Sally Peabody is a Paris Specialist who has been seriously smitten with Istanbul. There are fascinating similarities in what make Paris and Istanbul so intriguing while being utterly unique great cities. Sally is bringing small groups for culinary and cultural tours to experience Istanbul (and beyond) in addition to her travel advising and culinary tours to access the best in Paris. http://www.yourgreatdaysinparis.com

Meksika kültürüne damgasını vuran düalizmdir, güneş ve ay arasındaki zıtlıktır. Aztek yaratılış efsanesine göre güneş, yeryüzünün üzerine düşüp onu mahvetmek için insan kurbanlara muhtaçtı. Başka halkların da efsanelerinde gökyüzü olayları, semavi aşıklar güneş ve ay merkezî bir rol oynar. Ay kadındır, güzledir ama değişkendir; güneş ise erkektir, büyük bir dinginlik ve kayıtsızlık içinde muntazaman gökyüzünde ki yolunu izler. Çoğu efsanaye göre güneş ve ay birbirleri için yaratılmışlardır, ama bir türlü kavuşamazlar…
Frida Kahlo, pek çok resminde güneş ve ayı Diego Rivera ile olan kendi aşk hikayesini anlatmak için metafor olarak kullanmıştır. Diego, Frida’nın güneşidir, Frida ise ay tanrıçasıdır. Frida Kahlo güneşle ayın birleşmesindeki imkansızlığı resimlerinde çeşitli biçimlerde dile getirir.

Helga Prignitz- Poda

I would like to invite you to join the Turkish Women’s International Network (TurkishWIN). The TurkishWIN is a vibrant networking platform of professional Turkish women outside of Turkey and their community. Join the network, empower others and tap into our new global community!

Please click here to start your application.

What has a new spin-off comic done to our cheery red-head?

Last year, when Archie finally married his high-school sweetheart, Veronica, after 68 years of dating, his comic sold a blockbuster 24 times the usual 2,500-odd copies per issue. A few months later, he married Veronica’s blond rival, Betty, in another popular story line tracing a parallel imagined future. (Archie’s no bigamist.) Happily ever after, right?

By DAVID CARR

Has WikiLeaks changed journalism forever?

Perhaps. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Think back to 2008, when WikiLeaks simply released documents that suggested the government of Kenya had looted its country. The follow-up in the mainstream media was decidedly muted.

Then last spring, WikiLeaks adopted a more journalistic approach — editing and annotating a 2007 video from Baghdad in which an Apache helicopter fired on men who appeared to be unarmed, including two employees of Reuters. The reviews were mixed, with some suggesting that the video had been edited to political ends, but the disclosure received much more attention in the press.

In July, WikiLeaks began what amounted to a partnership with mainstream media organizations, including The New York Times, by giving them an early look at the so-called Afghan War Diary, a strategy that resulted in extensive reporting on the implications of the secret documents.

Then in October, the heretofore classified mother lode of 250,000 United States diplomatic cables that describe tensions across the globe was shared by WikiLeaks with Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. (The Guardian shared documents with The New York Times.) The result was huge: many articles have come out since, many of them deep dives into the implications of the trove of documents.

Notice that with each successive release, WikiLeaks has become more strategic and has been rewarded with deeper, more extensive coverage of its revelations. It’s a long walk from WikiLeaks’s origins as a user-edited site held in common to something more akin to a traditional model of publishing, but seems to be in keeping with its manifesto to deliver documents with “maximum possible impact.”

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder and guiding spirit, apparently began to understand that scarcity, not ubiquity, drives coverage of events. Instead of just pulling back the blankets for all to see, he began to limit the disclosures to those who would add value through presentation, editing and additional reporting. In a sense, Mr. Assange, a former programmer, leveraged the processing power of the news media to build a story and present it in comprehensible ways. (Of course, as someone who draws a paycheck from a mainstream journalism outfit, it may be no surprise that I continue to see durable value in what we do even amid the journalistic jujitsu WikiLeaks introduces.)

And by publishing only a portion of the documents, rather than spilling information willy-nilly and recklessly endangering lives, WikiLeaks could also strike a posture of responsibility, an approach that seems to run counter to Mr. Assange’s own core anarchism.

Although Mr. Assange is now arguing that the site is engaged in what he called a new kind of “scientific journalism,” his earlier writings suggest he believes the mission of WikiLeaks is to throw sand in the works of what he considers corrupt, secretive and inherently evil states. He initiated a conspiracy in order to take down what he saw as an even greater conspiracy.

