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Simple life Was Only Necessary
Through much of human history, frugal simplicity was not a choice but a necessity – and since necessary, it was also deemed a moral virtue. But with the advent of industrial capitalism and a consumer society, a system arose that was committed to relentless growth, and with it grew a population (aka ‘the market’) that…
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A Simple but Fantastic Illusion
You can not believe your eyes after looking at this picture that simply shows a brick wall. A wall that has crack in it and there is a small stone sitting there. right? Wrong. They say usually it takes about 30 seconds to find out the illusion here… I don’t think so … Just look…
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Being Hassan for Morocco
A photographer, designer, and filmmaker, Hassan Hajjaj is one of Morocco’s preeminent international artists, sometimes called his native country’s answer to Andy Warhol. Entirely self-taught and influenced by a mix of London’s hip-hop and reggae scenes and his North African heritage, Hajjaj has a diverse practice that includes portraiture, installation, performance, fashion, and furniture design.…
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Dance About I Hate Dancing
Directer, choreographer , dancer and filmmaker Jo Roy made a playful video based on a poem by British actor and comedian Stephen Fry…
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Fact-Resistant Humans Killing the Earth
Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports. The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as…
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Illusionist Painter
Rob Gonsalves is a 55-year-old Canadian of Portuguese descent who paints scenes that fill in the space somewhere in between everyday activities and hallucinations. His images contain dual representations of reality—with his particular artistry forming at the intersection between fantasy and nonfiction. At just 12 years old, Gonsalves began acquiring perspective drawing skills and giving…
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Debate Whether the World Exists
You might not think there’d be much overlap between neuroscience and philosophy, but that’s not what philosopher Alva Noë sees. Where philosophers have long debated how much we should trust our perception of the external world, neuroscientists operate on the assumption that we shouldn’t trust it much at all. According to neuroscience, says, Noë, it’s…
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Secularism in the Last Six Centuries
The religious implications of secularism are often misconstrued, too. Secularisation did not mean godlessness; for the most part, early modern Europeans were profoundly Christian. It was rather that the boundary between the religious and the secular became more distinct than before. As the 17th-century English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne put it, humans live ‘in divided…
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Future of Islam
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” ― George Orwell, 1984 These days every other person seems to be concerned about the future of Islamic Civilization. From the Islamists, the traditionalists, the Liberals, the Conservatives etc. almost everyone seems to have a stake in the…
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She ran across northern Iran and saw kindness
Kristina Palten was wondering what she can do to have an impact on prejudiced world that she encounters. She decided to run alone across Iran. She took risk and was afraid. But her intuition was positive. She run for 58 days and most of the time all she saw was kindness and compassion. Kristina Paltén blog…
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Iranian Homosexuals in an Album
Born to Iranian parents but growing up with Swiss upbringing gave Laurence Rasti critical mind that has a flavors of both culture. In her project “There Are No Homosexuals in Iran “, we can see the alternative perspective that she brought to a social issue in Iran. “In Denizli, a small town in Turkey, hundreds of Iranian gay refugees have put…
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A cozy dining spot in the middle of nowhere
Sometimes you have no idea how a place in the middle of your way to a destination can become your cozy spot. You would not care what time or when it is. That becomes your all the time hang out, no matter what. I found my cozy spot while ago when I was traveling to…
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A guy in our office is going through a divorce
He is distracted and depressed and hardly focused. He is constantly complaining, skipping on office work and missing deadlines. And to top it all off, he is forgetful and takes forever to do a simple task. Last week after seeing all the backed up work and more that needed to get done, I barged in…
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The girl in a veil
It was all we had on our minds: to hit on girls when they least expected it. We were teenage boys in junior high; three friends looking for ways to spend the heated summer of my hometown. One day while on our hunt for a possible best “catch”, and to escape the three o’clock scorching…
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Thom Yorke and the manly dance
I had always had a passion for dancing. However, I used to turn into a tough hard body as soon as I started to move my sculpture. There were no accompanying between my body’s stupid movements and the music playing. I could say it was because of the way I was grown up as a…
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If you are the Prince, I would be your persian Princess
I was running late to work as usual, on the morning April 21st. Jumped in the car and started the engine. The radio got on and frustration suddenly rushed into my mind. “Stupid radio, Just be quiet” My hand was right on the switch to turn it off and suddenly I heard:”Prince was found dead in his…
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I’m not your girlfriend honey, just be fast
The door bell rang and the boy ran to the door monitor and picked up the phone with no hesitation. Right before, he hit the table beside the wall and the vase fell down on the floor. He bent down, grabbed the vase and put the artificial flowers back inside, while answering the phone.…
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My mother had no idea what "feminisim" means
I was only six when me and my mother walked through the mountains for the first time, to get to our ancestral village in northern Iran. I was so excited, cause my mother promised to buy me a goat to play with, while we were spending the short time there. My annual trips to the village were…
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A brief history of Iranian cinema
To best understand the roots of Iranian cinema, one must perhaps travel back to the early 20th century, when the Qajar monarch Mozaffareddin Shah was shown cinematographic footage during a visit to France. The cinematograph, invented in 1892, was the successor to the kinetoscope that granted viewers the ability to watch quality, illuminated images on…
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I am still *mesmerized*
It was midday, almost noon. I was at the office and dad called, wondering about my plans for lunch. And I talked about not being able to make it home in time. Dad suggested I’d go to his place and join him for lunch. “I got some calf liver”, he said, “and I’ll barbecue some…
