We say the camera doesn't lie, but we also know that pictures distort and deceive. In Picture Perfect, Kiku Adatto brilliantly examines the use and abuse of images today. Ranging from family albums to Facebook, political campaigns to popular movies, images of war to pictures of protest. Adatto reveals how the line between the person and the pose, the real and the fake, news and entertainment is increasingly blurred. New technologies make it easier than ever to capture, manipulate, and (...) spread images. But even in the age of the Internet, we still seek authentic pictures and believe in the camera's promise to document, witness, and interpret our lives. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of the single-cell biochemical toolbox including chromosome conformation capture -based methods that provide novel insights into chromatin spatial organization in individual cells. The observations made with these techniques revealed that topologically associating domains emerge from cell population averages and do not exist as static structures in individual cells. Stochastic nature of the genome folding is likely to be biologically relevant and may reflect the ability of chromatin fibers to adopt a number of alternative configurations, (...) some of which could be transiently stabilized and serve regulatory purposes. Single-cell Hi-C approaches provide an opportunity to analyze chromatin folding in rare cell types such as stem cells, tumor progenitors, oocytes, and totipotent cells, contributing to a deeper understanding of basic mechanisms in development and disease. Here, we review key findings of single-cell Hi-C and discuss possible biological reasons and consequences of the inferred dynamic chromatin spatial organization. Single-cell Hi-C expands the molecular biology toolbox for studies of chromatin structure in individual cells. This technique allows one to analyze cell-to-cell variability in TAD and loop structure, and to capture chromosome conformation in rare cell types such as oocytes, totipotent cells, and tumor progenitors. (shrink)

In his 2013 book Kiku hito (English translation Homo audiens, 2022), composer and musicologist Jo Kondo (近藤譲) outlines his interpretation of music as the interrelationship between notes, each of which ‘has its own entity and life’ and yet is only meaningful in relationship with other notes, an assertion which echoes 15th-century nō (能) composers Zeami’s (世阿弥) and Zenchiku’s (禅竹) writings on the life and death of each note in a nō performance. Though in his own writing Kondo restricts himself (...) to the tradition of western aesthetics, in a 2023 interview he acknowledges that his system of musical interpretation is rooted in the Kegon (華厳) Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net (which illustrates the idea of ultimate reality as the ‘unimpeded interpenetration of phenomena and phenomena’ jiji muge hokkai 事事無礙法界). In this experimental paper, I will explore the aesthetic implications of this idea: is a listener’s interpretation of the relationships between sounds in a musical work (‘work’ defined as broadly as possible, inclusive of all forms of deep, active listening, from contemporary sound art to nō to Dōgen (道元) hearing a sūtra in the voices of monkeys) merely a metaphor for the ‘unimpeded interpenetration of phenomena and phenomena’, or is it an example of it? What are the implications for the interpretation of all types of music and sound art if sounds – like other nonsentient (hijō 非情) phenomena such as water and mountains – have Buddha-nature (busshō 仏性)? And does this interpretative frame have ethical implications for interpreters – listeners, composers, and performers – of music and sound-art in this age of imminent environmental collapse?. (shrink)

Publication date: 31 January 2018 Source: Author: Zari Dorri Holden Caulfield, the major character in Jerome David Salinger’s most rewarded novel The Catcher in the Rye, long stood as the innovative and leading figure for such distinctive and revolutionary traits in a character he presented in 1959s’ America literary domain. Salinger media-shy and no interview policies led the public to spread out the idea of the author’s being the whole genius behind the sheer novelty of Holden Caulfield character by making (...) a myth out of the author who turns down any kind of publicity and is finally lionized. This student-friendly hero who denigrate respectability and” phoniness” with his cynical attitude and obscene language, in one way or another, is kept being compared to such huge characters like Huckle Berry Finn whose universal popularity is barely deniable; but the question is that, could at any rate, J.D.Salinger be the sole innovator behind this genuineness? On the other hand, are there any other social and environmental factors, which came to pave the way for any kinds of Holden to be born and well liked? The main purpose of the paper is to answer these questions by a kind of critical theory as New Historicism and survey through the history as a discourse in this method. The results and findings indicate that, apparently, there was a specific social context for the emergence of this novel, with which the author had to interact. By opening up the environmental condition of those days and considering the facts, which affected Holden’s birth and popularity in that era. This essay will point out the fact that criticizing America’s 50s in such aforementioned ambience was inevitably and to some extent predictable. (shrink)