Paul J. Zak: “Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men.”
Tag: 04.28.12
A New Food Ethics Quandary: If Plants Are Sentient Enough To Communicate, Is It Okay To Eat Them?
A team of Israeli researchers found “that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil” – and those plants responded. “Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication?”
Rise Of The Artist-Endowed Foundations
“Artist-endowed foundations are the sleeping giants of philanthropy,” says András Szántó, a New York-based analyst and cultural consultant. Indeed, these charitable foundations, endowed by an artist with assets (archives, property and art among them) used for the public good, are quietly but dramatically changing the US art landscape through their grant-making programmes, scholarship, research activities and contributions to museum collections.
The Best New Yorker Covers You’ve Never Seen
The (possibly better; surely more outrageous) covers that didn’t make it through the process, culled by the magazine’s art editor.
William Klein, Photography Outsider, Finally Has “A Moment”
“Klein burst on to the photography scene in the early 60s with a series of books about cities – New York, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo – filled with raw, grainy, black-and-white photographs that caught the energy and movement of modern urban life with scant regard for traditional composition. The first, Life Is Good & Good For You in New York (1956), once it got published, earned him the opprobrium of both critics and other photographers alike. ‘They just didn’t get it,’ he says. ‘They thought it should not have been published, that it was vulgar and somehow sinned against the great sacred tradition of the photography book. They were annoyed for sure.'”
Building The Perfect City (Utopias Always Work Out So Well)
“Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere ‘smart city’ — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.”
Kitsch: Still A Topic Of Bemusement?
London’s filled with kitschy fashion and design this season. “But what exactly is kitsch? Why is it making a comeback? And why does it provoke such knee-jerk disapproval?”
Cuban Actors Reappear To Ask For Asylum
Two young Cuban actors who star in an award-winning film about young Cubans defecting to Miami have now come out of hiding – in Miami – to say they’re defecting to the U.S.
Don’t Annoy A Classicist, Especially A Famous, Well-Loved One Like Mary Beard
“As likely to cadge a cigarette from a student as to ask them to conjugate a Greek verb, Beard is opposed to the elite image of her subject. ‘The importance of Mary is that she is the living embodiment of the fact that classics isn’t just for posh people and men and in fact never has been.'”
Tonys Committee Rules On One Man, Two Guvnors
The work, a contemporary script based on a 1746 play, isn’t a revival, says the Broadway awards’ eligibility committee. “A committee member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the eligibility discussions are private, said the view among several on the panel was that the One Man producers had been trying to manipulate the categories and avoid the crowded field competing for best play nominations.”