Last month a controversial op-ed by Slavoj Žižek was published in Le Monde diplomatique. Around the same time, Žižek also wrote a similar letter to the London Review of Books. In the current issue, LRB has published some of its readers' responses.

As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling.

This assessment is consistent with Jello's reaction that Žižek's argument "reads exactly like Chinese propaganda."

No Shangri-La | Letters to the LRB

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories – anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.

This site archives 190 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

Indeterminacy

A free alternative to the ever-offensive Comic Sans.

HVD Comic Serif

In the 1970s Joe Haldeman approached more than a dozen different publishers before he finally found one interested in The Forever War. The book went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, although a large chunk of the story had been cut out before it saw publication. Now Haldeman and Avon Books have released the definitive version of The Forever War, published for the first time as Haldeman originally intended. The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can't adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Auto-Tune corrects a singer’s pitch. It also distorts—a grand tradition in pop.

The Gerbil’s Revenge

This is a cute reminder of the "boss button" in old games.

Read at Work

Vanishing America

DNJ Gallery: Artist: Michael Eastman

Scrapple (2005: Golan Levin) is an audiovisual installation in which everyday objects placed on a table are interpreted as sound-producing marks in an “active score.” The Scrapple system scans a table surface as if it were a kind of music notation, producing music in real-time from any objects lying there. The installation makes use of a variety of playful forms; in particular, long flexible curves allow for the creation of variable melodies, while an assemblage of cloth shapes, small objects and wind-up toys yields ever-changing rhythms. Video projections on the Scrapple table transform the surface into a simple augmented reality, in which the objects placed by users are elaborated through luminous and explanatory graphics. The 3-meter long table produces a 4-second audio loop, allowing participants to experiment freely with tangible, interactive audiovisual composition. In the Scrapple installation, the table is the score.

Scrapple

Impressions and demonstration of using the Percussa Audio cubes with the tutorial Ableton Live set. The center cube detects the faces of the other cubes to send MIDI notes to Live to change loops.

Percussa Cubes basics

David Foster Wallace, author of the novel "Infinite Jest," was asked by Rolling Stone magazine to cover John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. That assignment became a chapter in his essay collection "Consider the Lobster" (2005); the essay has now been issued as a stand-alone book, "McCain's Promise." In a phone interview, Mr. Wallace said he came away from the experience marveling at "how unknowable and layered these candidates are." Mr. Wallace also answered questions via email about presidential hopefuls, the youth vote and smiley faces.

Just Asking: David Foster Wallace