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People in Glass Apartments

Influenced in part by Richard Meier’s glass box towers in lower Manhattan (and his newest one at One Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn), these transparent living spaces, once the quintessence of twenty first century Modernism, have become eyesores, particularly at night when they take on the appearance of showrooms in Amsterdam’s red light district.
Granted simply walking down the street and inadvertently peering into a window does not constitute “secret or surreptitious” trespassing on another’s privacy, but it does beg the question: Why would anyone want their intimate life exposed to any peeping Tom, Dick or Harry? In other words, what were the architects thinking? And why are so many developers buying into this aesthetic? 
Read more at observatory.designobserver.com
 

Venn diagram of mythical creatures via @ashalynd

Second language changes the way bilinguals read in their native tongue

Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always “on”?

The fact that bilinguals aren’t forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there’s some kind of switch.
in 2007, brain surgeons reported evidence for a language switch when their cortical prodding with an electrode caused two bilingual patients to switch languages suddenly and involuntarily.
On the other hand, there’s good evidence that languages are integrated in the bilingual mind.
bilinguals are faster at naming an object when the word for that object is similar or the same in the two languages they speak (e.g. ship/schip in English and Dutch).
even when bilinguals read sentence after sentence in their native tongue, access to words in their second language remains open, rather than switched off, thus having an effect on the way the native language is processed.
“Becoming a bilingual means one will never read the newspaper again in the same way,” they concluded. “It changes one of people’s seemingly most automatic skills, namely, reading in one’s native language.”Read more at bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
 

The traveling museum of failed love

Coming Soon | ‘The Museum of Broken Relationships’

The Museum of Broken Relationships

Love letters, scrapbooks, pressed flowers, vials of blood: these relationship mementos finally have a place to call home. “The Museum of Broken Relationships” is a roving exhibition of donated objects organized by Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic in Croatia as a cathartic response to the emotional turmoil of love lost. Along with an anonymous short story detailing the emotional resonance of each donation, these artifacts of failed romances provide a much-needed alternative to the usual heartbreak-recovery methods like Charlie Kaufman’s memory erasure and/or binge drinking.

Currently showing in Kilkenny, Ireland, with plans to return to North America in 2010, the exhibition boasts more than 100 artifacts submitted from around the world. And it expands with every city it visits as the heartbroken share their pain by depositing the detritus of their defunct relationships
The Museum of Broken Relationships
The Museum of Broken Relationships
See more at themoment.blogs.nytimes.com
 

John Berger on the female nude

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WAYS OF SEEING (episode two - female nude) 1/4

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WAYS OF SEEING (episode two - female nude) 2/4

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WAYS OF SEEING (episode two - female nude) 3/4

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WAYS OF SEEING (episode two - female nude) 4/4

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The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics

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When comic book heroes and villains get old: Superheroes Decadence by Donald Soffritti

More at the source.

Amplifyd from www.telegraph.co.uk

Italian cartoonist Donald Soffritti imagines the later years of superheroes, with hilarious results. His brilliant cartoons have been collected into a book, available here

Wonder Woman
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Captain America
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Batman and Robin
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Catwoman
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The Penguin
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The Great Order of the Universe by Christian Bök

Via @bitoy’s Flickr

Amplifyd from www.poetryfoundation.org

NOTES: “The Great Order of the Universe” is a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the LEGO patent. Using a conceptual strategy reminiscent of Sol LeWitt, the image enumerates every possible way of combining two LEGO bricks, each with six pegs. The caption consists of two texts: the first, a translated paragraph from a volume by Democritus; the second, a transcribed paragraph from the patent by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. The two paragraphs are perfect anagrams of each other.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2009).

Read more at www.poetryfoundation.org
 

Anton Kannemeyer - The Alphabet of Democracy

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a selection of Kannemeyer’s works on paper from The Alphabet of Democracy-series, a new series entitled Cursed Paradise and drawings from recent sketch books; all of which raise extremely uncomfortable questions in the debate about racial stereotypes and South Africa cultural and socio-political landscape.
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With The Alphabet of Democracy, the white South African artist tackles many issues politicians and journalists tent to “diplomatically” avoid. The series sharply comments on the madness below the surface of the rabidly conformist parts of white South African society, especially the Afrikaans community. Black politicians are not protected from his sarcasm either as the alphabet also targets the absurdity of some of their statements.
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In this context, the word “democracy” becomes subversive. The liberated South African society and its form of government are shown as just another arbitrary social order fraught with moral ambiguity and human absurdity.

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See more at www.we-make-money-not-art.com
 

John Hodgman quizzes Obama

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Humorist John Hodgman was the entertainment headliner at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner. Mr. Hodgman roasted the president for being a “nerd”, referencing his place in popular culture and passion for comics and science fiction.
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