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August 29, 2006
08.29.06 Hermaphrodite Frogs; Biotech Goes Retro; "Story of O" Author Speaks
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August 29, 2006 Edition |
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THiS WEEK: Bitch Magazine celebrates ten years of feminism and pop culture, and a new book to boot; the same herbicide that was used in Agent Orange and turns frogs into hermaphrodites is considered "safe" in your drinking water; an archaeologist argues that the inhabitants of Easter Island didn't die out from over-exploiting their own resources (as is commonly claimed), but from colonial genocide; biotech goes retro; investigative journalist Greg Palast suggests that maybe, just maybe, New Orleans isn't being rebuilt for the benefit of the 65% black population that lived there before Katrina; the author of the BDSM classic The Story of O discusses glorious immorality in a new documentary; a look at cartoonist Alison Bechdel's amazing new graphic novel / memoir, Fun Home; the origins of the Zapatista's "Other Campaign," and many fun side-trips to surprise and delight you, all in this week's Media Picks.
This Week's Picks:
- AUDIO | Bitchfest
Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, co-founders of the fabulous magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, talk about their origin as a zine ten years ago, their new anthology, Bitchfest, the politics of labels such as "post-feminist," "sex-positivity," and everyone's favorite five-letter word beginning with "b."Michael Krasny | Forum
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R608160900 - It's Not Easy Being Green
Atrazine is among the world's oldest and most effective herbicides—the aspirin of weed- killers. It was developed during a period of intense innovation in the chemical industry that began with the Second World War and the invention of 2,4-D, the first “selective” herbicide: it could kill weeds without killing the crops. (It was later mixed with 2,4,5-T by the military to make the decidedly nonselective defoliant Agent Orange.) Syngenta, a company with roots dating back a couple of centuries that also gave the world DDT and LSD, introduced atrazine to the market in 1959. And today, the federally established “safe” limit for atrazine in human drinking water is 3 ppb, thirty times the dose that has, in lab experiments, turned frogs into hermaphrodites.William Souder | Harpers
http://www.harpers.org/ItsNotEasyBeingGreen.html - Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island
Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used the Rapanui, the native inhabitants of Easter Island, as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?" And in his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." When I first went to Rapa Nui to conduct archaeological research, I expected to help confirm this story. Instead, as I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui's prehistory was speculation. It was genocide, not ecocide, that caused the demise of the Rapanui.Terry L. Hunt | American Scientist
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/53200?fulltext=true&print=yes - Selective Breeding Gets Modern
Faced with a consumer backlash, biotech is working on genetically engineered food without the genetic engineering. Good old-fashioned crossbreeding is getting a high-tech boost.Griffin Wright | Wired
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,71433-0.html?tw=wn_index_18 - INFORMATIVE PARODY | Monsantopoly
Anna Lappé & Matthew Willse | The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060911/monsantopoly - PERSPECTIVE | Transportation
The most popular vehicle in the world today is the bicycle. There are 40 times more rickshaws in Delhi than there are taxis in New York City. And Somalia's camel population is almost as large as its human population.Princeton
http://www.princeton.edu/~ina/images/infographics/transportation_big.jpg - The Writer of O
For many years, it was assumed that the erotic novel The Story of O had been penned by a man: What woman could—or would—write with such love about female mortification? Albert Camus stated defiantly, definitively, "A woman could not write this book." As a male fantasy of domination, the story makes Sadean sense, but as a woman's fantasy, it would threaten two thousand years of prevailing notions about female sexuality—and upset numerous husbands. "Women are as immoral as men," says the author, Dominique Aury (aka Pauline Réage), in American filmmaker Pola Rapaport's fascinating documentary Écrivain d'O (Writer of O), newly released on DVD. "But," she continues, her eyes twinkling with girlish mischief, "no one has noticed."Toni Bentley | Bookforum
http://www.bookforum.com/bentley.html - REVIEW | A Dyke to Watch Out For
The latest in breakout graphic novels is an unlikely candidate: a chronicle of its lesbian author's upbringing with her closeted, married dad, complete with side trips to the family business, the "fun home." "Fun" here is short for funeral, and it's an apt distillation of Vermont writer and illustrator Alison Bechdel's creative focus.Carellin Brooks | The Tyee
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/08/23/FunHome/ - The Other Campaign
On the morning of January 1st, 1994, with the seizure of governmental offices in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas announced thier existence to the world. They had emerged from the remote highlands of Chiapas, the southernmost and poorest state of Mexico. Their mestizo Mexican spokesperson, the incongruously tall and pale Subcomandante Marcos, effortlessly dispensed poetic prose, politics and wit in three languages: that morning of the takeover of San Cristóbal de las Casas, tourists in the street asked Marcos if they would miss their transportation connections; with exquisite politeness Marcos replied, "Forgive us, but this is a revolution."Roger Stoll | Z Net
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=59&ItemID=10833
- Media Picks Contributing Editor: Adam Barker
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin
Wiegand and Brian Awehali
Posted by erin at August 29, 2006 12:30 PM