Poetry is an important part of Persian culture. Not only it is popular among the educated, but also the less educated (unlike in the “west”); in Iran, even the illiterate understand the language of poetry. While we have a wide range of poets with different styles of work, from classic to more contemporary, people of all classes and backgrounds are familiar with a number of leading Persian poets. One poet whose poetry is cherished and recited on daily basis is Sohrab Sepehri . Known for his modern mystic poetry, Sohrab’s delicate view on life and nature invites the readers to constantly question their beliefs and views. The Water’s Footsteps in which he cherishes his simple life and appreciates what he has as well as questioning the most basics traditions and beliefs of his reader, is one of the most famous and widely memorized poems in Iran. I recently received an email from Iran where the author, mimicking Sohrab’s poem, was pointing to the current states of Iranian youths. Take a look at its translation: I’m getting my degree in “time-wasting” My pockets are empty I have a father, Whose dream is to be able to fall sleep at night Friends, who are all bad influences And a god who has turned away from me I’m from a University where, I blindly follow my Professor And I pray for good grades I understand very well that my future is “unemployment” I don’t understand why they say “business men are doing well” And “engineers have no jobs” We must wash our eyes And see differently We must be afraid of smart people and Complain about the price of knowledge And tell people that today I realized this And I say “to hell with all forms of arts and sciences”

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Reworking Sohrab Sepehri For the Modern Age

If you’re like me, you have a really bulbous nose and haven’t bought new underpants since 2007. Okay, that didn’t work. “If you’re like me … ” is supposed to be a good way to start a column because it establishes instant rapport with the reader. But, apparently, one must try for common ground. Let’s try again. Read full article > >

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Gene Weingarten: Poop in a hoop

Amazon is expected to introduce a tablet Wednesday. It is expected to be an expanded version of the company’s popular Kindle e-reader. TechCrunch reported that the tablet will go by the rather punny name of the Kindle Fire. Below is a roundup of advance reports and rumors about the tablet. Form: The tablet is expected to be a 7-inch slate, according to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, who says he’s had some hands-on time with the device. The screen is said to be backlit — not e-ink like the reader — and to be similar in style to the BlackBerry PlayBook, but without a camera. That makes it easy to slip in a small purse or bag, but with less screen real estate than most best-selling tablets. Read full article > >

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Amazon tablet: What to expect from the Kindle Fire

Verizon and Intuit announced Thursday that they are teaming up to introduce a mobile payment system that will let customers swipe their credit cards with their smartphones. Verizon will sell the Intuit Reader smartphone accessory in its retail stores. The Reader plugs into the audio jack of most Android phones, BlackBerrys, the iPhone and the iPad. The product rollout is intended to make it easy for small-business owners and others to process mobile payments, likely boosting sales of smartphones. Read full article > >

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Verizon, Intuit team up for mobile payments

Verizon and Intuit announced Thursday that they are teaming up to introduce a mobile payment system that will let customers swipe their credit cards with their smartphones. Verizon will sell the Intuit Reader smartphone accessory in its retail stores. The Reader plugs into the audio jack of most Android phones, BlackBerrys, the iPhone and the iPad. The product rollout is intended to make it easy for small-business owners and others to process mobile payments, likely boosting sales of smartphones. Read full article > >

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Verizon, Intuit team up for mobile payments

Win the latest “Perfect Spout” water bottle Kor has been producing quality reusable water bottles since their inception in 2008. With forward-thinking design, they excel at creating functional H20 portage and are committed to changing the habits of the Dasani-swilling masses, The release of their newest vessel, the Vida , does nothing less than reinvent the steel water carrier. Kor’s steel bottle uses Kor’s “Perfect Spout” technology, which is designed to feel smooth and natural against the lip—unlike most bottles where you hit the screw-top threading or wide-mouths that make it hard to not dribble while drinking. Topped with a handle that makes it easy to clip or carry, the tapered shape of the bottle feels good in the hand too. Finishes include Anthracite, Natural Finish and Arctic White, which add to its sturdy and sleek appearance. The Vida is available in 500 ($22) and 750ml ($25) sizes and sells from the Kor site, but we’re giving away five bottles at random to our Twitter followers! To enter, simply retweet our link to this story with #vida before midnight EST on Wednesday, 23 March 2010. Take our reader survey and enter to win a CH Edition Jambox!

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Kor Vida

The world’s 16 most famous art cars come together in one exhibit Honoring the 35th anniversary of the project, an exhibit at the BMW Museum in Munich brings together the complete set of 17 BMW Art Cars (with the exception of Olafur Eliasson’s ice sculpture) for the first time. Seeing them in one place makes for a study of the car as canvas, highlighting both similarities in the artist’s approaches (the majority are splashed with bright colors) as well as each distinct style. While assembling all the cars is an impressive single-subject show, and many of the big names—Calder, Hockney, Lichtenstein—are familiar, there’s plenty of opportunity for discovery with some of the lesser-known works, like the shimmering surface of Matazo Kayama’s 1990 535i that welcomes visitors to the exhibit. On a recent visit there as a guest of BMW, I also picked up a few insights that speak to the rich history of the brand initiative. As a whole, the show speaks to the savvy pairing of culture and sport, supporting the automaker’s values of performance and the joy of driving as they introduce fine art to race car driving. A classic Warhol story, that he took all of 23 minutes to paint his 1979 M1 because he said the design of the car is so great, underlines his accompanying statement that he “tried to portray a sense of speed. When a car is going really fast all the lines and colours become a blur.” The short film on the making of this car and its race is worth checking out on the BMW Art Car microsite . Similarly, Kayama said of his car (pictured above), “it was the attractive basic shape of the car which made my work at all possible in the first place.” The show runs through 30 September 2011 at the BMW Museum in Munich. See more art cars—from Rauschenberg to Stella to Holzer and more—in the gallery below . Take our reader survey and enter to win a CH Edition Jambox!

