February 2012
4 posts
The Vocabulary of Cormac McCarthy
The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The...
The Antiquation of the Future
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/shitsiskosays.html
Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to deliberately take action to achieve in my world… To be alone as profoundly (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a decision to shut down all of...
January 2012
26 posts
The Story of a Suicide | Ian Parker for the New... →
drinkyourjuice:
A really thorough 14 page piece on the Tyler Clementi/Rutgers case that manages to make reading the texts of awful suburban New Jersey teenagers engaging.
Also, I think my favorite aside was: “That evening, Ravi played Ultimate Frisbee (a sport that, in one online discussion of the Clementi case, was predictably described as “gayer than having sex with a dude”).”
[h/t Tyler]
...
Gopnik on Mass Incarceration
I think this article is a must-read, both for the content and for style. I’ve read it twice, and I can’t point to a single paragraph that I’d excise.
That said, I love this bit comparing the Bill of Rights to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration...
Forbes on Zynga
If Zynga made Avatar, it would still be about actual Native Americans and set in the 1860s. They’d hire Ryan Gosling to replace Kevin Costner, call it “Cavorting with Bears” and refuse to acknowledge the original’s existence.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/25/everything-wrong-with-zynga-in-one-image/
“The album w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs was just named record of the year by...”
– Chuck Klosterman on tUnE-yArDs - Grantland
Best footnote I’ve read in a while.
(via younglionyounglover)
Why Romney's Tax Return Matters - The Atlantic
It’s not that Romney tax return proves he’s done something wrong. It’s that his tax returns prove that the tax code is wrong. Households worth $200 million earning $20 million in investment income a year shouldn’t be paying a lower tax rate than some middle class families, especially at a time when we’re thinking about cutting spending that disproportionately...
"We out in nature dawg, ain't no need to use...
PIPA Response from Senator Michael Bennet
Emailed to me today in response to the email I sent urging him to oppose SOPA/PIPA.
As a free place for expression and commerce, the Internet is a representation of what is best about American ingenuity. Unfortunately there is a disturbingly large number of criminals who take advantage of this forum by stealing and illegally selling intellectual property. Many of these individuals do not even...
Animals Being Dicks
http://tumblr.com/ZquJNxDv6kIm
Carles on the Fan Experience
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7475325/chill-bros-mavericks-bench-vip-fan-experience-competitive-fandom-social-media-age
Upcoming generations no longer value the social currency equated with ‘just being there,’ because we are allegedly already everywhere with the power of hashtags, 4G wireless networks, and enslaved content publishers…
Is it really worth it for...
WatchThe part starting at around the :90 mark is my favorite.
Denver Dive Bars
Favorite review of Berkeley Inn:
What’s bar drama without a fight? It wasn’t hard to hear the action, screaming insults and curse words flying across the pool table. You had to squint your eyes to see past the thick layers of smoke: this is a smoker’s oasis, what ordinance? Nobody threw a punch, to my disappointment, though three separate groups got close. The bartender...
“…they have always seemed to me like they were more about having something to...”
– The masterful Gabe Delahaye, on Cleanses
(via stryker)
This article is better than the blurb, but longer.
David Cho on "Watch the Throne"
You have two guys who overcame two very different, for lack of a better word, plights of modern urban culture (for Jay, a life of selling drugs; for Kanye, never completely fitting in on the streets or in education or the arts), and now are all about celebrating themselves for not having to curb what they want to do to what anyone expects them to do. If you accept this as the thesis for Watch...
Obama Makes It Official: Suspected Terrorists Can... →
younglionyounglover:
Hey, America. New Year, New Rules.
Pretty much, if you voted for a federal politician in office- president, representative, whatever- you should give yourself a punch in the mouth.
December 2011
13 posts
Epicurean Dealmaker as The Devil's Advocate
http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-nation-service.html
There is another, more prominent strain to the critique of Wall Street’s hiring among college students. That is, it is argued that the financial industry is so lucrative and glamorous that it has—at least for the past many years—hoovered up all the “best and brightest” among this nation’s young people, leaving too few for the...
Spam Email? or Avant-Garde Poetry?
From: viagra-soft.inc375@ftventures.com Subject: yora hillman suck a dick
[Link] life whose lay using bedlam nectar trade tamper they exhorted damage ability goodly glimpse vow king whatsoever among brissons marpesian stayed desirous inventions. lion mut reasonably maxent stately mark cried fly examinations clothed fierceness wont paltry full love truth emulgent whereof stomach name. battalia...
"Everything I know I learned from the Bible." -... →
jeffappel:
A nice op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about literature’s debt to the Biblical narrative.
The Legacy of Mike Utley
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7352748/football-injuries-thumbs-sign
In 1905, at least 18 players died during games. The legalization of the forward pass and other reforms helped curb football’s violence, so the modern NFL has never had a tragedy equivalent to Dale Earnhardt’s death — a moment that forces fans and participants to confront the horror their sport can create. NFL...
“Please don’t do this cheap, sad thing.”
– Amazon Launches Christmas Attack on Local Shops
(via stryker)
Clay Shirky on Newspapers
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis/
Like a Yeats of the newspaper world, Starkman yearns for the restoration of a culture considerably purer than the actual newspaper business has ever been. Reading Confidence Game, you’d never know that most papers are not like the NY Times, that most of what appears in their pages is syndicated, that sports is...
Learning About Work Ethic From My High School... →
There isn’t really a good blurb that I can quote, so let me just say that clicking through and reading this is worth it.
November 2011
16 posts
What Jail Is Like For Protestors
But there simply cannot be any rule, or any carceral logic, or any arguments whatsoever, for filthy toilets. And sitting there, with the stench from our filthy toilet filling the room, and with the filth in our filthy sink making me less eager than I ought to have been to drink from it, despite being thirsty, I became angry—really, honestly, for the first time. I thought for the first time, with...
Conor Friedersdorf on Berkeley Cops
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/what-george-orwell-can-teach-us-about-ows-and-police-brutality/248797/
The U.C. police officers are dressed in riot gear. They’re given guns, batons, body armor, face shields, and spray canisters of pepper spray. And they’re sent out in force. If they were in a video game they’d be ready to face off against some bad-ass foe...
Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1e1h0TrNN?print=true
We’re a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays...
Carles on Sports and Memes
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7247652/consuming-sports-our-crowded-meme-economy
The Super Bowl Shuffle was a pre-Internet viral video. Bill Buckner was a precursor to the FAIL meme. Thirty-minute blooper videos used to document the random stuff that happened in sports, like people’s pants falling down, streakers, or birds being killed by 100 mph fastballs. It’s weird how all of...