"For his new project, Err, artist Jeremy Hutchison contacted various factories around the world, and asked if one of their workers would produce an 'incorrect' version of the product they make every day: in doing so, the functional objects became artworks. Hutchison has also kept all of the correspondence with the factories as part of the project."
posted by Potomac Avenue on Jul 5, 2011 - 27 comments

William Gibson offers interesting perceptions of our world The insight on the connection between the perceived threat from terrorism (not his term) and the attraction of lottery tickets (about half-way down) pushed me over to post this, but the rest of it is worth your time, too.
posted by mojohand on Dec 5, 2010 - 82 comments

Acclaimed writer Bruce Sterling is back for his annual State of the World interview in The WELL's inkwell conference. It's a must-read. The first question comes from Cory Doctorow who asks him to help him plan for the future now that Cory has a kid, etc. Sterling's answer is hilarious, biting, and brilliant all at the same time. And that's only the beginning...
posted by brianstorms on Jan 6, 2010 - 130 comments

Martin Amis on 9/11 and the cult of death: [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin on Sep 11, 2007 - 71 comments

This Israeli process could turn the gigantic oil shale deposits of the US into the largest energy production in the world, outstripping the Middle East's role and dramatically altering the world economy to be even MORE US-centric.
posted by Kickstart70 on Nov 18, 2006 - 39 comments

...With the end of the cold war and the emergence of global networks in which goods, ideas and people circulate outside the language of citizenship, the fundamentalist fight for ideological states has lost influence... Muslim radicalism, by contrast, has moved beyond the language of citizenship to assume a global countenance, joining movements as different as environmentalism and pacifism in its pursuit of justice on a worldwide scale. Such movements are ethical rather than political in nature: they can neither predict nor control the global consequences of their actions...

Spectral brothers: al-Qaida’s world wide web  
Snapshots of Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad are to be seen within
posted by y2karl on Dec 8, 2005 - 17 comments

Hugo Chávez is crazy! Hugo Chávez is certainly making a lot of news these days. No doubt we'll find the truth somewhere between "evil dictator" and "third world savior," but the long, dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America casts suspicion on everything. Chávez is gaining a heroic light in the third world for "standing up to" the United States. He's making friends with Cuba, China and Iran. Is Chávez heading up a new rogues' gallery ... or gearing up for the resource wars?
Previous MetaFilter coverage: [1,2,3,4]
posted by jefgodesky on Aug 24, 2005 - 62 comments

Emancipator or Oppressor? E.J. Dionne talks about how the global economy may not be as evil or as good as its respective supporters and detractors make it out to be. It seems like a pretty balanced look at a subject that gets horribly slanted coverage.
posted by owillis on Jan 2, 2002 - 2 comments

eBay takes a leaf out of eToys' book. Everybody's favourite auction site is threatening legal action against EBay Pty Limited, an Australian company that’s been around for twenty years but only got online recently. eBay has the ebay.com.au domain name, so EBay bought ebayaust.com in late 1999 for their small business selling self-published books.

Now eBay wants EBay to stop using the name both online and offline, the latter of which seems highly dubious given the relative ages of the companies.

In what is becoming an increasingly global marketplace, where do we draw the line between disparate companies with similar names?
posted by Georgina on Feb 27, 2001 - 6 comments