The NYT: The rash of blowouts began in June, when a new drought-induced water policy went into effect, a circumstance leading outside engineers and analysts to question whether water restrictions are contributing to the problem. Under the policy, residents are permitted to water their lawns only on Monday and Thursday, causing a surge in water [...]
Passport: Over 100 people were killed after soldiers began firing on a pro-democracy rally in Guinea yesterday. The demonstrators were protesting over rumors that military leader Moussa Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup last December, plans to run in presidential elections.According to reports from Human Rights Watch, soldiers stripped and raped female protesters [...]
The Economist: Ms Wokhwale prospered because being able to make and receive phone calls is so important to people that even the very poor are prepared to pay for it. In places with bad roads, unreliable postal services, few trains and parlous landlines, mobile phones can substitute for travel, allow quicker and easier access to [...]
My one genuine LOL moment of the day: “Berlusconi referred several times to President Obama’s speech today. However, he avoided reference to Qaddafi’s diatribe, in which he was one of the few world leaders to receive praise.”
“Poverty makes some people insane,” writes Michael Gold, as quoted in an inspiring review of Depression Era art in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I wonder if some modern cultures are more adept at dealing with poverty than others. For example, Mexico. India. China. And if they are, what are the characteristics of [...]
Dear Mr. Joss Whedon and your compassionate legions of nerddom: please consider making your next viral hit a musical comedy about the eighth circle of Hell. And please title it “Main Street USA“: “Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, criticized for her lack of foreign policy experience, emerged in Asia on Wednesday to share [...]
The privileges of being a political refugee for me are many. Not least of which is my U.S. citizenship. But the one that I have in mind tonight is more immaterial and, perhaps, more important. When I was child and lived in New York City, my parents took me to see a documentary. It wasn’t [...]
Perhaps, one of the benefits of having a state-run media agency – which competes, however unfairly, with private media agencies – is the possibility of accountability, not to shareholders but voters. The BBC: Ex-director general Greg Dyke says the BBC is part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy… Dyke: “The evidence that [...]
Once it gets going, Adam Gopnik’s profile of Canadian Michael Ignatieff’s political philosophy is captivating. Anyone wondering, as I am, what America might look like when it becomes a majority minority country will enjoy reading the many passages on the individual versus the collective. (If you have my email and would like me to pull [...]
There are many caveats to the following graph, which is about as scientific a description of my person as my astrological sign. (Cancer.) First, I am a very bad Facebook user: I don’t seek out old friends and I don’t pay much attention to invitations. Second, race here is somewhat arbitrary: more than a few [...]
I was looking at the profile of a friend’s friend on Facebook the other day. All of this person’s friends were Latinos – or, at least, had Hispanic names. I wondered if this enclave had an impact on this person’s politics, brand affinities, job prospects, priorities, etc. Meanwhile, here’s Project Gaydar.
An interesting article about a lack of energy standards for consumer electronics, and its impact on our energy needs, neglects to ask the manufacturers of efficient appliances like refrigerators and washing machines how they have fared under regulations. Now that they’re 40-70% more efficient, are they also more profitable per unit? The article doesn’t say [...]
The NYT: “When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring in an attempt to combat swine flu, it was warned that Cairo would be overwhelmed with trash. Now, it is.”
The Economist: “According to Luca Solca of Bernstein Research, 60% of the luxury market is now based on demand from ‘aspirational’ customers rather than from the wealthy elite.”
simen johan: paintings and sculptures josh keyes: drawings and paintings cai guo-qiang: sculptures walton ford: paintings
A friend of mine tried to outsmart a fellow voter using Twitter. And I thought: that’s an interesting game. Twitter is like previous word games. To play a word game, you have to follow some rules. In the case of poetry it’s: rhyming, staying on beat, and painting a picture. One of the few rules [...]
The United States benefits from a market economy. Only, it’s not really a market economy, is it? Economist Nancy Folbre in the New York Times: [A] large share of our economic output is now produced by large companies whose sales exceed the gross domestic product of many countries of the world. The vertically integrated supply [...]
1) Scott Simpson has rewritten classic book titles with an ear for today’s marketing lingo. Example: Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class becomes Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us. 2) A YouTube user responds to a demonstration of an AI written to solve the [...]
Kathrine Gutierrez improves on what looks to be a dreadfully boring movie about Darwin by imagining it as a teen romance: it should’ve been about him being a young, carefree, drinking-pub-hobbit-pre-ring lad type and then getting roped into a dreary trip to escape his sorrow at losing his girl to a more serious type, and [...]
This woman with a sign that turns “cap and trade” into “cap and traitor,” does she know what cap and trade is? I’ve read several essays on cap and trade and I’m not really sure I understand how it would work. So I wonder if the average American – and, especially, this woman – knows how it [...]
Amanda Terkel: The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama’s address to students live yesterday because it reportedly didn’t want to interrupt its regularly scheduled lesson plans. However, the district has now decided to bus its students off-campus on [Monday] Sept. 21 to hear President Bush speak. Well, sort of. [...]
Affordable health care for all, especially mental health care, would erode the financial base of at least one right wing organization: James Dobson understands that behind the rights’ politics of resentment is a culture of personal crisis that he’s been catering to and cultivating since he became a public figure in the early 70s. And [...]
A reader of Talking Points Memo writes: Wilson’s outburst reflects something deeper. One recurrent theme of extremist assaults on the president has been the deep, visceral conviction that he’s hiding an extremist agenda. The more moderate his rhetoric, the more reasonable his tone, the more detailed and specific his claims, the deeper this conviction grows. [...]
From the wellspring of California conservatism: Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with [...]
A wonderfully detailed account of how the poster for an indie sci fi movie was designed. The movie’s web site also has some novel behind-the-scenes demonstrations.
Raffi Khatchadourian in the New Yorker: At the time of Steele’s deployment, the 101st Airborne’s base of operations in Iraq was in Tikrit, and its offices were divided into two wings: one was devoted to operational matters, such as raids to kill or capture insurgents; the other was focussed on civil and legal affairs. Someone [...]
The great American prime-time soap opera is overdue for a comeback. I’d tune in for a reboot of Dynasty or Dallas featuring characters loosely based on the loud and brash Angelo Mozilo as well as the prim yet passionate Sheila Bair. As they tussle behind closed doors, the fate of one family becomes the fate [...]
All of life a game, a hunt: Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to [...]
on the brouhaha over the President of the United States addressing America’s public school children. one of the few benefits of being a Cuban refugee is that for myself and, much more so, for my parents, totalitarianism isn’t a threat, it’s a reality. we’ve spent our lives coming to terms with dictatorship, doublespeak and the [...]
I’m fascinated by Italy because the gap between what it claims to be (liberal democracy, capitalist economy, Catholic society) and what it actually is (kleptocracy, crony capitalism, debauchery) is wide enough to fit… the Vatican. But when readers complained that maybe a Roman Catholic newspaper had a moral duty to denounce divorce, consorting with teenage [...]
On mike and maaike’s concept vehicle, the atnmbl. As energy becomes more expensive, roads more congested and computers both more powerful and cheaper, the automobile reverts back to its predecessor: the train wagon.
About a week ago, someone on MetaFilter posted a link to Wal-Mart People, the photo blog that mocks people who, wittingly or not, draw too much attention to themselves while shopping at Wal-Mart. These eccentrics or “walcreatures” have the nerve to not hide themselves despite lacking the bodies, hairstyles and clothing that the editors find [...]