Larry’s List: Body Scammer Edition

Respect for elders is universal among primates, Mona Lisa had high cholesterol and guess who’s getting rich off those invasive body scanners? All this and more on today’s list.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Newer links are on top.

Scott Lively was one of three American activists to speak at an anti-gay conference in Kampala, Uganda on March 5-7, 2009.

The TSA Scan Scam The TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies. Will the “digital strip search” device just bring more of the same?

Federal Appeals Court Gives Washington State Felons Right to Vote Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Washington State’s law denying the vote to people with felony convictions is racially discriminatory and violates the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

Mona Lisa May Have Suffered From High Cholesterol Is she enjoying a private joke? Is she sneaking a sly glance at an unseen lover? Or is the glint in the Mona Lisa’s eye in fact the result of a build-up of fatty acids around her eye socket, a sure sign that she wasn’t watching her cholesterol?

Cultured Personals Every so often I check out the personals in the New York Review of Books. They’re sort of like the brainy, geriatric version of the ads on Match.com.

In Praise of Infidelity [to the Score] In an interview last April, before his performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at London’s Covent Garden, the noted opera and orchestral conductor Semyon Bychkov stated: “You start trying to be faithful to a composer’s score but great masterpieces give you enormous possibilities for interpretation.

Mobile Phone: Call It What You Will How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences

Respect for Elders: Monkey See, Monkey Do Respect for elders may be universal in primates. Monkeys – just like humans – pay their elders special attention during conversation, apparently in order to garner some of the older animals’ wisdom.

What Doesn’t Work in America These days, everyone has experienced a little moment of shock when the unimaginable became American.

Updated Demographics for Internet, Broadband and Wireless Users In a national survey between Nov. 30 and Dec. 27, 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds …

Millennials: They’re Younger — But Their Preferences Aren’t That Different As might be expected, members of the Millennial generation are enthusiastic about the technological and communication advances of the past decade.

Less Politics, More Poetry: China’s Colleges Eye the Liberal Arts A mandarin silk jacket buttoned over his chest, Philip Webb paces theatrically across the classroom and informs his students they will each have 15 seconds to address the class on a topic—any topic.