May 2013
10 posts
“There is something about holding-in and release that seems essential to all...”
– Millsin’ About
April 2013
14 posts
NPR pulled no punches this morning in this takedown of beltway commentators:
I have a huge problem with— some of them are good at their job, and I’ve been looking at— there are people who have done studies, you know, who are the good prognosticators, and some of them are pretty good, but a lot of them are terrible and there is no accountability. No one ever goes back and says “oh...
3 tags
Tumblr is incredibly
We’re incredibly proud of our partners’ creativity and have been constantly amazed by how well these creations can fit into our Dashboards.
We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Tumblr app!
Dialogue about these behaviors is incredibly important and online communities can be extraordinarily helpful to people struggling with these difficult conditions.
Online dialogue about...
o_O
Ambitious clans, or individuals within clans, secured power by manipulating cosmologies to claim a closer relationship with the supernatural elite than the one enjoyed by other clans or clan leaders. Flannery and Marcus argue that this phenomenon has been pervasive throughout human history, reaching an extreme with the Egyptian pharaohs, who claimed divine status. Such manipulation wasn’t so...
1 tag
Three eras of currency
cdixon:
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
what
multitudes herein:
The politics of the deal are so fragile that Mr. Toomey asked that one of the Democratic co-sponsors of the amendment, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, not appear at a news conference Wednesday morning, Senate aides said. Mr. Schumer agreed, and told Mr. Manchin at the 50th-birthday party of the television host Joe Scarborough that he would not be attending.
this:
Peretti usually presents a cheerful exterior, but that kind of talk inflames his ego. “Could you make a list of cute animals that gets 5 million views?” he snapped when I mentioned Graf’s comment that night at the bar. “It’s actually really hard.”
is the new this:
“‘Thirty-three Animals Who Are Disappointed in You’ is a work of literature,” Mr. Smith said defiantly, referring to an April...
1 tag
March 2013
3 posts
Andrew McLaughlin of Digg was kind enough to respond last night to my blog post from Tuesday asking Digg to stop stealing writing from other websites. Andrew took care to explain both how Digg’s mobile apps work as well as the various difficulties facing app developers looking to provide great user experiences. He also touched on some of the long-term ideas Digg is kicking around for...
February 2013
6 posts
1 tag
291 Five Word TED Talks That Were Real Things And...
Be an artist, right now!
Dare to educate Afghan girls
A country with no water
Let’s teach kids to code
A universal translator for surgeons
Ethical riddles in HIV research
Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease
What fear can teach us
Why bother leaving the house?
Pool medical patents, save lives
Why global jihad is losing
How to solve traffic jams
Your brain on video games
How to...
1 tag
'Forrest Gump' is the Worst Movie in the History...
Forrest Gump is a bad film. Forrest Gump is the worst film! I’ll even go so far as to say this: Forrest Gump is worse than Crash.1 But it’s also a long film, and so there’s no shortage of things that are really very deeply wrong with it. (The majority of which have already been very thoroughly treated over at The Awl—which if you haven’t read yet what are you even doing...
Confronting the Fact of Fiction and the Fiction of Fact
Audiences are used to reading the words “based on a true story” as a hedge rather than a promise (or a threat!). And we are often in the dark about just what has been changed or omitted. Even devoted history buffs may not remember the tally of votes in Congress nearly 150 years ago. But thinking adults can tell the difference between a...
Not to belabor the point or anything. →
“‘Thirty-three Animals Who Are Disappointed in You’ is a work of literature,” Mr. Smith said defiantly, referring to an April BuzzFeed post that has so far received 2.5 million views. “I’m totally not joking.” The author of the piece “spent like 15 hours finding images of animals that would express the particular palette of human emotion he was going for and...
No. →
“The fabric of politics has always been gossip and jokes and crazy personality stuff and memes,” he said, a little angrily. “I mean, Dukakis in the tank, that’s a meme. Political coverage that wants to be solely high-minded is missing huge chunks of the actual interplay of personality and power that is what actually drives things.”
January 2013
15 posts
listening to this on repeat until the end of time
1 tag
“Similarly, McDonald’s has offered a “Big Xtra Brazil” burger...”
– Jeb!
the president was inaugurated at a private oval office ceremony the day before:
But the truth is this: It feels like a lie. When luminaries have gathered together in the flesh for an epic, historic event — the inauguration as the first black President serves a second term and swears on a bible — you expect truth. You want it to be genuine, exacting and pure. Lip-syncing is false. Miming....
Sorry, ok, but now that we’ve entered the phase of the Manti Te’o story where we’ve run out of things to speculate on and so now everyone’s running posts that are all “no, see, in the age of online dating his story’s not all THAT crazy” is it totally inappropriate of me to point out that wait a minute it IS actually EXACTLY that crazy for a FOOTBALL PLAYER...
2 tags
Correction: an earlier correction to an earlier blog post wrongly referred to the object of its correction as a relic. The correction should have read rubric.
1 tag
Correction: an earlier post on this blog wrongly referred to the idiotic phrase “inaugural black ball” as a subhed. The text in question was a relic.
and what's worse is it was in the quiet car
last night i was riding the train and working on my laptop and the woman next to me taps me on my arm because i had my headphones in and presumably didn’t hear her say whatever she had just said to me, or idk maybe she didn’t bother saying anything at all in the first place because she saw i had headphones in and assumed i wouldn’t hear her, but regardless let’s hope there...
1 tag
RIP Richard Ben Cramer
Richard Ben Cramer is dead at just 62. He was a huge influence in my life.
It would be wrong to say he will be missed—that would only be getting at half the story. He is already missed, and has been for years now, ever since he reported out a thousand-page masterpiece and then promptly vanished from political journalism.
He vanished because his book was panned by beltway insiders and it was...
After Being Raped, I Was Wounded - My Honor Wasn’t
Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your...
December 2012
10 posts