“WikiLeaks is not a news organization, it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power,” said George Packer, a writer on international affairs at The New Yorker. “They simply believe that the State Department is an illegitimate organization that needs to be exposed, which is not really journalism.”

By shading his radicalism and collaborating with mainstream outlets, Mr. Assange created a comfort zone for his partners in journalism. They could do their jobs and he could do his.

“The notion that this experience has somehow profoundly changed journalism, the way that information gets out or changed the way that diplomacy happens, seems rather exaggerated,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, which used information from the leaks to report a series of large articles.

“It was a big deal, but not an unfamiliar one. Consumers of information became privy to a lot of stuff that had been secret before,” Mr. Keller said. “The scale of it was unusual, but was it different in kind from the Pentagon Papers or revelation of Abu Ghraib or government eavesdropping? I think probably not.”

In this case, the media companies could also take some comfort in knowing that the current trove did not contain, with a few notable exceptions, any earth-shaking revelations. No thinking citizen was surprised to learn that diplomats don’t trust each other and say so behind closed doors. But as it has became increasingly apparent that WikiLeaks was changing the way information is released and consumed, questions were raised about the value of traditional journalistic approaches.

“People from the digital world are always saying we don’t need journalists at all because information is everywhere and there in no barrier to entry,” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School. “But these documents provide a good answer to that question. Even though journalists didn’t dig them out, there is a great deal of value in their efforts to explain and examine them. Who else would have had the energy or resources to do what these news organization have done?”

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WikiLeaks certainly isn’t being afforded the same protections we give other media outlets in free countries. It has come under significant attack as PayPal, Amazon and Visa have all tried to bar WikiLeaks from their services, a move that would seem unthinkable had it been made against mainstream newspapers. (Can you imagine the outcry if a credit card company decided to cut off The Washington Post because it didn’t like what was on the front page?)

Sen. Joseph Lieberman has said that Mr. Assange should be charged with treason while Sarah Palin has called him “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” (Indeed, Senator Lieberman has suggested that the Justice Department should examine the role of The New York Times in the leaks.)

Mr. Packer is very much against the prosecution of WikiLeaks on grounds of treason because, he said, “discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.”

But Mr. Assange, who is in jail in Britain in connection with a Swedish extradition request, is a complicated partner. So far, WikiLeaks has been involved in a fruitful collaboration, a new form of hybrid journalism emerging in the space between so-called hacktivists and mainstream media outlets, but the relationship is an unstable one.

WikiLeaks may be willing to play ball with newspapers for now, but the organization does not share the same values or objectives. Mr. Assange and the site’s supporters see transparency as the ultimate objective, believing that sunshine and openness will deprive bad actors of the secrecy they require to be successful. Mainstream media may spend a lot of time trying to ferret information out of official hands, but they largely operate in the belief that the state is legitimate and entitled to at least some of its secrets.

And Mr. Assange has placed a doomsday card on the table: he has said that if WikiLeaks’s existence is threatened, the organization would be willing to spill all the documents in its possession out into the public domain, ignoring the potentially mortal consequences. (His lawyers told ABC News that they expect he will be indicted on espionage charges in the United States.) Mr. Packer said such an act “is something no journalistic organization would ever do, or threaten to do.”

And what if WikiLeaks was unhappy with how one of its ad hoc media partners had handled the information it provided or became displeased with the coverage of WikiLeaks? The same guns in the info-war that have been aimed at its political and Web opponents could be trained on media outlets.

Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and an author and a contributor to The New Yorker who has written extensively about Afghanistan, said that the durability of the WikiLeaks model remained an open question.

“I’m skeptical about whether a release of this size is ever going to take place again,” he said, “in part because established interests and the rule of law tend to come down pretty hard on incipient movements. Think of the initial impact of Napster and what subsequently happened to them.”

Of course, Napster is no longer around but the insurgency it represented all but tipped the music industry.

“Right now, media outlets are treating this as a transaction with a legitimate journalistic organization,” he said. “But at some point, they are going to have to evolve into an organization that has an address and identity or the clock will run out on that level of collaboration.”

Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, said that WikiLeaks had already changed the rules by creating a situation where competitive news organizations were now cooperating to share a scoop.

“WikiLeaks represents a new kind of advocacy, one that brings to mind the activism of the ’60s, one in which people want to get their own hands on information and do their own digging,” she said. “What you are seeing is just a crack in the door right now. No one can tell where this is really going.”