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Welcome Home BMW Art Cars

A luxury Italian furniture-maker’s riff on the classic Thonet chair Bilou Bilou, a play on Thonet chairs, recently caught our attention for its subtly luxurious reinterpretation of the classic cafe seating in the Beau Rivage bar in Lausanne, Switzerland. Now, with the just-opened NYC branch of Promemoria , the manufacturer of the chair, we look forward to seeing more of its sensuous pared-down lines stateside. First introduced in 2003, the Bilou Bilou is available covered in leather or in any of 12 rich colors of stretch velvet, but we prefer the family-owned brand’s trademark mix of seductive surfaces in the combination of glossy polished beech and leather. This use of high-end materials, paired in unusual ways and reinvented with contemporary shapes as well as superlative craftsmanship, runs through Promemoria. A progressive approach to design balancing a playful sensibility with the utmost in artisan furniture-making techniques, their philosophy is perhaps best defined by their mascot, a frog—because it always moves forward. Take our reader survey and enter to win a CH Edition Jambox!

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Bilou Bilou

A quasi-friend wants this reader to be her baby’s godmother. What should she do?

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Fairly Godmother?

A quasi-friend wants this reader to be her baby’s godmother. What should she do?

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Fairly Godmother?

This reader is annoyed by “show-offs” on Facebook. Are they alone in their thinking?

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Facebook or can’t-face book?

This reader is annoyed by “show-offs” on Facebook. Are they alone in their thinking?

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Facebook or can’t-face book?

Career Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander, who won the Bronze Star for leading a team in a series of intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, has written a dramatic account of the pursuit and capture of a key Al Qaeda leader named Zafar in northern Iraq. Alexander also sifts through the current interrogation policy debate in Washington, separating nonsense from fact and offering the reader an intelligent and critical take on the issues. I put six questions to him about his new book, Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. . . .

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SCOTT HORTON—Kill or Capture—Six Questions for Matthew Alexander

I mentioned yesterday a surprisingly low-cost project to get e-reader devices (nook, Kindle, Sony Reader, et al) in the hands of U.S. troops in combat zones. Reader Shane Huang adds some context: > > I wanted to share my experience with an earlier generation of e-book reader during my deployment to Iraq. A few years back, my brother in law bought me a Sony Reader for my deployment, which allowed me to bring the rough equivalent of 30 lbs worth of books in something that could fit in my pocket. Also, through software I was able to download the complete contents of publications that choose to make their material freely available online – and that’s how I fell in love with The Atlantic. An e-book reader shared in a platoon would be a huge morale boost. This is actually something the FRGs (family readiness groups, or spouses who volunteer to support deployed units from home) could start doing as well. With one account, and some gift cards, and possibly a deal with donations from publishers and book sellers, units could easily pass around books without the problem of incompatible preferences or the bulk/weight of paper books. One issue that came up for me, though, is the fragility of the screen. One wouldn’t think that the e-ink screen would easily be broken from the feel and appearance of it, but it turns out there is a pane of glass underneath that needs to stay intact for the screen to work properly. Luckily for me, the screen broke in my luggage on my flight home to the U.S., so I was able to replace it within days.

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More on e-Readers for the Troops

by Jamelle Bouie A lot of excellent commentary has come out of Ross Douthat’s quasi-attempt to justify the use of poor women as baby farms for infertile elites. Jill Filipovic notes that the “good” days of widespread adoption were terrible for the women involved, as they “were shipped off to boarding houses for pregnant girls” and forced to “donate” their child to a more “deserving” family. Likewise, Amanda Marcotte highlights the deep misogyny in treating women as little more than repositories for fetuses, “whose mental health is of no more consequence than the mental health of your X-Box.” On the other side of things, a somewhat supportive Andrew Sullivan has been posting reader letters—as is his wont—on adoption and its challenges. Of all the responses, this one is easily the best: …less than a month after we adopted our first child, our agency called us asking if we knew anyone at all with a completed home study. They had a healthy baby boy in a hospital and nobody willing to adopt him. (Agency rules didn’t allow us to take him before our first was completed.) For our second, the agency tried for days to contact us around Christmas since we were the only people on the list who were willing to take him. Why was it so hard to place them? Simple: the adoption market is built around healthy white infants. If you’re willing to remove even *one* of those conditions, the waiting list is short to non-existent. Everything about this gets a yes . A few responses complain that the adoption system is “broken,” but I’m skeptical. If you want to adopt a “desirable” baby—white and healthy—then I have no doubt that the process is incredibly difficult. But there are thousands of children—infants, toddlers, older kids—who need homes, and are easier to adopt, as the reader can attest to. The difference is that they are black or Latino, and potential adoptive parents—many of them white—don’t imagine themselves with a child of color. Which is fair; I don’t begrudge anyone who wants a child that looks like them, and there are real challenges to raising a child of a different race. For black children especially, white parents need to be able to help their kids navigate a complicated racial landscape. That said, with adoption as the topic du jour, let’s not pretend that the situation is similar for every child from every background. African Americans account for 32 percent of the kids in foster care, and they are far less likely than white ones to be adopted. If there is a problem with adoption in the United States, there it is. On a related note, you should read Terry Keleher’s Colorlines piece on raising a black boy as a single white man.

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Abortion, Adoption, and the ‘Right’ Kind of Kids