Toothpicks, 2007 - 60" x 99" - Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.

Running the Numbers

An American Self-Portrait

by Photographer/artist Chris Jordan

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

Waging Peace

by Cate Montana

Peace is breaking out all over.

If you get your news from mainstream TV and radio, you probably haven't noticed. But here are a few startling statistics the networks have overlooked in their rush to promote the usual stories of crime, corruption, terrorism and war.

• More lasting peace initiatives have been successful in the last 15 years than over the last two or three centuries combined.
• More individuals and private groups are involved in effective grass roots peace-making and conflict resolution efforts than ever before.
• Thirty years ago the great majority of the world's governments were autocratic, totalitarian regimes with democracies far in the minority. Today approximately 70% of world governments are democratic.¹

With our attention fixed on "the problems," we rarely hear stories like the one about the philanthropist who subsidized a group of 8,000 Transcendental Meditation practitioners to engage in group meditation twice a day from 1988 to 1990, near New Delhi, India.