从《小时代》到中国奢侈品形象危机
唐霜为纽约时报中文网撰稿 10:26
在中国,纵使时尚媒体刊出一百篇时尚与人文之作,都挽救不了一次社会事件对奢侈品形象的打击。电影《小时代》的恶俗时尚观是奢侈品牌在中国形象危机的又一
馬政府最重大經濟政策:「六海一空」救得了台灣經濟嗎? | |
為了救經濟、搶招商,亞洲各國正瘋經濟特區。但真能成為救經濟的特效藥嗎?《天下》跨國採訪中、日、韓、馬各國經濟特區,台灣優勢在哪裡?… |
[n]on-monogamy is stereotyped as a bad deal for women and girls, all of whom actually just want a white wedding, because we women are all the same, simple creatures with simple desires. When abuse happens within polyamorous relationships, outsiders often assume that the non-traditional relationship structure is to blame – but the same assumptions are rarely made when a "traditional" marriage turns violent, despite the fact that the practice historically treated women as property and until recently made it legal for men to rape their wives. For plenty of women, that's reason enough to consider other options.
Of course, polyamory isn't always political. People do it for all sorts of reasons, from grand ethical statements to boredom – managing the drama of multiple relationships is a great way to kill time on a Sunday afternoon. Personally, I started practising non-monogamy in my early 20s as a statement against the tyranny of the heterosexual couple form and the patriarchal nuclear family – but then again, I did a lot of silly things for similar reasons in my early 20s. If you'd asked 21-year-old me why precisely I was hanging half-naked out of a fourth-floor window on Holloway Road, I'd probably also have answered "as a statement against the tyranny of the heterosexual couple form". Nowadays, from the wise and serious vantage point of my mid-20s, I practice non-monogamy because it works for me. It doesn't work for everyone, and I might not choose it forever.
Polyamory is the latest subversive and a la mode sexual practice toreceive extensive media coverage. It appeals as a subject for to those interested in alternative lifestyles, but also attracts commentary from some deeply unpleasant folk who have trashed it alongside gay marriage. "What next?" ask the bigoted opponents of equal marriage. "Polygamy and marriage to your brother/cat/hedge trimmer?"
It is neither my business or concern as to how many sexual partners anyone has at any one time, and I genuinely could not care less how folk organise their relationships. But the co-opting and rebranding of polygamy, so that it loses its nasty association with the oppression of the most disadvantaged women, is as irresponsible as suggesting that because some women chose to enter high-end prostitution as a social experiment, all prostitution is radical and harmless.
Caroline Humphrey, a professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, has argued in favour of the legalisation of polygamy because, according to a number of women in polygamous marriages in Russia, "half a good man is better than none at all".
Central Asia has reached a turning point and what comes next really worries it. Will the Taliban return to conquer Afghanistan and open the way for the Central Asian Islamist groups that are closely linked to al-Qaeda and have increased their forces while based in Pakistan? Will populist riots reminiscent of the Arab Spring sweep through the region? They have already done so twice in Kyrgyzstan, in March 2005 and April 2010, bringing down two presidents.
Will the weaker states, lacking economic resources, become hostage to China or Russia? Will the most important regional organization they all belong to—the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—help them overcome instability or will it continue to help them avoid making serious reforms?
None of the works under review provides the full answers to these questions, although Alexander Cooley’s book, Great Games, Local Rules, comes closest. They all agree on the unprecedented rise of China’s influence in Central Asia. Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse, scholars at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., demonstrate in The Chinese Question in Central Asia that China is already the dominant economic power in the region.
China has also taken care of one vital strategic interest since 1991: making sure that the Uighurs, China’s largest Muslim ethnic group who live in the western province of Xinjiang, do not seriously threaten to become independent and that the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs who live in Central Asia do not help them do so. During the 1950s large numbers of Uighurs fled the Maoist regime to seek shelter in Soviet Central Asia where they were relatively well treated.
