Bøger af Sina Najafi

Sally O'Reilly's The Ambivalents--like its companion volume, Jeff Dolven's Take Care--is a response to a 1986 catalog for Braintree Scientific, an American company that manufactures lab products used in experiments on rats and mice. O'Reilly's book comprises letters to the company in the guise of various characters, including an artist, a literary critic, a dissatisfied customer and schoolchildren.

The second volume in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, New York-based artist David Scher's Hail, Cretin! features the melancholy peregrinations of a demicenturion missing his upper half. This protagonist--a lonely, postimperial half-man who seems fated to permanent homelessness--experiences the landscape as if for the first time.

With the possible exception of the eyes, no other part of the face is as burdened with legend, myth and significance as the nose.Cabinet issue 64, with a special section on "The Nose," includes Christopher Turner on Smell-O-Vision, Aromarama and other failed technologies for making cinema into an olfactory event; Jennifer Greenberg on how European colonialists characterized the relationship between race and nose shape; Anthony Harley on the political history of rhinoplasty in the US; and Thiago Carvalho on the new scientific work on the relationship between smell, immunity and mating among animals. Elsewhere in the issue: Adam Bobbette on Indonesian men who train young birds to sing the songs of extinct birds; Indiana Seresin on the way a mythic Native American indigeneity has been used by children at American summer camps; Ara Merjian on the Situationists' uses of Giorgio de Chirico's early paintings, and more.

A zone of deprivation and emptiness but also a space for adventure and even divine revelation, the desert has historically resisted human domination, even as it has continued to tantalize the cultural imagination. Cabinet issue 63, with a special section on "The Desert," includes Maria Golia on the long history of tomb raiding in Egypt; Margaret Spelling on her recent visit to the town built in the Andalusian desert as a set for Italian spaghetti westerns; and Jonathan Randall on climate change and the shifting boundaries of the world's deserts. Elsewhere in the issue: George Pendle on the unusual friendship between RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn and performance artist James Lee Byars; Adam Jasper on the surprising history of the "lorem ipsum" placeholder text used universally by designers and publishers; and Volker Welter on visiting sites significant to F.W. Murnau's ill-fated life in Hollywood.

One of only a handful of substances produced in nature expressly as food, milk is fundamental for infant mammalian nutrition, but is also foundational in human myth and religion. Cabinet issue 62, with a special section on "Milk," includes Renata Salecl on the psychoanalytical implications of the recent death of a child solely breastfed for the first five years of his life; Jeff Dolven on milk and luminosity; Esther Leslie and Melanie Jackson on the ways in which milk is transformed from primary material to metaphorical excess; and Melanie Tyson on the colonial history of condensed milk. Elsewhere in the issue: Daniel Rosenberg on Maurice Sendak's beloved "Nutshell Library" and the fantasies of book classification; Richard Cooke on the history of live sex shows in Europe and their sudden decline in the 1980s; and an artist project by S. Billie Mandle exploring the varieties of Catholic confessionals.

This description of Cabinet issue 61 was written on 1 September 2015. Which also happens to be 17 Dhu al-Qada 1436. And 17 Elul 5775. And 19 Wu 4713. The passage of time may be immutable, but the innumerable systems (Gregorian, Islamic, Hebrew and Chinese, respectively, above) that have been used to order our experience of Earth's transit through the solar system suggest that our methods of measuring it are not. With its roots in the Latin kalendae--meaning "the called," the word refers to the practice of Roman priests "calling" the first day of each Roman month--the calendar has long had a profound relationship to the state's economic, religious and political power. And the common trajectory of calendars' development during mid- to late antiquity, from empirical, flexible systems to schematic, fixed ones, also has telling parallels with shifts in broader social, scientific and technological attitudes. Cabinet issue 61, with a special section on "Calendars," includes Sebastian Lunefeld on why so many radical political movements have tried to institute calendar reform; Joanna Dopico on 19th-century French sociologist August Comte's positivist calendar; and Gordon Landon on why some cultures developed, and continue to use, lunar calendars. Elsewhere in the issue: David Serlin on the long history of battlefield bandages with instructions printed on them; Tom Levin on early "voicemail," messages recorded on vinyl and mailed to loved ones; and Christopher Turner on the rise and fall of scratch-and-sniff films.

From hollowed gourds to cardboard boxes: a history of the "container"Just as the very first constructed containers emerged at a time when new techniques of food gathering and storage began to give rise to novel technologies of collection, transportation and conservation, so too have the innovations in "packaging" across the hundreds of intervening millennia both flowed from, and made possible, new modes of social, cultural and economic activity. Familiar throughout history on both the domestic (from hollowed gourds or animal skin pouches to clay pots, amphorae, and glass jars and bottles) and commercial scales (from chests and barrels to tin cans, cardboard boxes, wooden crates and the intermodal shipping systems that carry so much of the modern world's goods), the container is arguably the most fundamental instrument of human civilization--a technology that facilitates the varied methods of ordering, preservation and conveyance that underpin the most basic forms of human labor and communal structure. Cabinet issue 60, with a special section on "Containers," includes Simon Asad on the challenge that efficient packing poses for mathematics; Jason Hamlin on attempts to recycle glass bottles as architectural materials; Margaret Bode on specimen boxes in the history of science; and Susan Lopez on the rise of the modern cardboard box in 19th-century Brooklyn. Elsewhere in the issue: Cecilia Sjöholm on the history of book burning; Avinoam Shalem on urban archaeology and "vertical knowledge"; and an artist project by Agniezka Kurant.