Eski yeni dinler / GÜNDÜZ VASSAF

12/12/2010

Sımsıkı sarıldığımız, aitliklerimiz geçici. Ajda Pekkan’ın “Kimler geldi, kimler geçti,” şarkısı gibi. Büyük patlamayla başladığı bilinen evrenimizin kalıcılığı bile şüpheli. Paralel evrenler olabileceğini söyleyen nice fizikçi var. Dünya’nın, Güneşimizin kaç yıl sonra yok olacağı aşağı yukarı biliniyor. (Şu anda yarı yoldayız.)
Ve birileri çıkıp “devletimiz ilelebet var olacaktır,” deyince bizler de inanıp, silahlanıp ölmeye öldürmeye gitmişiz tarih boyunca. Dinlerimize ölümsüzlük atfediyoruz. Onlar da geçici değil mi? Onlar da devletler, imparatorluklar gibi doğup ölmüyorlar mı? Aklımıza kendi dinimiz gelince “Haşa!” Türkleri Müslüman biliriz.
Oysa belki tarihte en çok farklı dinleri olan bir kavim Türkler. Yüzlerce yıllık mazisi olan Hırıstiyan Türkler var- Gagavuzlar. Ya Yahudi Türkler? Nerdeyse Osmanlı İmparatorluğu kadar uzun ömürlü Hazar İmparatorluğu’nda Türklerin Yahudi olduğunu, bugün Türkiye’de yaşayan kaç kişi bilir? Türkün, Zerdüştü, Hindusu, Şamanı,Taoisti, Budisti ve dinsizi de var. Bu zenginliğimizin, dinsel çeşitliliğimizin hatırlanmasına, hatırlatılmasına kapalıyız? Neden bu aitlik mozağimizden okullarda, ibadet yerlerinde söz edilmez?
Tek tip aitliğimiz kimilerini güçlü kılarken, tek tip aitliklerimiz üzerine iktidarlar kurulurken bizlerden bir şey eksilmiyor mu? imparatorlukların doğumu-ölümü üzerine nice tarih kitaplarımız var. Roma İmparatorluğu’nun, Osmanlının, Sovyetler’in, doğuşu-batışı üzerine ha babam kafa yormuş tarihçiler. Dünyamıza egemen Amerikan İmparatorluğunun batıp batmayacağı değil, ne zaman batacağı konuşuluyor.
Sanki tarihimizde böyle bir şey yokmuş gibi, olamazmış gibi dinlerin nasıl doğup battığını pek yazan yok. Neden?
Acaba dinlerin ömrü, onları benimseyen imparatorlukların, iktidarların, güç odaklarının ömrüyle mi sınırlı? Pers imparatorluğunun çökmesiyle birlikte tanrıları Zerdüşt de unutuldu.
Eski Yunan uygarlığı ve onların tanrılarını devralan Roma İmparatorluğu’nun bitmesiyle Zeus tahtından oldu. Üç bin yıllık Mısır uygarlığı bitince dini, dili kayboldu. Hıristiyanlıkla, İslam’la özdeşleşen imparatorluklar batınca, bu dinler ulus-devlet iktidarlarında varlıklarını sürdürüyor.
Museviler ticaret ve finansta güç odağı. (Budizm ve Hinduizm örneklerinden bildiğimiz gibi tek tanrılı olmak, dinlerin yaşayıp yaşamayacağına ilişkin kıstas değil.)
Tarihimizde ölen dinler olduğu gibi günümüzde yeni dinlerin doğduğunu söyleyebilir miyiz? Cevabı zor çünkü karar veren merci yok. Minnacık Kosova dünyanın birçok ülkesi tarafından devlet olarak tanındı. Yeni dinler için böyle bir kurumsal kabul mekanizması, devletle hukuku vs. yok.
Bakarsınız yarın uzayda başka canlılarla temas kurulunca bir çırpıda dünya çapında yeni bir din türeyebilir. Ama sanal dünyamızda şimdiden doğan yeni dinler var. Birinin adı “teknopaganizm.” Yeni ipek yolumuz Google’da gezintiye çıkarsanız başka genç dinlerle de karşılaşabilirsiniz.

By MIGUEL HELFT/NYT

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook’s quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook’s “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook’s terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

Facebook took down a page used by WikiLeaks supporters to organize hacking attacks on the sites of such companies, including PayPal and MasterCard; it said the page violated the terms of service, which prohibit material that is hateful, threatening, pornographic or incites violence or illegal acts. But it did not remove WikiLeaks’s own Facebook pages.

