Category: ideas

“What’s behind this Potter-mania? Clearly something other than the quality of the novels. When reviewers finally get to read the new Potter, no doubt there will be the predictable backlash of claims that it is not that good – but who cares? The discussion has gone beyond all that. Since it began, Potter-mania has represented a cultural infantilism, that only grows as the years go by. It is about what we expect from our kids, our books, our value system and ourselves. Whatever happens in The Order of the Phoenix, the story of our obsession with Harry Potter is unlikely to have a happy ending.”

Scientists have discovered that stimulating the brain with a “transcranial magnetic stimulator” enhances brain function and creativity. “You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It’s a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.”

With Saddam Hussein out of power, and Iraq facing an uncertain future, Iraqi artists are beginning to stare down the barrel of a hard question: without tyranny to rail against, what is our function? “By his own authoritarian standards, Hussein was a supporter of the arts,” with a stable of state-sponsored playwrights, poets, and other artists directed to churn out a constant flow of product which could be compared to the Socialist Realist works of the USSR under Stalin. It was a repressive, hateful system, yes, but it was at least a system. In the post-Hussein Iraq, where American troops roam the streets and the future is on hold, one Baghdad playwright sums up the new paradox: “Whatever is around me is vague, unseen. We don’t know our country’s future; it is hard to write.”

Some artists did well in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Now that he’s gone, they have more freedom to create, and there are galleries ready to show their work. “But painters and sculptors say that for now, the inspiration is gone – stifled by sweltering days with no electricity, snaking gas station lines and sleepless nights defending galleries against looters and arsonists. ‘I ask the artists to make something new, and they tell me they are tired’.”

It’s called the Mob Project and it works like this: Someone writes an email with a date, time, place and random activity, then sends it to people to forward to whomever they want. At the appointed time, dozens (hundreds?) of strangers converge at the appointed location. “The Mob Project has a particular New York twist – you have to know someone to get invited. There’s no website to go to for information, no ads in local papers – the mob forms from e-mails that are forwarded from person to person. ‘Everyone loves a mindless mob! I was so stoked when I got my invitation – no action, no protest, no needing to review my political stance on a particular issue. Just be there or be square.”

“In the past few years, a curious literary genre known as ‘fan fiction’ has been flourishing. The term refers to all manner of vignettes, short stories and novels based on the universes described in popular books, TV shows and movies. Similarly derived works are appearing in music, where fans are using their computers to mix songs from popular artists into new works that they call ‘mashups.’ Movie fans are taking digital copies of films such as the ‘Star Wars’ epics and creating alternate endings or deleting characters such as the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks. The explosion of these part-original, part-borrowed works has set authors of fan fiction against some media companies in a battle to redefine the line between consumers’ right to ‘fair use’ and copyright holders’ rights to control their intellectual property.”

Iraq was once a center for art and culture. But it has been in “steep decline for twenty years. The loss into exile of three million people, among them many of the country’s most gifted, has arguably been far more destructive than recent wartime damage. The reduction of the entire middle class to deep poverty, one result of the international sanctions imposed since 1990, compounded the misery. The sanctions — or, as Iraqis say, the siege—had the further effect of sealing them off from advances elsewhere in the world, and even from the hope of catching up. In the past decade a kind of rottenness set in. When I saw Baghdad in 1990, with its neat, palm-lined boulevards, it looked not unlike Kuwait or Riyadh. A decade later the city looked more like Khartoum or Kinshasa, a place of brownouts, grasping bureaucrats, and leaky drains, its broken streets packed with the aimless unemployed.”

Researchers believe that advances in microelectronics and medical imaging are “bringing us closer to a world where mind reading is possible and some blindness is overcome with visual prostheses.” But as alluring as some of the possibilities may be, the capabilities of such technology may very likely have a nasty downside. “Researchers may one day find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism.” If so, what will that mean for those so labeled?