- An Amazing Trickeration?: Banished Words For 2012 : NPR 010112
During the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles on Aug. 28, 2011, singer Beyonce Knowles rubbed her stomach in the middle of the performance to reveal her baby bump. “Baby bump” is one of the words on Lake Superior State University’s list of banished words this year.
- How A Teen’s Coerced Confession Set Her Free : NPR 010212
In that room, Truong will admit to suffocating her son. She’ll be arrested and she’ll spend almost three years awaiting trial for murder. But a videotape that police made of that interrogation, which NPR member station WBUR fought in court to obtain, will eventually set her free.
- How Fracking Wastewater Is Tied To Quakes : NPR 010512
Small earthquakes in Ohio and Arkansas associated with hydraulic fracturing for natural gas have taken many people by surprise. Gas industry executives say there’s no hard evidence that their activities are causing these quakes. But some scientists say it’s certainly possible; in fact, people have been causing quakes for years.
- Quakes Jeopardize Ohio City’s Economic Recovery : NPR 010512
There is a natural gas drilling boom going on in Youngstown, Ohio. But a series of earthquakes there has renewed focus on activities like drilling and mining that are known to cause earthquakes. Now people in the area are weighing safety over economic growth.
- ‘Thin Blue Line’ Piqued Mike Mills Movie Interest : NPR 010312
Steve Inskeep talks to filmmaker Mike Mills for the latest in the Watch This series about recommended movies and television shows. Mills directed the film Beginners starring Christopher Plummer as an elderly father who comes out of the closet.
- Up Close And Personal: Introducing Intimate Theater : NPR 010212
Theatergoers are used to being anonymous, hidden in the darkness, part of a crowd. They’re free to fidget, yawn, even tune out; the actors won’t know. But in an innovative kind of theater popping up at fringe festivals and independent venues the spotlight shines on the audience. Intimate theater relies on tight spaces and unconventional stages to collapse the distance between performer and viewer.
- Google Searches Are A Window Into Our Culture : NPR 010212
Millions of people are searching for things every day on Google. The people at the giant search engine company realized that if they tracked those searches, the patterns can tell us about what’s happening with people’s lives.
- Airlines To Post Fees, Exxon Awarded $900 Million : NPR 010212
Starting later this month, the Transportation Department is requiring airlines to advertise prices which include all of the non-optional fees. That way passengers know the full amount they’d have to pay for a ticket. And, Exxon Mobil received some disappointing news from an international panel arbitrating a dispute between it and Venezuela. The panel awarded Exxon only about $900 million. It had been seeking $7 billion.
About the Flaneur
![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