Facebook’s decision in the WikiLeaks matter illustrates the complexities that the company grapples with, on issues as diverse as that controversy, verbal bullying among teenagers, gay-baiting and religious intolerance.

With Facebook’s prominence on the Web — its more than 500 million members upload more than one billion pieces of content a day — the site’s role as an arbiter of free speech is likely to become even more pronounced.

“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about free speech on the Internet. “It is important that Facebook is exercising its power carefully and protecting more speech rather than less.”

But Facebook rarely pleases everyone. Any piece of content — a photograph, video, page or even a message between two individuals — could offend somebody. Decisions by the company not to remove material related to Holocaust denial or pages critical of Islam and other religions, for example, have annoyed advocacy groups and prompted some foreign governments to temporarily block the site.

Some critics say Facebook does not do enough to prevent certain abuses, like bullying, and may put users at risk with lax privacy policies. They also say the company is often too slow to respond to problems.

For example, a page lampooning and, in some instances, threatening violence against an 11-year-old girl from Orlando, Fla., who had appeared in a music video, was still up last week, months after users reported the page to Facebook. The girl’s mother, Christa Etheridge, said she had been in touch with law enforcement authorities and was hoping the offenders would be prosecuted.

“I’m highly upset that Facebook has allowed this to go on repeatedly and to let it get this far,” she said.

A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band’s video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.

Facebook says it is constantly working to improve its tools to report abuse and trying to educate users about bullying. And it says it responds as fast as it can to the roughly two million reports of potentially abusive content that its users flag every week.

“Our intent is to triage to make sure we get to the high-priority, high-risk and high-visibility items most quickly,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer.

In early October, Mr. Willner and his colleagues spent more than a week dealing with one high-risk, highly visible case; rogue citizens of Facebook’s world had posted antigay messages and threats of violence on a page inviting people to remember Tyler Clementi and other gay teenagers who have committed suicide, on so-called Spirit Day, Oct. 20.

Working with colleagues here and in Dublin, they tracked down the accounts of the offenders and shut them down. Then, using an automated technology to tap Facebook’s graph of connections between members, they tracked down more profiles for people, who, as it turned out, had also been posting violent messages.

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“Most of the hateful content was coming from fake profiles,” said James Mitchell, who is Mr. Willner’s supervisor and leads the team. He said that because most of these profiles, created by people he called “trolls,” were connected to those of other trolls, Facebook could track down and block an entire network relatively quickly.

Using the system, Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.

Most abuse incidents are not nearly as prominent or public as the defacing of the Spirit Day page, which had nearly 1.5 million members. As with schoolyard taunts, they often happen among a small group of people, hidden from casual view.

On a morning in November, Nick Sullivan, a member of the hate and harassment team, watched as reports of bullying incidents scrolled across his screen, full of mind-numbing meanness. “Emily looks like a brother.” (Deleted) “Grady is with Dave.” (Deleted) “Ronald is the biggest loser.” (Deleted) Although the insults are relatively mild, as attacks on specific people who are not public figures, these all violated the terms of service.

“There’s definitely some crazy stuff out there,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But you can do thousands of these in a day.”

Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, which advises parents and teachers on Internet safety, said her organization frequently received complaints that Facebook does not quickly remove threats against individuals. Jim Steyer, executive director of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, also said that many instances of abuse seemed to fall through the cracks.

“Self-policing can take some time, and by then a lot of the damage may already be done,” he said.

Facebook maintains it is doing its best.

“In the same way that efforts to combat bullying offline are not 100 percent successful, the efforts to stop people from saying something offensive about another person online are not complete either,” Joe Sullivan said.

Facebook faces even thornier challenges when policing activity that is considered political by some, and illegal by others, like the controversy over WikiLeaks and the secret diplomatic cables it published.

Last spring, for example, the company declined to take down pages related to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” an Internetwide protest to defend free speech that surfaced in repudiation of death threats received by two cartoonists who had drawn pictures of Muhammad. A lot of the discussion on Facebook involved people in Islamic countries debating with people in the West about why the images offended.

Facebook’s team worked to separate the political discussion from the attacks on specific people or Muslims. “There were people on the page that were crossing the line, but the page itself was not crossing the line,” Mr. Mitchell said.

Facebook’s refusal to shut down the debate caused its entire site to be blocked in Pakistan and Bangladesh for several days.

