Random links from last week
Suphala is a talented Tabla player in New York slowly gaining US national attention. She recently got profiled in NYT. I have been hoping to make it to one of her concerts this year (without any luck so far). As the article makes clear, Tabla is a relatively difficult medium to popularize to a Western audience. The usual Western marketing gimmicks are frowned upon by the traditional arbiters of taste in this space.
If you have seen Annie Hall, you would not have forgotten the scene where Woody Allen pulls out Marshall McLuhan out from behind a counter to tell an insufferable bore standing before him in a line that his interpretation of McLuhan is completely wrong. I was somehow reminded of the story when browsing through this thread in Mefi about Douglas Ruskoff's new book. (Mefi is a great place to hang around. But like a lot of other public forums, it takes very little to derail a thread.) While I have read a few of Ruskoff's essays (and liked them), I am not a huge fan. But I find it annoying when people start criticizing books or ideas without having read them first. So I found it really cool that after a while, out popped Ruskoff to defend his book.
'Captain Capitalism' is an economist living in Minneapolis. Last month he wrote a tragicomic post about how he almost got his dream date, but didn't, and got a call from the editor of The Economist instead. All sorts of people weighed in to offer their suggestion. Check it out.
Eric Alterman has a scary overview of the tentacles of neoconservative influence in America media.
Talking of conservatives, I recently read this old article by Fareed Zakaria on the history of martini. An entertaining write-up.
This is an interesting (if speculative) story on a lost tribe of Jews from Mizoram (via Zoostation, I think)