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Reza Ghassemi, "The Spell Chanted by Lambs"
Reza Ghassemi has written and stages many plays first of which was at the age of eighteen. Before the Islamic revolution his plays won prestigious awards in Iran, but after the revolution they were banned from the theater. This, among other reasons, encouraged him to immigrate to France where he pursued his career as a…
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Man in the Mirror
In his own words, Hossain Rad’s poetry is “the struggles of a bare man in the mirror, with his emotions and sensitivities, so raw, so untouched… “We borrow our souls from women,” He explains, “just like goddesses … We care, we evolve into them so deeply, letting them becoming a part of us, and we…
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Why We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others.
Don’t judgments about a language’s beauty or ugliness generally depend on our personal experiences with people who speak it, and the associations it evokes? Brazilian Portuguese is considered especially soft and melodic – and it inspires thoughts of the bossa nova and Copacabana. Spanish calls up visions of flamenco, bullfights, and – maybe – especially…
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Why Are Va… Important To You
Here’s a video from the kids at Connecticut College who asked 100 of the men at their college to explain why they think that vaginas are important as a part of a campaign for V Day. The results are hilarious and heartwarming, with answers ranging from “vaginas are beautiful” to “I spent some time in…
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DJ of Your Serendipity – Jun Miyake
To introduce you to a unique and different style of musical composition, I have chosen this special piece, Lilies in the Valley, a musical score by Jun Miyake. Miyake is a successful Japanese composer, trumpeter and a UC Berkley graduate, with thirteen solo albums and lots of movie scores and soundtracks to his name. Lilies…
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Philip Roth: The novelist’s obsession is with language
Philip Roth‘s 1979 classic, The Ghost Writer, will be spotlighted at Stanford at a February 25 “Another Look” book club event (see below here). Cynthia Haven interviewed the author in preparation for the event. His weapon-of-choice was the email interview, rather than a telephone conversation. Roth was precise, nuanced and to the point. He turned…
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The love of stuff
We’ve got used to the transitory nature of our possessions, the way things are routinely swept aside and replaced – whether it’s last season’s cut of jeans or computers that mysteriously slow down as if clogged by quick-drying cement. It’s one of the challenges facing the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, whose chief…
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Do the Dead Live On In Facebook?
Think of how rich and deeply personal your online persona has become. Now think of what will happen to it when you die. Until very recently, this question used to feel unusual or irrelevant for all but a tiny, ultrawired slice of the population. In a New York Times Magazine feature about online death last…
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Ukraine, Putin, and the West
Perhaps the way to put it is that an intellectual mistake was turned into a political mistake. The intellectual mistake was to fixate on Putin as the bad man who came along and suddenly undid the good work of Boris Yeltsin. (Bill Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott the other day tweeted an inadvertent reductio ad…
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At the End of 8th Street
With her brother on the death row for murder, Niloofar, Taraneh Alidoosti, has only three days, to come up with blood money, Diya, to be paid to the victim’s next of kin, or her brother will be executed. This is the main story around which a series of events take place in the movie, the…
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Elevating Celebrity Portraiture to an Art
“I’m more interested in being good than being famous,” the photographer Annie Leibovitz has said. But by elevating celebrity portraiture to an art, she has become as renowned as many of her subjects. Her first Experience as a professional photographer was in her college years when the Rolling Stone, hired her to take a portrait…
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What Color is Tuesday? Exploring Synesthesia
How does one experience synesthesia? The neurological trait that combines two or more senses? Synesthetes may taste the number 9 or attach a color to each day of the week. Richard E. Cytowic explains the fascinating world of entangled senses and why we may all have just a touch of synesthesia. Lesson by Richard E.…
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Dystopian Trilogy for Teens
Veronica Roth (born August 19, 1988) is an American author known for her debut New York times best selling novels Divergent and Insurgent. Her third book titled Allegiant, completing the Divergent trilogy, was released last year. She is the recipient of the Goodreads Favorite Book of 2011 and the 2012 winner for Best Young Adult…
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Disease are Culture Makers
The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic…
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Why Some people Are Always Miserable
In her article, The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People, Family Therapist Cloe Madanes, gives us a road-map to misery, and successful self sabotage, even with complete exercises. I myself, mostly identified with number twelve in her list: Glorify or vilify the past. Glorifying the past is telling yourself how happy, fortunate life was before…
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Endless fun
In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a rotating cylinder. The more ambitious examples were Lilliputian orchestras, such as the Panharmonicon, invented in Vienna in 1805, or the mass-produced Orchestrion that came…
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Sex With Robots
Robots as companions and sex partners, have been the subject of much research and debate. The sex robot that knows your name, your likes and dislikes, your favorite sexual positions and is able to carry on a discussion & expresses her love to you & be your loving friend. Always turned on, and ready to…
