Nepenthe

Location Fort Greene Rent $1,300 Square feet 600 [studio apartment in tenement building] Occupants Kelli Miller [master's student in architecture] ; Jason Loewenstein Well, a pig. [Pig] Snork, grunt. [Jason] Come on, Bub. [He goes to his water bowl.] That's a big one. [Kelli] One hundred and five pounds. When we found him, he very easily fit on your lap. It was on the streets in Louisville. He was just in the gutter. Lying there. He was standing up nosing through the leaves. We found him two homes. They returned him each time. [Jason] Within a day. [Kelli] At that age, he required a lot of attention. What kind? He pees for a very long time. [Jason] We're talking minutes, five at least. Is he housebroken? [Kelli] Yes. [She smiles.] When he lived with the dogs, they didn't let him mess up. They taught him the ropes. When we moved here, they all slept together. When the dogs died, he slept with us for quite some time. That was three years ago. [Jason] For farm pigs, he...

Name Occupation Country Chinua Achebe Novelist Nigeria Jean Baudrillard Sociologist, cultural critic France Gary Becker Economist United States Pope Benedict XVI Religious leader Germany, Vatican Jagdish Bhagwati Economist India, United States Fernando Henrique Cardoso Sociologist, former president Brazil Noam Chomsky Linguist, author, activist United States J.M. Coetzee Novelist South Africa Gordon Conway Agricultural ecologist Britain Robert Cooper Diplomat, writer Britain Richard Dawkins Biologist, polemicist Britain Hernando de Soto Economist Peru Pavol Demes Political analyst Slovakia Daniel Dennett Philosopher United States Kemal Dervis Economist Turkey Jared Diamond Biologist, physiologist, historian United States Freeman Dyson Physicist United States Shirin Ebadi Lawyer, human rights activist Iran Umberto Eco Medievalist, novelist Italy Paul Ekman Psychologist United States Fan Gang Economist China Niall Ferguson Historian Britain Alain Finkielkraut Essa...

September edition of The New Criterion is laden with articles on Britain =)

Heard on Jay Leno: Do you know who's really happy about the soaring oil prices? The Amish ..................................................................................................:-D

Mirror mirror, on the wall Who's to be showered with roses fair? Of whom should you take particular care? Who brings peace to all mankind? Who is naughty, sometimes kind? Who may one day be a queen? Who's sixth sense's so very keen? And who's about to enter here? It's only a pussycat NEVER FEAR!

MUST READ: Myths of American exceptionalism The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new. (...) Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy. (...) Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing h...

Reading "The Prince" ...it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men's minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or misjudgment, is always forced to have the knife ready in hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him... [A prince] will be despised if he has a reputation for being fickle, frivolous, effeminate, cowardly, irresolute; a prince should avoid this like the plague and strive to demonstrate in his actions grandeur, courage, sobriety, strength. It's for this reason that I decided to read Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince." No one else is more closely identified with the idea of self-ad...

The Story of the Iraq Museum Picking up the pieces of 40,000 years of cultural life We all know what happened, or think we know. When American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, hordes of looters rushed into the Iraq Museum, repository of the world's greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities, and stripped the place while our GIs were busily pulling down Saddam statues for CNN. The truth, wouldn't you know it, is a bit more elusive. About 15,000 objects were stolen, not 170,000 as first reported (actually the size of the museum's entire collection), an exaggeration resulting from misunderstandings between the first journalists to reach the shattered museum and distraught Iraqi curators. Some objects were irretrievably damaged, but nearly half those stolen have since been recovered, as museum director Donny George writes in this absorbing book. Its editors aren't interested in raking over old coals or giving a definitive account of how ...

MARADI, Niger, Aug. 7 - In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby. Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition. The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey. "When she came here, she was all small and curled up," said her mother, Henda, 30. "It's Plumpy'nut that's made her like this. She's immense!" Never heard of Plumpy'nut? Come to Maradi, a bustling crossroads where the number of malnourished children exceeds even the flocks of motor scooters flitting down its dirt streets. At this epicenter of Niger's latest hunger crisis, Plumpy'nut is saving lives, perhaps including Taorey's. Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, i...

PostSecret obrigada à Joanicas e ao seu blogue familiar, Calais-Pedro

Nueva Yol n. In Caribbean Spanish, New York (City). Also Nueba Yol. Dominican Republic. NYC. Puerto Rico. Spanish. The "yol" is due to a clipped final consonant, characteristic of Caribbean Spanish. In most dialects of Spanish, the "V" and "B" are both pronounced as a voiced labiodental plosive, sometimes resulting in the common spelling or transcription nueba for nueva 'new' (also seen in the variable spelling of Havana/Habana). [God...] love-cum-arranged marriage n. matrimony between a mutually acceptable and consenting couple that has been facilitated by the couple’s parents. English. India. [ Cum is Latin for “with” or “together with.”] [As long as there's cum...]

Mr. Jeavons Said That I Was A Very Clever Boy Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day , and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day , and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day , and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day , which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks . He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical. I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days . And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it ...

Saving the industrial age from oblivion, through photography Read more on Sign and Sight

Through Andalusia, in Search of Gazpacho SPAIN is a matrix of themed routes - rutas as they are known in Spanish - carefully mapped out for those looking to follow a lead. There is the Catholic pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela, the Ruta del Quijote, trailing Cervantes's beloved character from windmill to windmill in La Mancha, and, in season, there is even a Strawberry Train. So doesn't gazpacho, perhaps the country's most persuasive gastronomic goodwill ambassador, deserve the same? Cold soup was addictive long before the actress Carmen Maura tossed a fistful of Valium into a blender of gazpacho in Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 film, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Perhaps the ultimate indication of its appeal today might be that for just one euro, a McDonald's meal in Spain can be supersized with a refreshing cup of the stuff. A little research conducted among chefs, food critics and historians suggested that tracing the regional origi...

PREGUNTA: (a) Alfonso se descarga una canción de Internet. (b) Alfonso decide que prefiere el disco original y va a El Corte Inglés a hurtarlo. Una vez allí, y para no dar dos viajes, opta por llevarse toda una discografía. La suma de lo hurtado no supera los 400 euros. RESPUESTA: La descarga de la canción sería un delito con pena de 6 meses a dos años . El hurto de la discografía en El Corte Inglés ni siquiera sería un delito sino una simple falta (art. 623.1 CP). [ El test del disparate o cómo engañar a un pais ]

RULES OF ATTRACTION Men, women and Darwin Can evolutionary psychology take the mystery out of how we meet and mate? "Falling in love," he said, "is basically a process where both sides feel they're getting a good deal." Read all about it on LA Times

PETER SINGER Un-American about animals WHAT COUNTRY has the most advanced animal protection legislation in the world? If you guessed the United States, go to the bottom of the class. The United States lags far behind all 25 nations of the European Union, and most other developed nations as well, such as Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. To gauge just how far behind the United States is, consider these three facts: # Around 10 billion farm animals are killed every year by US meat, egg, and dairy industries; the estimated number of animals killed for research every year is 20 million to 30 million, a mere 0.3 of that number. # In the United States, there is no federal law governing the welfare of animals on the farm. Federal law begins only at the slaughterhouse. # Most states with major animal industries have written into their anticruelty laws exemptions for ''common farming practices." If something is a common farming practice, it is, according to these stat...

Sixty years after the Allies’ bombing of Dresden enveloped the city in flames, controversy persists over whether the attack was militarily justified or morally indefensible. But another question, no less crucial, is seldom asked: Did wartime conditions allow military leaders to look away as they violated their own principles? Lenghty article from The Wilson Quarterly