At The Public Domain Review, Nicholas Jeeves considers the role of the smile in portraiture, touching on the 18th century Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility and its advice on smiling so as to show the teeth:
This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them.
More here.
Some questionable attribution, but an enjoyable jaunt through Europe’s ever changing borders at a thousand years per minute here.
At foreignpolicy.com, Charlie Stross considers generations, loyalty, work and surveillance:
Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents’ post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the security state may well find them unemployable, their values too alien to assimilate into a model still rooted in the early 20th century. But if you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers?
More here.
In the context of recent events in Syria, discussion of a 2007 article by Eisensee and Strömberg at The Duck of Minerva:
Based on their study of 5,000 natural disasters between 1968 and 2002, they find that “U.S. policy makers are less likely to declare disasters during the Olympics, and in general when other newsworthy stories are in abundance.”
More here.
What happened during the search to find 8,000 inspirational individuals to carry the Olympic torch for the 2012 games?
At almost every stage of the allocation process torchbearer places were given to executives at sponsors and their commercial partners, awarded to staff for sales performance, to diplomats, journalists and media bosses.
The full story in “8000 Holes: How the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay Lost its Way”. More here.
After June’s bill banning ‘propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations’, news from Russia of ‘Occupy Paedophilia’ torturing and killing gay men (and uploading pictures of the process, for your consideration).
News also that the new laws are likely to be enforced at the 2014 Winter Olympics, leading to condemnation by the US president. Will the International Olympic Committee act?
The IOC has received assurances from the highest level of government in Russia that the legislation will not affect those attending or taking part in the Games.
Well, that’s alright then.
More on the apparent inaction of parties organising and sponsoring the games at the New York Times.
A number of visualizations of High Frequency Trading at youtube. In this video:
Watch the stock of Mylan, Inc (symbol: MYL; market cap $11.6 Billion) drop 2.8% in the blink of an eye (200 milliseconds), wiping out $325 Million in shareholder equity.
More at nanex.net.
Adam Thirlwell writing on ‘How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature’:
The investigation of tone in Baudelaire is an investigation into humiliation; and this humiliation, in Baudelaire’s theory, is the result of his conviction—to us, perhaps, counter-intuitive—that everything natural is corrupt. […] All of Baudelaire’s writing is based on this refusal of Nature as natural. Instead, what is really natural is melancholy, and perversion.
More at the New Republic.
John Lanchester on the urgency of reform to the banking sector at the London Review of Books:
Another global crisis is coming, as sure as Christmas. The euro? China? Who knows – but it’s coming, and when it does, we need our banks to be safe, for all sorts of reasons, including, right at the top of the list, the fact that we can’t afford to bail them out in the same way as last time. It’s manifestly obvious that our banks are too big. So the solution needs to be equally obvious and equally big…
More here.
At priceonomics, a discussion of a classic psychological experiment goes on to consider the social forces which encourage the work ethic:
…when South Korea and China were mired in poverty, Westerners described their people as hopelessly lazy, with a culture that did not value industriousness and taking initiative. As time has shown, however, this is not an innate inevitability but a reflection of economic realities. All these “lazy” people were perfectly willing to work hard, study long hours, and plan for the future, but only when opportunities existed and they trusted that hard work would pay off.
More at ‘What Marshmallows Tell Us About Silicon Valley’, and related material at ‘The Myth of the Lazy Poor’.