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January 11, 2006

01.11.06 | Planet of Slums; Hey, Hetero!; Obituary for Comandanta Ramona
January 11, 2006 Edition

"The Best of the Rest of the Web"

THiS WEEK: Looking at the Sharon Factor in Palestine; Mike Davis' original essay on how we are creating a planet of slums; customarily hilarious words from Steven Colbert; when art becomes numbers; legendary Zapatista leader Comandanta Ramona has died; satirical Australian poster series on the joys of heterosexuality; what will become of Evo Morales; book your bus tour to gawk at the utter destruction of New Orleans; more evidence of just how severely most whites don't understand racism; the 2005 Political Folly Awards; and several other exciting surprises in this week's Media Picks.

This Week's Picks:

  1. The Sharon Factor
    While Palestinians may view Sharon's physical death, when it comes, with not a small amount of gloating, the timing of Sharon's end is not particularly expedient for the Palestinians.

    Khaled Amayreh | Al-Ahram Weekly
    http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/777/re1.htm


  2. Planet Of Slums
    Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima's innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred.
    (This 2004 essay constitutes the basis of Mike Davis' soon-to-be-released book of the same name.)

    New Left Review | Mike Davis
    http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26001.shtml


  3. VIDEO | The Infection That Is You
    Stephen Colbert explains to auto workers that Ford provides people with cars, not health insurance.

    Colbert Report | Comedy Central
    http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=36280


  4. The Rembrandt Code
    Scientists at Dartmouth are using graphics analyzing programs and statistics to identify true artistic masterworks. "The fact that you can put everything on the computer means that everything is numbers," one of the researchers says. "As soon as everything is numbers, it makes perfect sense to ask mathematical questions about what the numbers represent."

    Bijal P. Trivedi | Wired
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/rembrandt.html


  5. OBITUARY | Legendary Zapatista Leader Comandanta Ramona Has Died
    After a decade-long bout with cancer of the kidney, Zapatista leader Comandanta Ramona died early yesterday morning. Choking back tears and with a wavering voice, Subcomandante Marcos made the public announcement of Ramona's death in the midst of the Chiapas segment of the nationwide six month Zapatista led "Other Campaign."

    Andrew Kennis | Narco News
    http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1542.html


  6. CARTOON | Counter-Culture

    Shannon Wheeler | Too Much Coffee Man
    http://www.tmcm.com/comics/tmcm051219.gif


  7. SUBVERSIVE ART | Hey, Hetero!
    It's so easy! However queer you look, if you're one each male/female, your public affection does not endanger you. No one will hurt you for expressing love or lust, no one will tell you to keep it in the privacy of your own home.

    Deborah Kelly & Tina Fiveash | ABC Arts Online
    http://abc.net.au/arts/visual/stories/venice/hh_02.htm


  8. Before Columbus: Revisionism and Enlightenment
    In "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus", author Charles Mann deftly synthesizes new and old information from paleo-societies in the western hemisphere. Mann takes readers back to the time before Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus and his crew had touched the shore of Guanahani, what Columbus arrogantly rechristened San Salvador.

    Kim Peterson | Dissident Voice
    http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Petersen02.htm


  9. Bolivia's Home-Grown President
    On its face, the election of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia would seem like an enormous victory for the left. But the question remains whether the first indigenous president in Bolivia's history will be allowed—by the Bolivian Congress or by the larger international financial and legal system—to live up to his promises and fulfill the enormous expectations of his supporters.

    Daphne Eviatar | The Nation
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060123/eviatar


  10. PHOTOS | Air Conditioned Drive Through Category Five
    Photos (and commentary) of the Gray Line "Hurricane Katrina—America's Worst Catastrophe" tour. That's right—tour.

    BAG News Notes
    http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2006/01/air_conditioned.html#more


  11. Black Consensus, White Dispute
    Meanwhile, only 20 percent of whites believe that the federal government's failure to respond had anything to do with race, and only 38 percent think there is something to be learned about racial inequality from the Katrina disaster.

    Glen Ford and Peter Gamble | Black Commentator
    http://www.blackcommentator.com/165/165_cover_katrina_study.html


  12. Unspoken Words
    The Defense Department and the President want students learning Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and other "critical" languages in order to protect the country "in the long-term by spreading freedom."

    Rob Capriccioso and David Epstein | InsideHigherEd
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/06/foreign


  13. The Political Folly Awards of 2005
    As with bestselling books by big authors from publishing conglomerates and Oscar-winning films from giant studios, so, when it comes to the Political Folly Awards, the famed PFs, ever fewer members of the Bush administration and associated bureaucrats, spooks, and Pentagon officials took ever more of them in 2005.

    Tom Engelhardt | Tomdispatch
    http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=46373


- Media Picks Contributing Editors: Adam Barker, Justin Park
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin Wiegand and Brian Awehali


Posted by erin at January 11, 2006 05:24 PM

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