america adrift has gotten a facelift. Well, basically it’s a new template. But give it a look and leave a comment if you’re inclined. I still want to do something with the property here but can’t quite figure out what.
Tags: Blogging, Design
TED simply provides one the most creative and innovative online forums. I first discovered TED while researching Al Gore’s climate presentations. I soon found myself “losing” hours at a time clicking through various speaker presentations.
H/t NCN for bringing this “low-tech” (for TED standards) yet utterly stirring presentation to my attention:
Photojournalist James Nachtwey was one of the 2007 recipients of the TED Prize. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it brings people from these three worlds together to spread ideas, mostly by challenging fascinating thinkers to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. These talks are available on-line at TED.com. The annual prize winners are given a $100,000 award AND granted one WISH to help change the world. James Nachtwey’s wish is to “break [a story that the world needs to know about] in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digitial age.” That story will break on October 3 both on-line and around the world. Don’t miss it!
Given my growing interest in the intersection of photojournalism and visual culture on political culture and democratic society, I’m particularly interested in how online technology may be able to “rescue” the image from the “crisis” that Hariman and Lucaites so convincingly demonstrate in their landmark book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.
Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.
Here Nachtwey and TED look to reinvigorate the role of photojournalism, understood as a critical tool for liberal-democratic citizenship, and place it back into a central space in our public discourses. Here it’s interesting to see how the internet, a major enabler of media over saturation can be redeployed to cut through all the white noise.
Stay tuned, today is October 3, 2008.
Federman Frenzy, available as an open source web publication.
The volume presents four scholarly articles, and as indicated on the poster (make sure to enlarge it so that you can see the table of contents to begin with), it also offers readers a special treat in the form of unpublished texts by Federman. The book Federman Frenzy: the ‘cult’ in culture, the ‘me’ in memory, the ‘he’ in history – encounters with Raymond Federman is published as a web publication by Research News, Dept. of Language and Culture, Aalborg University.
Bent Sørensen’s latest distraction (and mine), Ordinary Finds has just been added to my blog role. I love this style of blogging, which is akin to a personal mental “news agitator” of all the interesting stuff he encounters online. This looks deliberately different from Bent’s other online blogging like his personal cultural studies blog or his mostly “academically oriented” writing at america adrift.
I was also pleased to read there that Wood S Lot, a fantastic culture/theory/aesthetics portal, has provided some much appreciated ‘blog love’, linking to both Rosi Smith’s essay Seeing Through the Bell Jar: and my essay, Don DeLillo and Society’s Reorientation to Time and Space: in the as peers journal.
Tags: Announcements, Blogging
Not sure how many know about Piled Higher and Deeper, but more should definitely read it.
“Washington, DC – Congressman Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo, San Francisco), 80, passed away this morning due to complications from cancer at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.”
Last year, Tom Lantos visited the University of Southern Denmark, attending the dissertation defense of his daughter, Katrina Swett. Mrs. Swett’s dissertation was on the role of the U.S. congress in global human rights issues. See, The Lantos Doctrine for more.
Lantos was also the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress;
Born Feb. 1, 1928 in Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family, Lantos was 16 when the Nazis occupied Hungary and sent him to a labor camp. He escaped twice and eventually made it to a safe house run by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. With most of his family killed by the Nazis, Lantos joined the resistance. He arrived in the United States in 1947 on a college scholarship, earned a master’s degree in economics at the University of Washington and a doctorate in economics at the University of California-Berkeley. Lantos taught for 30 years at San Francisco State University before winning a congressional seat in 1980.
See also this write up in the SF Gate.
From the limited secondary sources I’ve read, Lantos was a man that never minced words, a rare trait in contemporary politics. Anyone who attended the panel discussion as SDU following his daughter’s dissertation enjoyed a great opportunity to hear the man, sharp and unfiltered. I later met him and his wife Annette, with Katrina and her husband Richard at the train station in Odense, waiting for the train to Copenhagen. We talked about family, me being an expatriate (by choice), and how much everyone enjoyed Denmark.
The Atlantic Community, SDU, and everyone here in Denmark who had the opportunity to meet Tom Lantos wish to extend our sincerest condolences to his wife Annette, daughter Katrina and their families.
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