Too often translation is discussed in terms of loss. What hasn't come through? How is the translation inferior to the original? Multiples, refreshingly, does the opposite: it asks, instead, what is it that survives? And in particular, can something like "style", which we attach so closely to the specificities of linguistic activity, survive being wrenched out of a language entirely and remade in another? Novelist Adam Thirlwell devised an experiment to put these questions to the test. The outcome is this impossible, fascinating book. The idea in brief: get a story translated several times in series (Russian to French, to English, to Dutch …) and as the distance from the original increases, watch what changes and what remains. To put extra strain on the original's integrity, Thirlwell invited novelists to do the translating. Many hadn't translated before. Some possessed – it transpired – only the ropiest understanding of the source language. And novelists are expected to have styles of their own (unlike us translators, who aren't allowed), so might struggle to avoid incorporating their particular stylistic distortions. How could an original survive?more from Daniel Hahn at The Guardian here.
India’s inability to pull Kamlesh and hundreds of millions of others out of desperate poverty despite decades of robust economic growth has been one of history’s great governance failures and economic mysteries.
Does India simply need more time for growth to work its magic, or is there something fundamentally wrong with its formula? Do improvements in health and literacy create growth or simply derive from it? And would India’s people have better lives if the government focused on improving workers’ skills or on bettering investors’ opportunities?
Those are some of the questions behind an unusually nasty fight between two of this nation’s greatest economists. It is a fight that has echoes in poor countries across the globe.
The battle between Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner and Harvard professor, and Jagdish Bhagwati, an eminent professor at Columbia University, has broken out just as India’s economy seems to be coming undone. The rupee has plunged to historical lows against the dollar, and extraordinary efforts by the government to stem the slide, including limits on investments abroad by Indian companies, appear to be having little effect. Growth has fallen to 5 percent annually, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently admitted that it was unlikely to snap back soon. Foreign investors are turning away, and the nation’s stock market has recently swooned.
Into this combustible mix came Mr. Sen and Mr. Bhagwati.
Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.
I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.
Changes during the early nineteenth century revolutionized responses to fat. A new focus on statistics brought with it the concept of weight norms, and advances in chemistry suggested that sugar intake and fat were closely related. Fat was now considered unburned fuel, whereas before it was thought of in very different terms, related to an early understanding of the body as rooted in liquids and humours. And as technology slowly moved into the domestic sphere, people weighed themselves more. One consequence: “There is an intensified will to thinness in the second half of the nineteenth century”, and it is a consequence that falls differentially on women. Indeed, an enduring response to fatness, a response that stands impervious to change with the century, society, or culture is the double standard “between”, Vigarello explains, “the male case where relatively big sizes are tolerated” and “the female case where thinness is obligatory”. The gendered aspect of fatness, a phenomenon which results in “two adipose cultures”, is a star point in Vigarello’s book; his discussion of the “disparities of alimentation” at work within France’s class structure is another. By 1920, Georges Vigarello tells us, obesity was viewed in much the same terms as it is today: “The fat person is both an aesthetic threat and a health risk”. As he readily admits, what is new is what is emphasized by Lustig and Moss: the runaway nature of it, the global nature of the problem.more from Barbara J. King at the TLS here.
Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize humans as a tremendous evolutionary force. In hospitals, we drive the evolution of resistant bacteria by giving patients antibiotics. In the oceans, we drive the evolution of small-bodied fish by catching the big ones.
In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of bigger brains.
Dr. Snell-Rood bases her conclusion on a collection of mammal skulls kept at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Snell-Rood picked out 10 species to study, including mice, shrews, bats and gophers. She selected dozens of individual skulls that were collected as far back as a century ago. An undergraduate student named Naomi Wick measured the dimensions of the skulls, making it possible to estimate the size of their brains.
Two important results emerged from their research. In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.
「香港也是人類最偉大的成功實驗之一。」「香港的實驗還有未完成的部份嗎?我們不是『什麼都有』了嗎?作為戰後嬰兒潮代的一份子,我還有一種痛,而相信同代很多人會有同感。那就是民主。或者說,以市民普選出代議決策者和行政長官的制度。」「我相信香港民主也會有改進,只是慢了一點,慢得有點荒謬。」「民主是香港未完成的實驗,其他實驗的成果不會因為民主的成形而失敗,因為民主是整個實驗的一部份。有了民主,這一代人才完成任務。」「要完成,就在這一代。」
The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.