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DJ of Your Serendipity – 1
I found the magazine very addictive then I thought that there will be many like minded people who love alternative music. So I sent my list of music and a bunch of short anecdotes that goes with it for the collaboration. There…I got the job. I will be the Dj of your very personal moments.…
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Sogand, Iranian – German singer
Sogand was 5 years old when her Iranian parents moved to Germany. She is part of the ever extending diaspora communities all around the globe. In the world that in reality became a global village, the new generations of Diasporas grew up to love their motherland as much as being a proud citizen of host…
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Mississippi John Hurt – Spike driver blues
John Hurt sang of surprisingly violent and frank subjects in a disarmingly tender voice, coupled with an amazing technical mastery of guitar. This music will stay with you and is often quite moving and original, since it combines blues with elements and playing styles normally associated with “folk,” due to the fact that Hurt hardly…
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The World Dances Without Iran
A man from Seattle travels the globe to dance with people around the world. And every time I watch one of his dance videos, I get emotional, with tears in my eyes. I don’t know why, although I know it will never happen, every time, I wish and hope, the next country he visits will…
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Drunk With Love
“Drunk With Love”, by Rana Farhan, magnificently mesmerizes with style, and an abundant beauty. Based on a poem by Rumi, the words of an ecstatic love poem, are brought to life in a smooth and serene way. Farhan sings the song in Persian, but in English, the words are searing. Drunk With Love- lyrics by…
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Persian Tattoos
Tattooing among Persians, especially among gypsies and nomads, goes back as far as the 19th century. In Iran, it was common for upper class women to have patterns adorn their hands and feet, to, in their belief, provide strength or protection. Although the art of tattoo in the middle east is forbidden by religious scriptures,…
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Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly
The opening in Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly”, is reminiscent of Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies (2010): a playful group of friends turns out to be childish and overbearing, and their holiday arrangements entirely banal. The Camera dizzily following each person, as the vacationers arrive at the ramshackle beach house, mending broken windows and doors while…
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It is Sung in Yellow
Don’t listen to my voice, it is sung in yellow Don’t touch my heart, it’s sick with coldness Don’t get close to my soul, it’s been abandoned for years Don’t touch my brain, its pain is contagious And from afar, make me feel like a mystic A déjà vu of a creature that once existed…
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The Rise of the Single Dad
Caroline Kitchener in The Atlantic Today, more men than ever are making the same choice. A Pew Research study published this statistic this summer: 8 percent of households with minor children are now headed by a single father, up from just one percent in 1960. This represents a nine-fold increase, from fewer than 300,000 households…
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Writers Into Saints
Tim Parks in The New York review of the Books Over the last ten years or so I have read literary biographies of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Hardy, Leopardi, Verga, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Moravia, Morante, Malaparte, Pavese, Borges, Beckett, Bernhard, Christina Stead, Henry Green, and probably others too. With only the rarest of exceptions,…
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Blue Melancholia is Approaching
It’s not about death, or the end drawing near. It’s not about love or hate among sisters, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters or husbands and wives. Nor is it about ” happiness”, with its usual smirk, hiding all the depressing feelings of melancholia. It’s not “about” anything in particular to many who haven’t experienced it. It…
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Poet of the Caribbean- Derek Walcott
Teju Cole in Sunday Book Review, The new York Times “Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.” The thought is kin to the one John Keats expressed in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the…
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Why is Academic Writing so Academic
Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm…
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A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan
“Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America! A Message of Love NOT Hate!” These words are the first, one sees after going on the Ku Klux Klan’s, website. But the Klan’s name has always been synonymous with hatred and white supremacy sentiments, antisemitism, racism and hatred against blacks. Anthony Karene, a…
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The Master and Margarita
Naturally, much of Bulgakov’s frustration with the socio-political systems of his day bleeds through the story, an exploration of human nature in a sometimes highly surreal and seemingly random setting. Bulgakov’s imagination takes playful leaps, embroidering recurring symbols throughout. I also feel how we interpret these fanciful routines and playful satire within the stories is…
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Iranian Women Make A Push For Greater Opportunities
Iran is starting to see a re-launch of activist groups following the election last year of President Hassan Rouhani. Social movements were scarce after the government crushed public protests known as the Green Movement following the 2009 elections. After the decisive vote for Rouhani, a surge of hope in Iran has attracted activists back to…
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Street Fashion In Iran
Here Are some of the candid camera photos from Iranian cities: www.tehran24.com
