February 2012
12 posts
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Today is my birthday.
I’m 25 years old. I don’t feel terribly accomplished, but that’s (probably) okay.
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Morning Routines Are Creativity Killers →
kateoplis:
As several recent studies highlight, the way most of us spend our mornings is exactly counter to the conditions that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us promote flexible, open-minded thinking. Take that hurried wake-up, for example. In a study published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning last year, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks reported that imaginative...
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“When you feel the impossibility of really thinking about the ten thousand year...”
– Larry Lessig (via azspot)
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Occupy D.C. raided this morning →
Follow-up to last week.
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Dividing women’s bodies into parts →
In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others.
- Jill Lepore, “Komen’s Choice,” The New Yorker, 2 February 2012
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Femmeism: A Feminist Fantasy/ A Jersey Girl... →
The universe, too, is Black and Womyn./ We exist inside her holy body/ fragment does not exist/ all the shards are glowing fractions of her brilliant wholeness./ We realize that for much of our lives we will be negotiating a host of mistaken identities. But we are not fazed because we Femmes are committed to struggle.
- Cyree Johnson, Sprinkle: A Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies, vol. 4...
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Food and violence: "a new age of want"
It is true that most historians would subscribe to some version of “no Hitler, no Holocaust.” But what they mean is that Hitler was a necessary condition for such a calamity, not that he was a sufficient one. There were many other necessary conditions for Nazi racial imperialism. Take, for example, worries about the food supply. In the 1930s, food was highly valued in both Berlin and...
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irenic
(īˈrenik) –n. Aiming or aimed at peace. [From Greek eirēnikós, equivalent to eirḗn ( ē ) peace + -ikos -ic.]
(via Google and Dictionary.com)
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“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we...”
– Ivan Turgenev
January 2012
30 posts
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“We have a deep hope … that another world is possible.”
– Kathleen G. Sutcliffe, former journalist, at Occupy DC. Today at noon, they will be kicked out of McPherson Square as police enforce a ban on overnight camping. You can watch live video of the camp at Washington Post’s Post Now blog.
See also: Today’s Express cover photo.
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SotU 2012 at Busboys & Poets
President Obama: Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years.
Exactly 1 person: *enthusiastic applause*
Everyone else: ...
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“He seemingly lacks the ability to empathize with anyone who is meaningfully...”
– Melissa McEwan, on Ron Paul. It seems like “ability to empathize with people who are meaningfully different from oneself” is a pretty important characteristic for a leader, yet nobody talks about it much. I don’t, even, at least not in those terms. But I think I should.
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“When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you...”
– Adrienne Rich, Invisibility in the Academe (via fuckyeahlesbianliterature)
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“Um, … this came as a surprise to anybody?”
– a person close to Obama, commenting on “all the professions of shock and outrage at Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.” In his statement Wednesday, Obama said, “This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline...
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SOPA loses support among congressional sponsors
shortformblog:
3 SOPA/PIPA sponsors withdraw support on day of blackout (source)
» Feeling some heat? Of these three co-sponsors of the SOPA or PIPA legislation, Florida Senator Marco Rubio is by far the biggest name. Rubio cited concerns about “a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet.” The other two co-sponsors were Rep. Lee Terry of...
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“The Wikipedia blackout presents a horrifying picture of a world with no...”
– Andy Daglas (via kateoplis) Quote of the night.
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"The Washington Post is joining several other... →
shortformblog:
Genius idea. A great way for news organizations, who need to stay objective in this case, to get involved in the Great Blackout.
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MLK: "America, too, is going to Hell, if..."
In Memphis, March 18, 1968, a few weeks before he was killed in that city:
…And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to Hell, if we don’t use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years...
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Newspapers should have regularly-updated lists of... →
There’s fairly broad agreement that quoting public figures saying something wrong about Subject X in a news story, and then correcting the record on Subject X only in a follow-up fact-checking piece, is a lousy practice. After all, everyone reads the A1 story, but very few people read the A17 fact check. The current system just doesn’t work.
And yet, if you insist on real-time fact...
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How to Report Newsmakers' Assertions and Facts AT...
In response to NYT Public Editor Arthur Brisbane’s question of “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”
A basic reporting framework:
“My take on the issue is [A],” said News Maker. “In fact, if you look at [B], you will see that [C].”
A is a viewpoint popular...
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“You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the...”
– Anne Lamot, Bird by Bird, quoted at Brain Pickings
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U.S. becomes first nation to put catch limits on... →
Can’t believe I missed this story at work today — it was right below the fold on the front page of the Washington Post!
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staircase wit
L’esprit de l’escalier or L’esprit d’escalier (literally, staircase wit) is a French term used in English that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late.
This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home...
December 2011
85 posts
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why i’m fat positive. →
None of this is new, exactly, but it is a lot of good reasons, well-articulated, in one place.
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“Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting...”
– David Roberts at Grist, on why the “New EPA mercury rules are a bona fide Big Deal,” 21 December 2011
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Top Longreads in 2011
Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” The Nation, 28 November 2011
Sady Doyle, “The Percentages: A Biography of Class,” Tiger Beatdown, 8 October 2011
Lester R. Brown, “The New Geopolitics of Food,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2011
Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” New York Times, 22 June 2011
Mara Hvistendahl,...
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“I can’t believe how much money and how much of our lives this has...”
– Mother Jones human rights reporter Mac McClelland writes about fact-checking her book, For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War, with a mixture of fascination, dedication, and frustration that is familiar to me. Fact-checking is awesome. And difficult....