." Here are Vonnegut's statemets about happiness and how he discovered he was a science fiction writer, with commentary by AV.Lessing: Nobel win a 'disaster'
Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing says winning the award has stopped her writing.Too Many Writers, Not Enough Readers?
Are there too many writers and not enough readers? Rachel Donadio crunches the numbers. It's well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn't read a book in the previous year -- a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there's a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.Foucault and anarchism
why is [Foucault] the target of a visceral rejection or at least a complete indifference for most of the anarchists? The author suggests two reasons: Foucault is characterized by a deep pessimism as to the possibility of getting out of power relations or more precisely of organizing them in an emancipative manner and:Modes of philosophizing
Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should it be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? And should analytic philosophy reject continental philosophy or recognize it as another "mode of philosophizing"?Steampunk, a new trend
I am at C3 at MIT today, and I am sure I will have lots of interesting things to report by the end of the day. But let me point to an article that appeared in the NYT this morning, for those of us interesting in trends and movements in contemporary culture.
La Ferla describes the Steampunk as a
subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.
