Ali Golzad Recycles Cardboard to Capture Empathy

“To me the plight of child soldiers and children abused as sex slaves escapes notice in the civilized world which causes me to question how civilized we really are. To me, these are invisible people.”

Try to imagineIranian aircraft carriers anchoring in the Gulf of Mexico. Preposterous, right? So why does our military get a free pass to camp out in the Persian Gulf? Keep reading …

New Year’s Resolution: Declare War on Iran: Pessimists, skeptics, and conspiracy theorists often have a fairly similar point of view. The difference is in the packaging of their arguments. It’s hard to tell where Guernica’s Russ Baker falls on the Chicken Little spectrum with his latest essay, which questions whether or not the federal government is grooming U.S. citizens for a war with Iran.

Keep reading …

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• Is our response to climate change a moral or an economic issue? Kathleen Dean Moore urges us to do the right thing regardless of the bottom line.
• Clogs, boils, and death: 10 plagues for the new millennium.
• Distinguish yourself—as exactly what, we’re not sure—with a wooden necktie.
• Propublica questions Politico’s decision to publish a story on Herman Cain’s possible sexual harassment, writing that it “may be the biggest investigative scoop of the campaign season. But it would be hard to deduce that from the facts as published.”
• Guernica puts together its first Iranian-American issue, and in light of guest editor Porochista Khakpour’s statement, “I wish no one had the concept Iranian-American,” the editors wonder, “could this magazine have made a worse choice?”
• NaNoWri­Mo kicks off! Get writing….
• Before you dust off your copy of A Christmas Carol for the annual read, check out the secret life of Charles Dickens.
• Where in the world can you get an abortion, and for what reason?
• Sometimes we need a nudge to change our behavior for the better—but it’s got to be just the right kind of nudge.
• How to feed 7 billion people without destroying the planet.
• In an illustrated edition of Food Rules, available November 1, Michael Pollan introduces the new food commandments. #7: Enjoy drinks that have been caffeinated by nature, not food science.

(via Designboom)

“Tin Soldiers” is an installation which depicts the nine armies that were implicated in, or subject to, acts of war in today’s Middle East. The pieces are produced in numbers proportional to those of active troops in 2010. Each of the featured armies are cast from the same mould and hand-painted in the military outfits of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey. A total of 12,235 soldiers at a scale of 1:200 are arranged in a systematic platform, in a way acting as a multistage exploration of the results of the instrumentalizing of individuals through political and economic agendas.