July 2011
June 2011
Future Journalism Project: Colbert Gets His Super... →
futurejournalismproject:
The Federal Elections Commission today approved comedian Stephen Colbert’s application to form a super PAC. Super PAC’s came on the scene in 2010 after US Supreme Court rulings in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v Federal Election Commission struck down spending…
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano: The Mirror-Slave... →
ladyjournos:
You, like me, probably have a mirror face. It’s close to my “photo face,” but it’s a separate beast.
The New Inquiry || June 10, 2011
Pullquote added by me
I also began to understand what else I see in the mirror besides my reflection. In looking at a handsome young man, the shapely form of a yoga model, and the calorie count on the graham crackers I was about to eat, I had...
Michael Paterniti Goes Behind the Scenes at Al... →
If the so-called Arab Spring recently focused American awareness on the raft of Middle Eastern countries trying to shirk their repressive regimes—from Tunisia to Bahrain, from Yemen to Egypt and Libya—then it also threw into high relief the difference between what we’ve come to accept as our television “news” here in America and what a network like Al Jazeera presents of the...
The Ruricolist: Stock market →
Capitalism did not invent the bubble. Sri Lanka, I have just been reading, is covered in the ruins of a massive, ancient irrigation network that was abandoned just as it was finished. The most parsimonious explanation is that ancient Sri Lanka had a bubble in aqueducts. Perhaps the answer to why the Maya built so many splendid cities, and then abandoned them, is a...
Rainmaking Bacteria Ride Clouds to "Colonize"... →
Scientists had already suspected that cloud bacteria may be linked to plants and soils in a “feedback loop,” a system of exchange between ecosystems.
In fact, these bacteria may have evolved with plants over millennia, building a dependent relationship, Sands said.
The concept also ties into Sands’s ongoing study of the idea that drought cycles are connected to bacteria in...
Billionaires give big to new 'super PACS' - ... →
“We’re going to have $2 billion spent in the suspension of reality,” said Duncan.
Duncan is the chairman of Republican-supporting super-PAC American Crossroads, already gathering millions for the upcoming election. Here he laments the money expected of Democratic super-PACs. I think the charge is applicable to both sides.
Chaos feared as Syria crisis nears impasse - World... →
For now, Assad counts on the support of a small but growing Syrian middle class, a mixture of Sunnis, Alawites and other ethnic groups that live mostly in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo. This newly monied class, mostly traders and small manufacturers, has seen life gradually improve since Hafez Assad died in 2000, and his son began opening up the country’s economy.
“So far, they...
W. W. Norton: The Apparition →
wwnorton:
True to his word, our vet comes in late afternoon and kneels in a slant of sun. A pat, a needle stick stills the failing heart.
We lower the ancient form to the hemlock-shrouded grave and before the hole is brimmed set a layer of chicken wire to guard against predators
so that the earth…
Short personal note
After weeks of work— punctuated by a whirlwind trip to the middle east—my house is finally on the market as a rental. New linoleum, counter-tops, insulation, interior paint, shower base and waterproofing, packed-away stuff, un-mangled mini-blinds. The list goes on for nearly $13K in expenditures large and small. And the motivation for that investment is just to contain the damage (likely...
“Figuratively, however, Community is about something else entirely. The...”
– The Meta, Innovative Genius of ‘Community’ - Hampton Stevens - Entertainment - The Atlantic
Noted for the concision in making the point. It almost makes watching my favorite sitcom feel like homework.
officialbeastieboys:
REMIXXXXXXXX! As we are big...
Dan Harmon walks us through Community’s second... →
DH: It was conscious on the part of [former NBC programming head] Angela Bromstad, before she left NBC. Angela said, “Get more women on your staff. Make it half women.” I remember going, “Are you fucking kidding me?” to myself. “Okay, I got a sitcom, and this is as far as you go,” because I’ve just been told that half of my staff needs to be a quota hire. From the mouths of bureaucrats come the...
The Curve of Talent - Anything's Possible →
Nice perspective-aligning piece on talent and company size.
I don’t agree about large-company experience being a sign of mediocrity but I’ll own that it could be defensiveness because I work in a large company currently. On the flipside, my seven years in a string of startups were utter crap in terms of experience, due to myopic people masquerading as A-grade talent (in the vocab...
Hacker Typer →
Love this.
“A reporter asks if Weiner was drinking or using drugs—if he has a...”
– Dan Savage, Live Slogging Weiner’s Press Conference. (via marathonpacks)
The Gathering of American Gods →
I finally wrote up a recent vacation, this one to the House on the Rock in Wisconsin.
I’m building momentum to write up both my recent overseas adventures…they’re in very raw form. And this “short” one took three weeks to square away. But here it is, nonetheless.
roomthily: How I Failed, Failed, and Finally... →
roomthily:
But it turns out that the people trying to teach me were just doing a bad job. Those books that dragged me through a series of structured principles were just bad books. I should have ignored them. I should have just played.
[…]
But I think it helps to recognize that programming is actually a…
“After New York magazine editor Clay Felker took over the Village Voice in 1974,...”
– Fired (and resigned) journalists extract literary revenge on their former bosses. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
Trifling Twitter | Monday Note →
2105:
3 / Twitter’s pervasiveness has nothing in common with what we observe on Facebook or Google. As a business, Twitter’s trajectory looks more like Yahoo’s (unfortunately in a more precocious way) than a Google’s or Facebook’s. Zuckerberg’s social network enjoys unabated growth and much better monetization: it extracts about $3 in revenue per user (and makes a profit at it) versus $0.25 for...
ampersandean:
It’s a long way to heaven / It’s...
“I answered that there are many people who speak in the same way; that there are,...”
– Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1841)
Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man -... →
Really remarkable piece.