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Iranian Men Are Very Gentle and Shy
Men across the country and from a broad range of backgrounds posed for Irish photographer Owen McCann who was travelling in Iran. ‘There was an obvious language barrier,’ he says, ‘but I found them to be very gentle and shy. I didn’t detect any macho tendencies among the men I encountered which surprised me a…
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A philosophical Self-Knowledge Questionnaire
According to the philosophers of Ancient Greece, the summit of achievement was to have followed the injunction to ‘know yourself.’ While we all have some ideas about who we are, the knowledge we have is often patchy, and we have few opportunities to be guided in reflecting on our personality traits. This questionnaire does not…
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On the Internet, Everyone is a Critic
On the Internet, everyone is a critic — a Yelp-fueled takedown artist, an Amazon scholar, a cheerleader empowered by social media to Like and to Share. The inflated, always suspect authority of ink-stained wretches like me has been leveled by digital anarchy. Who needs a cranky nag when you have a friendly algorithm telling you,…
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Esfahan, Endangered Archive
Image source British library http://eap.bl.uk/database/overview_item.a4d?catId=10175;r=18467
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First Illustrated Persian Translation of Allan Poe’s The Raven
Allan Poe’s “The Raven” had been translated to Persian in the past, but this edition is a distinguished artifice because of its approach to both publication and translation. First of all, this is the first illustrated Persian translation of Allan Poe’s masterpiece. Secondly, it provides an introduction to the thought process and rationale behind the translation as well as…
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Happy New Year
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Iranian Jewellery Designers in Instagram
It seems that the jewellery design industry is booming in Iran. In the last 10 years there has been a new revival for this old forgotten national guild. It is only logical that the eager entrepreneurs such as Neda Majidi act upon this new niche market. She has gathered more than 700 Iranian designers to…
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How Corporations Created ‘Cool’
A philosopher / neuroscientist and a political scientist, wrote a book on how we as a consumer follow up the superficial trends that corporations make for us. Their book, Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World tries to show how the concept of “cool” lure us into buying more. Continue reading
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He Adds Cartoon to People's Instagram
Lucas Levitan, a Brazilian illustrator and multimedia artist, based in London with his known series that he calls “Photo Invasion,” he creates the most hilarious images of the Instagram. Gifted with an infinite imagination, he places in other Instagram users’ photos, unique and funny illustrations. Now, he gives the opportunity to other people to add…
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Toronto Film Festival and All the Crying Men
Crying male protagonists appeared in the first two films that I saw in this year’s TIFF. It came to my mind that maybe I should look for a trend, the unexpected snivelling men trend, men who are bawling tears or men who have no difficulty blubbering or even very comfortably bewailing in full agony. Therefore as a man who secretly finds a reason to cry…
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Iranian Fusion Band "Circle" CD Release – Toronto
This is the band that we introduced in our Persian magazine and we claimed that they got very close to adapting our beloved poet Sepehri’s poems into their songs. A challenge that most Iranian musicians wont even dare. 180 Shaw Street, Toronto 647 – 773 2158
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Canadian Couple Cancels Wedding to Help Syrian Refugees
A Toronto couple cancelled plans for a big, expensive wedding and asked guests at their small city hall ceremony to donate money in lieu of gifts — all to help them raise thousands of dollars to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees Samantha Jackson and Farzin Yousefian were planning a traditional wedding for March with all the trimmings, at a cost of tens…
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15 Books That President Obama Bought at a Local Bookstore
On a recent Saturday, President Obama and his family went to a local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, and purchased 21 books. Here are the books the president bought, ranked from most popular to least popular (based on the number of Amazon reviews). On a recent Saturday, President Obama and his family went to…
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A Family Portrait That left on the Moon
On April 20, 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke took his first steps on the Moon. He was 36 at the time and is the youngest human in history to ever walk on the lunar surface. But that’s not the only achievement of Duke’s that lives on in American history. While he was on the…
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The Loss of High Culture
This loss of high culture is not an American phenomenon alone. English intellectual and artistic life has fallen off greatly since the generation of Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. England now appears to be Mick Jagger’s country. The English novel, as written by Martin Amis, Ian -McEwan, and Salman Rushdie, attracts more publicity…
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Dancing Kid in Iranian Religious Mourning Parade
“Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our…
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Elephants’ Strategy to Fight Cancer
In 1977, a University of Oxford statistician named Richard Peto pointed out a simple yet puzzling biological fact: We humans should have a lot more cancer than mice, but we don’t. Dr. Peto’s argument was beguilingly simple. Every time a cell divides, there’s a small chance it will gain a mutation that speeds its growth.…
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How Did Humans Spread Out Over the Earth?
Most of human history is prehistory. Of the 200,000 or more years that humans have spent on Earth, only a tiny fraction have been recorded in writing. Even in our own little sliver of geologic time, the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose warm weather and relatively stable climate incubated the birth of agriculture, cities,…
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Vsauce YouTube channel and Billion viewers
The concept that Mr Vsauce ( one of the most popular YouTube channel) explained in this 21 minutes video, is mind boggling. He start talking in his fidgety way about a simple fact that some words like “The” get used more often in the language. Then goes in details of exploring The Zipf Mystery… And…
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We All judge Ourselves Too Harshly
It’s easy to feel like we aren’t good enough. We all judge ourselves too harshly, and reflect on our failures too critically. In an earnest resolve to “expect more” from ourselves, we dwell on the areas in which we need improvement, taking some of our most important accomplishments for granted. But we’re better than we…
