Candy-pink Taliban ... Pakistani art. This article includes a slideshow

Quoted: A hyper-realist drawing of a single bullet by Ayaz Jokhio, Arif Mahmood’s photograph of a boy playing with a toy gun and Ali Raza’s image, collaged from burned paper, of a veiled and screaming woman are in line with an international view of Pakistan as one big danger zone. Faiza Butt’s confectionary, gender-blend painting of turbaned men surrounded by hair dryers, pistols and ice cream cones takes some of the edge off of this paranoiac view and is one of the more interesting of the show’s several exercises in issue-driven whimsy.

Quoted: human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children, another remarkable display of social trust.

David Foster Wallace, best known for his 1996 novel ''Infinite Jest,'' was found dead in his home, according to police. Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home Friday.

Quoted: how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed... Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Quoted: Oral societies operated on polychronic time, with many things happening at once—socialization played a great role in the operation of these cultures, memory and memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of copiousness and redundancy. Oral cultures were additive rather than subordinate, closer to the human life world, and more situational and participatory than the more abstract qualities of literate cultures.

Photography and voyeurism in Japan...

Quoted: Why are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

Quoted: Tens of thousands of married Japanese women ventured into online currency trading in the last year and a half, playing the markets between household chores or after tucking the children into bed. While the overwhelmingly male world of traders and investors here mocked them as kimono-clad “Mrs. Watanabes,” these women collectively emerged as a powerful force, using Japan’s vast wealth to sway prices and confound economists.

Quoted:The housewife-traders were so secretive that many market analysts did not realize how widespread the trend had become until this summer, when the police arrested a Tokyo housewife accused of failing to pay $1.1 million in taxes on her foreign exchange earnings.

Quoted: Mr. Antonioni was the movies’ first diagnostician of what back then was called alienation, anomie, angst and decadence. If his films had their silly side (the image of Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, grappling fully clothed in a sand trap in “La Notte”), they were also prophetic. Their melancholy poetry transmuted an overriding mood of self-pity into something deeper and closer to tragedy.

A study I remembered from Harper's Magazine when I came across one of Peter's dots. Check out the connected network "graph" in the image.

Quoted: For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.