The idea of the North in modernity--its associations with sparseness and scarcity, to hardships and remoteness--has fed countless narratives of journeying to places and fates unknown. In classical antiquity, however, the north was a place of perfection. In the 5th century BCE, Pindar wrote of the wonders of Hyperborea--a northerly land whose natives lived unaffected by "sickness or ruinous old age," by "toil or battles." The poet also claimed this kingdom could be found "neither by ship nor on foot," and it is this mix of terrestrial encounter and lyric indeterminacy that continues to characterize our idea of the North. Cabinet 59, with a special section on "The North," includes Jessica Rowan on five centuries of expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage; Joe Duncan on the US government's rush to exploit Arctic resources made newly accessible by global warming; and Bettina Sierra on the attempts to recreate the atmospheric effects of the aurora borealis.

Across history, the morality of taking what belongs to another has been of concern to both theologians and lawmakers. Yet theft necessarily raises the question of what constitutes ownership, opening onto a longstanding philosophical debate about the relationship between property, freedom and virtue that stretches from Plato through Aquinas, Kant and Marx to contemporary theorists of intellectual property. And the different kinds of stealing--embezzlement, fraud, extortion, piracy, shoplifting--are as expansive as the categories of things (objects, ideas, images, styles, identities) that are understood to require protection from thievery. Cabinet 58, with a special section on "Theft," includes Susan Brewer on intellectual property debates in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries; Merle Harman on "beach theft" in the Caribbean; and Anton Sears on the diversionary techniques of the pickpocket. Elsewhere in the issue: Luke Healey on the aesthetics and politics of the soccer player's dive, and Margaret Wertheim on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

The theorist Fredric Jameson once wrote that it has become easier for us to imagine the world ending than to imagine a society not built around capitalism. As scenarios forecasting the collapse of social and ecological systems become increasingly credible, our answers seem confined to taking measures within the very logic that is the cause of our predicament. Or we spend our resources preparing for the worst: the Norwegian government builds a global seed vault for a post-apocalyptic future, while individuals stock safe rooms waiting for an end-time. Cabinet 57, with a special section on "Catastrophe," includes an interview with Anson Rabinbach on European intellectual responses to the catastrophes of two world wars; Matthew Spellman on St. Anthony the Hermit and the notion of retreating from a world marked by disaster; and Jonathan Hayes on the nineteenth-century roots of the ecological movement. Elsewhere in the issue: Charlie Hale on the decline and (noncomedic) fall of Buster Keaton; Adam Morris on the history of the flume ride and its relationship to logging practices in the US; and more.

Athletic contests are nearly as old as human society itself. They have grown and flourished across the millennia and around the world, and today form the basis of a global industry worth in excess of six hundred billion dollars. And such games are not just for the players: audiences' fascination with sports also make them a productive sphere through which to consider questions of spectatorship, tribalism and belonging. Cabinet 56, with a special section on "Sports," includes Leland de la Durantaye on the new geometries of tennis; Carla Wing on squash and the colonial history of rubber; and Hal Foster on the ritualistic dimensions of soccer. Elsewhere in the issue: Adam Jasper on how homes built by freed slaves in Liberia mimicked the Palladian style of US plantation mansions; Augusto Corriere on the disassembly and reassembly of a Munich theater during World War II; Carol Mavor on the aesthetics of middleness; and more.

The cultural, social and scientific management of death--how to postpone it, how to prepare for it, what to do with remains, how to remember the deceased--forms the rarely acknowledged framework for the formation of society. Community is only possible if its members avow and disavow, the fact that every one of them will die. The many ways in which we live with, and despite, this knowledge inform the focus of Cabinet 49, with its special section on "Death." Contributions include Stacey Roberts on the science of delaying death; Simon Jonasson on DIY burials; Elga Holt on the difference between human and animal mourning; and Suzanne Cotton on the history of suicide notes. Elsewhere in the issue: Leland de la Durantaye on a reimagining of The Waste Land; Sina Najafi on gifts given to and by American presidents; and an artist project by Santiago Borja.

In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber to indicate how consciousness follows from the primary activity of making. Against this, a certain ludic tradition has imagined a homo ludens, humans defined through their relationship with games and play. Cabinet 45 features Joshua Glenn on H.G. Wells' "Floor Games"; D. Graham Burnett on games played by game theorists; Barbara Levine and Jessica Helfand on dexterity games; James Trainor on the lost world of "adventure" playgrounds; Dana Katz on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies"; an interview with Bertell Ollman, inventor of the board game "Class Struggle"; and Jeff Dolven on poems as games. Elsewhere in the issue: Helen Larsson on the history of applause; Wayne Koestenbaum's legendary "Legend" column; Naomi Muller on eating the zoo animals in Berlin during World War II; Jeremy Crichton on "spite" houses; and much more.