Rural Studio in Alabama, a branch of the Auburn University architecture program. This house is made from carpet scraps! (via @jennipoos)
i just tried to take a nap & couldn’t because this song wouldn’t get out of my head. DAMN YOU!
Real estate mogul Bob Rennie commissioned artist Martin Creed to install his artwork as part of a restoration project. The Wing Sang building is the oldest building in Chinatown. The phrase “Everything is going to be alright” is a reference to the upcoming 2010 Olympic games and a hopeful message to the Downtown Eastside in general.
“But, setting aside the issue of gender, there is still no such thing as a level playing field in sports. Different bodies have physical attributes, even abnormalities, that may provide a distinct advantage in one sport or another. The N.B.A., for instance, has had several players with acromegaly—the overproduction of growth hormone. Michael Phelps, who has won fourteen Olympic gold medals, has unusually long arms and is said to have double-jointed elbows, knees, and ankles. Is Caster Semenya’s alleged extra testosterone really so different?
There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.”
- Long New Yorker article by Ariel Levy about Caster Semenya and the difficulties of determining sex. Read it all. Judith Butler has also weighed in, including this bit: “this act of ‘sex determination’ was supposed to be collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender’ (why wasn’t I called!?)” which I thought was hilarious (there’s an interrobang for god’s sake) but some commenters found to be “academic arrogance”.
Castro at the Lincoln Memorial, April 1959
i’m inexplicably stoked on this cover, right now.
“Subsequent studies of patients with pure alexia — they can see everything but written language — have located the specific contours of the letterbox area. Not surprisingly, it takes up a significant chunk of our visual cortex, as the invention of the alphabet seems to have usurped brain cells previously devoted to object recognition. (Dehaene refers to this process as “neuronal recycling.”) He also speculates that, while “learning to read induces massive cognitive gains,” it also comes with a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to literacy, we’re less able to “read” the details of natural world.”
- Jonah Lehrer reviewing Stanislas Dehaene’s new book, Reading in the Brain
