Brainiac

Jeremy Hutchison, a British artist, has created a clever meditation on the theme of uselessness. Writing at the Creative Review blog, Eliza Williams shares Hutchison’s art project “Err,” in which Hutchison asked factories around the world to send him incorrect, useless versions of their products. “I specified that [the] error should render the object dysfunctional,” Hutchison says, “and rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”

The factory workers obviously had fun with the project, even as they found it mystifying. The results include a ladder with only one rung and a comb with no tines - now called “Untitled (Comb),” and credited to Mr. Kartick, Mr. Ram, and Mr. Vikash of Star Creations Ltd, Kolkata, India.

Say ”bananas”! English wildlife photographer David Slater left his camera unattended while working with a group of crested black macaque monkeys in Indonesia - and one of them learned how to use it to take a series of portraits. The Daily Mail has the photos, including this amazingly great self-portrait by one of the monkey photographers.

Slater thinks she was admiring her own reflection in the camera’s lens. (Presumably, she’d never seen it before.) Another monkey, Slater explains, took “hundreds of pictures” while his friends posed together. It’s not quite clear how much the monkeys understood what they were doing, of course, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and teaching fellow in the Harvard English department and an instructor in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.