January 27, 2012 Rachel Sussman: The World's Oldest Living Things Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world's oldest continuously living organisms -- from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago's coast to an "underground forest" in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture.
January 25, 2012 Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 What aspects of religion should atheists adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a "religion for atheists" -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.
January 24, 2012 Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds Each seed in the carpet of porcelain replica sunflower seeds assembled by artist Ai Weiwei is hand-fired and hand-painted by inhabitants of Jingdezhen, the 'porcelain capital' of his native China. The installation. which originally premiered at The Tate in London is made of over 100 million hand-painted ceramic seeds. Weiwei employed 1,600 people in the process.
January 23, 2012 The Thomas Beale Cipher Based on a true legend of the famous unsolved code, The Thomas Beale Cipher contains 16 hidden messages that hold clues to the characters' secrets. Eight are fairly easy requiring only a close eye. Six are moderately difficult using various encryption methods. Two are extremely difficult requiring a genius mind to decrypt.
January 19, 2012 Henry Miller Asleep and Awake Tom Schiller's 1975 short documentary follows Miller from the microcosmos of his very own shit-hole to a mock-up 1890s New York of his childhood -- or "that old shit-hole, New York'" (in fact the set for Hello Dolly, with Barbra Streisand & Walter Matthau, 1969). Schiller describes his documentary this way: 'A guided tour of the pictures and artefacts of his bathroom' ... though it feels to be very much more than that.
January 18, 2012 PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting "creativity". The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is "dedicated to copyright infringement." The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.
January 16, 2012 3 Reasons Conservatives Should Cut Military Spending Conservative Republicans are happy to talk about cutting spending on the poor, education, and cowboy poetry readings, but they insist that spending on defense and homeland security be increased.
January 12, 2012 Dali's Night in a Surrealist Forest Surrealist artist Salvador Dali designs and hosts a party held in the Bali Room of the Hotel Del Monte, Monterey, California. The event was titled Night in a Surrealist Forest and it was a fund raiser to help European artists displaced by the war.
January 9, 2012 The Page Turner Joseph Herscher takes a sip of his coffee, pulling string thereby tipping paintings. Balls roll down paintings, lighting burner to boil water causing books to tip. Vase and computer get knocked off the table, releasing tape to open front page of newspaper.
January 6, 2012 The Saving American Democracy Amendment Warning that "American democracy in endangered," Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that allowed unrestricted and secret campaign spending by corporations on U.S. elections. The first constitutional amendment ever proposed by Sanders during his two decades in Congress would reverse the narrow 5-to-4 ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission.
January 4, 2012 Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the Remix Former "young Republican" Larry Lessig talks about what Democrats can learn about copyright from their opposite party, considered more conservative — a surprising lens on remix culture.
