The breaking year

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, 1909, by John Waterhouse 
In honour of the breaking new year, and of this annual time of resolutions, strategies, and self-reflection, a sonnet about life and youth and time by one of Spain’s greatest poets, Luis de Góngora (1561-1627):
While trying with your tresses to compete
in vain the sun’s rays shine on [...]

It ends in murder

Benazir Bhutto in 2006 (Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville) 
As world news organizations fall over themselves to provide broad-brush background and analysis on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, go read Tariq Ali’s recent LRB profile of and full-scale backgrounder on Bhutto; your investment in time will be repaid with greater comprehension. Example: A BBC piece today describes the [...]

Spurning the glass teat

 
With the writers strike threatening to turn American television into a wasteland of re-runs and reality-based programming, one could be forgiven for assuming that a final and ignominious descent into cultural oblivion is nigh. So it is with a sense of holiday joy that I present to you the counter-argument, namely, that American arts culture [...]

Ghosts unmentioned

Water is Leven, by Henk Hofstra (2007)
The ongoing interplay between man and nature occasionally throws up an oddity. In the usual course of things, cities and farmlands spread inexorably, fundamentally distorting (where not destroying outright) the ecosystems they encounter. Far less frequently, it is mankind who retreats – leaving concrete bunkers behind after a war, for [...]

Liquid aviary

A detail from a rather striking design by Barcelona designer Alex Trochut, prepared for ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The deliquescent flowers jump out at the viewer, but, once noticed, the hummingbirds are even more pleasing.
Or is it the reverse?

The things we don’t choose

The neighbourhood is the kind of place where ten-year-old boys on bicycles tell you to “fuck yourself and fuck your mother” when you ask them to move out of the road. Where the local tavern is frequented by a skeleton crew of thugs and broken-down old men at two o’clock in the afternoon. Where the [...]

Repent, ye sinners, repent

 
Professor of theological ethics and director of the Martin Marty Center at U. Chicago’s divinity school, William Schweiker provides more historical background on the practice of waterboarding:
In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and the symbolic threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed forcing [...]