“It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.”
Tag: 11.27.10
Why We Ate Too Much Turkey, Stuffing and Pie
“In recent years, neuroscience has begun to solve the mystery of overeating. It turns out to have little to do with our taste buds, or even with our conscious desire for certain foods. Instead, the impulse to overeat depends on the pleasures of the stomach and intestines, which have an uncanny ability to detect the presence of calories.”
The Unquiet English Village
“The English village is lodged in the public imagination as the great good place where nothing changes, a refuge from the rat race and a retirement dream.” But the histories of these little settlements have often been harsh. “What happens to them for good or ill is so often not the result of natural growth or decline but of some economic bonanza or hammerblow or some landlord’s benevolence or greed.”
Why Salman Rushdie Became a Writer
“My father was knowledgable, he’d tell his own versions of Arabian Nights, Panchatantra fables. … Everyone thinks that Rashid Khalifa, ‘the Shah of Blah’ in [my children’s] books, is a send-up of me but that’s based on my memory of my father telling these stories. I became a writer because I got addicted to story.”
The Man Who Wrote Gomorrah and His Life in on the Lam
“It is four years since the publication of Gomorrah, [Roberto Saviano’s] description of life under the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime syndicate.” The book and the subsequent film adaptation made him famous, wealthy and a hero to many. It also made him a target, and he now lives in Salman Rushdie-like hiding.
Peter Greenaway’s Light Show on Leonardo’s Last Supper
“For 16 minutes, a series of cinematic projections and an accompanying original soundtrack will play over a copy of the painting that, through the use of high-resolution 3-D scanners, faithfully reproduces the original. … Through the artist’s manipulation of light, at various times the figures in The Last Supper can appear three-dimensional, and the time of day seems to change.”