Facebook has also sought to walk a delicate line on Holocaust denial. The company has generally refused to block Holocaust denial material, but has worked with human rights groups to take down some content linked to organizations or groups, like the government of Iran, for which Holocaust denial is part of a larger campaign against Jews.

“Obviously we disagree with them on Holocaust denial,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Rabbi Cooper said Facebook had done a better job than many other major Web sites in developing a thoughtful policy on hate and harassment.

The soft-spoken Mr. Willner, who on his own Facebook page describes his political views as “turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” makes for an unlikely enforcer. An archaeology and anthropology major in college, he said that while he loved his job, he did not love watching so much of the underbelly of Facebook.

“I handle it by focusing on the fact that what we do matters,” he said.

Yaratıcı şehirler ve endüstriler

/GÜNDÜZ VASSAF

07/11/2010

Tarih boyunca egemen düzen kültür dediğini tekeline almış.
Günümüzde dünya edebiyatı bildiğimiz dünyayı yansıtmıyor. Çoğu ülkelerden gelen seslere, renklere ulaşamıyoruz. Türkiye’de herhangi bir gazetenin kitap ekinde ‘çok satanlar’ listesine bakın. Buradakilerle birlikte, Fransa, İngiltere ve ABD’de de çok satanların listesini görünce, kendimizi aldatmıyor muyuz dünyanın farkındayız diye? Batı ülkeleri dünyaya bizden de kapalı. Benmerkezci. Kendi ulusal ‘çok satan’ listelerine hapsolmuşlar.
Hele Amerikalılar! Özgür ticaret adına sermayelerini dünyaya dayattıkları halde, kültürleri sım sıkı kapalı. İngilizceye başka dillerden çevirdikleri eserlerin sayısı, Türkiye gibi başka ülkelerdeki çeviri sayısıyla karşılaştırıldığında, solda sıfır kalır.
Nerede Afrika, Asya, Güney Amerika? Ne okuyorlar? Ne düşünüyorlar?
Doğu-Batı arası köprü olduğuna kendimizi kandırdığımız Türkiye’de, Doğu ülkelerinin edebiyatı bile gündemimizde değil.
Japonlar, Hintliler, Endonezyalılar, Çinliler… İran, Ermenistan, hem de dili Türkçe olan Azerbeycan gibi komşularımız ne yazıyor, ne okuyor bilmiyoruz. Merak etmiyoruz. Dünyalı olamamamızın eksikliğinin, mahallemizde yalnızlığımızın, bilincinde değiliz.
Batı egemenliğindeki düşünce dünyası da, ‘hinterland’ diye baktığı bu ülkelerin kültürlerine sırtını dönmüş.
İş kendi kültürlerini satmaya gelince seferberlik halindeler. Reklamlarıyla pompaladıkları McDonald’s -Coca Cola yaşam kültürüyle, Guggenheim gibi müzelerin Dubai örneğinde olduğu gibi zincirleşerek ihracata dönüşmesiyle, sanayii devriminin öncülüğünü yapan Batı kapitalizmi, şimdi de kültür sanayiinde dünya tekeli olma yarışında.
Bir zamanlar aydınlanmanın ifadesi diye baktığımız kültür günümüzde sermayenin aracı oldu.
Yeni bir kültür mücadelesinin eşiğindeyiz. Ülkeler, daha doğrusu, dünyanın dört köşesine yayılmış çeşitli uygarlıkların kendilerine özgü kültürlerinin ifadesi, günümüzde nasıl korunarak geliştirilebilir? Toplumların kalkınmasının, zenginleşmesinin nasıl aracı olabilir? Resimden müziğe, el sanatlarından edebiyata, müzecilik anlayışından modaya, yeni bir dünya kültürü Batı’nın tekelinden nasıl özgürleşip yaygınlaşabilir?
Abu Dabi, Ortadoğu’da küresel bir şehir olma stratejisini, Guggenheim ve Louvre müzelerinin şube açacakları, 26 milyar dolarlık bir kültür köyü yaratma planı üzerine kurarken, Seul, kendini dünyanın tasarım başkenti ilan ederken, New York, Londra rekabeti artık sanayi gelirlerinin yanı sıra kültür/sanat ve yaratıcılık bağlamında da kıyaslanırken, UNESCO raporlarında, ‘Yaratıcı Endüstri’ ürünlerinin uluslararası ticaretteki pay diğer sektörleri aşıp 445 milyar doları bulurken, İstanbul ve Türkiye’nin başka şehirleri konunun dışında kalacak mı?

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