Jurnal: scraps and pieces of life




 
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Friday, January 26, 2007
 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

WHAT’S THE TROUBLE?
How doctors think
by JEROME GROOPMAN


MYSTERY TRAIN
Martín Ramírez, outsider
by PETER SCHJELDAHL


Artists:
Martin Ramírez
Swiss Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)
Reclusive Chicago janitor Henry Darger (1892-1973)


BRAZILIAN MUSICIAN CAETANO VELOSO

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Wednesday, January 10, 2007
 
National Geographic documentary: Relentless Enemies
Director: Dereck Joubert and Beverly Joubert
Narrator: Jeremy Irons

_______

Sunday, January 07, 2007
 
WHERE TO STAY

Castello di Vicarello, in Tuscay
(chicretreats.com)

Albergo Diffuso Santo Stefano di Sessanio
(sextantio.it)

Champ de Bataille, Normandy
(duchampdebataille.com)

Off Brazil's northeast coast, the island of Fernando de Noronha
Pousada Maravilha
(pousadamaravilha.com.br)

beach town of Jose Ignacio
La Posada del Faro
(posadadelfaro.com)

Wednesday, January 03, 2007
 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

SYNERGY WITH THE DEVIL
"The paradox is that Chávez’s anti-Americanism is central to his global appeal, while American consumers and companies are central to the economic performance of his regime. So, while he’s going around the world giving speeches about how the goose should be killed, he relies on the golden eggs to keep himself in power. This may seem like a state of affairs that can’t last, and Chávez’s supporters and detractors alike assume that, soon enough, his deeds will begin to live up to his rhetoric: he’ll cut off oil supplies to the U.S., or the like. But deep-seated ideological and political hostility between countries is often less of an obstacle to trade than you might think. Japan, for instance, is South Korea’s second-largest trading partner, despite the fact that Korean resentment toward Japan runs very high, thanks to a long history of Japanese imperialism in the region. China, meanwhile, treats Taiwan as a rebel province, and has threatened military action if it attempts to declare independence, but foreign trade between the two countries totals nearly sixty-five billion dollars. Trade does not, as Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine believed, always bring peace in its wake, “operating to cordialize mankind.” (Think, after all, of the First World War.) But the benefits of trade often excuse even the most grievous of sins. Sometimes, it just makes sense to deal with the devil.

— James Surowiecki

Read article
here


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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPT.
RAP MAP

Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2007-01-01


From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry: the New York City specialty map. The latest—and one you are not likely to see unless you run in criminal-justice circles—is a rendering of the city that breaks down, block by block, the home addresses of all New Yorkers incarcerated in a given year. This map won’t get you from Century 21 to the Met. But it does reveal that more prison-bound Bronx residents lived in walkups than in any other type of building, that Staten Island is the most law-abiding borough, and that Brooklyn—nicknamed “the borough of churches”—ran up the state’s highest bill in prison costs.

Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center, collaborated on the project with an architect named Laura Kurgan, at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. “What started out as a scholarly inquiry has turned into a national initiative,” said Cadora, whose team has mapped twelve cities so far. Their New York is a digital crazy quilt of “bright-against-black”: the areas least touched by incarceration in 2003, the year they chose to study (Riverdale, Bay Ridge, the West Village), appear black and gray; those more so (Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hell’s Kitchen) neon orange.

Recently, the mapmakers gathered at Columbia, and Cadora, a substantially built man with a fondness for Camel Lights, turned the face of his laptop to reveal the map. “Zero-value areas”—places where no one went to prison—were shaded black. “You see them crop up all across the city, but they never make up an entire neighborhood,” he said, invoking what might otherwise be a bragging point among New Yorkers: “There is always something going on somewhere.” The exceptions? “What I jokingly call ‘the Mafia neighborhoods’ of South Brooklyn,” he said, “where you’ve got one or two guys going away from an entire neighborhood. Also, this.” He pointed to a dark strip of the Upper East Side—the blocks in the Seventies and Eighties that border Central Park.

Just above was Harlem, the area with the highest rate of incarceration in the city: forty-four people from a single block along East 120th Street headed upstate. Such high-density spots are known as million-dollar blocks, because it takes upward of that in state expenditures to pay for their residents’ lockups. They are, unfailingly, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods—Brownsville, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica among them—great splashes of orange, by the map’s gauge.

Cadora and his team calculated every block’s prison costs by multiplying the minimum sentence of each incarcerated person by his estimated annual prison fees ($32,400), then adding these numbers together. By this logic, a serial killer on Fifth Avenue who gets a life sentence could make up his own million-dollar block. The borough with the most million-dollar blocks is Manhattan (“mainly because the blocks are so small”); the city’s most expensive block in 2003, a housing project along Harlem River Drive, not far from Yankee Stadium, cost the state $6.2 million and had forty-nine of its six hundred and eighty-nine male residents put behind bars.

The map’s data are largely gleaned from prison entry forms. Early in the study, Cadora noticed that an inordinate amount of people gave the same home address, in Queens. Curious, he looked up the address and found not a residential building but an institution: Rikers Island. Why so many New Yorkers would call a jail known as the House of Pain home is “a whole ’nother story,” Cadora said. “A lot are probably homeless, and one of the hugest problems for anyone coming out of prison is finding a place to live.” Cadora and his team believe that their map depicts a system spending millions to imprison people but little on the communities to which they return.

Cadora clicked on a map of New York State that charted the migration patterns of Brooklyn criminals: thousands of lines sprang from Kings County to prisons all over—Attica, Watertown, Great Meadow. The image was striking, like a bird’s spread wing. (“We’ve had art galleries ask to exhibit the maps,” Kurgan said.) Cadora has been pleased by the reaction of legislators. “It’s no longer just about getting tough or being soft on crime,” he said. “It’s ‘What are we going to do about Bed-Stuy?’ ”

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See the article

here

 

 
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