Highlights from the Harper's Weekly (with links!):
Apparently I missed this very intriguing item in the Harper's Weekly:
Curators at the Museum of Modern Art pulled the incubator plug on a tiny coat made of living mouse stem cells after it grew too fast ...Excuse me. Come again. A tiny what, made of what?
It's just weird. Via Kendra, who loves all things teeny.One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
Highlights from The Harper's Weekly:
Too difficult to quote selectively, here's the Harper's Yearly Review.
Eight hundred ninety-nine U.S. troops and 18,610 Iraqi
civilians were killed in the Iraq War. Eighty percent of
Iraqis were reporting "attacks nearby" and it was
estimated that 90 percent of Iraq's artists had fled the
country or been killed. Halliburton announced that it
would add 13,000 jobs, and President George W. Bush
underwent a colonoscopy. In Venezuela, President Hugo
Chavez embraced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of
Iran. "Welcome, fighter for just causes," said Chavez.
Senator Barack Obama was featured shirtless in People
Magazine's Beach Babes issue, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
banned smoking in the Speaker's Parlor of the Capitol, and
Senator Hillary Clinton said that "we want to be able to
continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in
digestible packages." Viagra turned 15. Wildfires spread
from north of Los Angeles to south of San Diego, and
scientists at New York University were deleting
frightening experiences from the memories of rats. The
first Muslim member of Congress took his oath on a Koran
once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Annual sales at Taser
International were expected to reach $90 million.
Drought was driving tens of thousands of snakes into
Australian cities, female koalas in Australia were
ignoring males in favor of five-bear lesbian orgies, and
developers were planning to open a Hooters in
Dubai. Scientists in London were working on a gum that
suppresses appetite and fights obesity. "Obese people like
chewing," reasoned a researcher. The United States
projected that it would emit 19 percent more greenhouse
gases in 2020 than it did in 2000, and U.S. pollution was
cited as the reason that the Dutch are now taller than
Americans. The United Arab Emirates beat out the United
States to become the world's most wasteful country, Ford
posted a loss of $12.7 billion for 2006 (the largest in
its 103-year history and equivalent to the GDP of Jordan),
and General Motors announced it would open a new research
center in Shanghai to develop alternative fuels and
vehicles. Geneticist Craig Venter announced that he had
constructed a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory
chemicals, creating the first artificial life form on
Earth. Britney Spears shaved her head, and an appeals
court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the writ of habeas
corpus does not apply to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. The market price for children in India slipped below
that of buffalo, and crystal meth was now available in
candy flavors.
Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Boris Yeltsin
died. Osama bin Laden turned 50 and the Senate doubled the
bounty on his head to $50 million. Ariel Sharon was still
alive. New stars were hatching near the head of
Orion. Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and
Tony Blair resigned. "[Blair] was the worst thing that
ever happened to Africa," said Bright Matonga, the deputy
information minister of Zimbabwe. "We hope that the
children of Iraq and Afghanistan he is killing everyday
will haunt him for the rest of his life." Reverend Ted
Haggard declared himself "completely heterosexual," and
Paris Hilton went to jail. An Irish soldier who won the
Military Cross for single-handedly defeating a Baghdad
suicide bomber was facing a court-martial for auctioning
his medal on eBay. Scientists trained dogs to track polar
bear feces, produced talking construction paper, made stem
cells out of adult mice, and linked the upsurge in cat sex
to global warming. Mr. Wizard died, as did
Mr. Whipple. Pope Benedict XVI decreed that, by
definition, Protestant churches are not churches, and it
was revealed that Mother Teresa, beginning in 1948 and
continuing until the end of her life in 1997, was unable
to sense the presence of God. "Repulsed--empty--no
faith--no love--no zeal," she wrote. "Heaven means
nothing." Detainees at Guantanamo Bay complained of
"infinite tedium and loneliness," and 20,000 people
marched against the junta in Burma; about 400 monks were
pushed away from the house where pro-democracy leader Aung
San Suu Kyi was imprisoned. "Love and kindness," read the
monks' yellow banner, "must win over everything."
Three nice links today from Harper's Weekly.
This week:
Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki
By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."
"More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991," Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.
Every week I thank Kendra for introducing me to the Harper's "Weekly Review."
And this week's review made me laugh out loud in the library.Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice painted an
upcoming U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference as a
"moment of opportunity" for Israelis and Palestinians,
while film director David Lynch claimed that 250 experts
in Transcendental Meditation could end that conflict by
dissolving "the suffocating rubber clown suit" of hatred.
Like a lot of people, I neglect the magazines I subscribe to. When I do read them, I am usually reminded why I subscribe.
And this month's Harper's has a truly great article that offers a novel way by which we the people can stop this war: a general strike.
Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.What I really like about this article, too, is that Garret Keizer is finely attuned to the way in which we have become inured to this war such that "normal life" continues apace while Blackwater (and our army, too, let's not forget) shoots people down in the street.If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizen-ry that believes it is already dead.
