The year in ideas (list and link)

[Guest]

Each year the NY Times offers "The Year in Ideas". Here's this year's list, some very interesting. You may have to register to view the article, but some of the 'ideas' are worth it. - Perdita

An annual compendium of ideas from A to Z. (Or at least Y. And, frankly, also missing J, O, Q, R and X.)

Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping; 'Acting White' Myth, The; Animated Society Portrait, The; Anti-Concept Concept Store, The
Augmented Bar Code, The; Benign Corporate Oligarchy, The; Best Way to Skip a Stone, The; Blogo Ad, The; Caller ID 6.0; Car That Emotes, The; Cold-Weather Theory of Witchcraft, The; Concrete You Can See Through; Criminalizing Reckless Sex; Debunking Photoshop Fakery; Designated Hitter as Moral Hazard, The; Do-It-Yourself Attack Ad, The; Downwardly Defined Celebrity Flaw, The; Drug-Trial Registry, The; Dumb Robots Are Better; EBay Vigilantism; Electability; Employable Liberal Arts Major, The; Escalating High-Heel Shoe, The; Exoskeleton Strength; Eyeball Jewelry; FanWing, The; Feral Cities; Fertile Red States; Foolproof Death Penalty, The; Genetic Family Values; Giga-Waves; Global Political Positioning System, The; Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover; Income-Variability Anxiety; Inkless Magazine, The; Invitation-Only, Incentivized Campaign Rally, The; Kill Midlevel Terrorists; Land-Mine-Detecting Plants; Lawfare; Listening for Cancer; Mainstream Mash-Up, The; Making Vaccines Good Business; McProfiling; Micropolis, The; Neo-Secessionism; Nonhegemonic Curating; Phraselator, The; Popular Constitutionalism; Presenteeism; Professional Amateurs; Psychopathic C.E.O.'s; Purple Is the Color of Correction; Purple-State Country Music; Sabermetrics for Football; Self-Storage; Singable National Anthem, The; Skin Literature; Soccer Model of Warfare, The; Stock Options for Soldiers; Strategic Extremism; Television Blaster, The; Thermoacoustic Freezer, The; 3-Point Problem, The; Underwear for Animated People; Vaporized, Oxygenated Cocktail, The; Virtopsy; Virtual Sketch Artist, The; Wal-Mart Sovereignty; Wandering Museum, The; Water That Isn't Wet; You Don't Need Superstars to Win

 

[herecomestherain]

Perdita, I do love you, almost as much as I love ideas...great article with a some fabulous reading. Thank you. I liked this.

December 12, 2004
Skin Literature
By DANIEL H. PINK

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ''Skin,'' will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson's ''words'' dies, so, too, will her tale.

As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ''The Melancholy of Anatomy,'' had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ''words'' to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs -- one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible -- which she may later publish or exhibit.

What kind of person signs up for an experiment in epidermal literature? Curiosity seekers and members of ''body modification'' communities have been early adopters. But many enlistees have been surprisingly mainstream. Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) In addition, Jackson has heard from several dyslexics, who have struggled with mastery of writing and reading. And librarians are signing up in droves. ''A lot of librarians are probably a lot hipper than we think,'' Jackson says.

Of course, librarians, like the rest of us, have a due date. And when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person's funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20's, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words.