For the minority of my friends who will read this, are familiar with “technologies of the self” and fans of The Naked Civil Servant: an excellent essay on Quentin Crisp by Mark Simpson, via MetaFilter.
Stephen Walt lays bare the failures of the Obama administration’s policy towards Palestine and Israel and makes some unsettling predictions about its implications for the region and the U.S.
Evert Cilliers on Cheney and other cowards: There’s a stunning contrast between Cheney and Bush, who said about Obama:”I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.” And: “I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is [...]
Slime Mold Beats Humans at Perfecting Traffic Networks
Matthew Yglesias: The Republican strategy of holding out for total surrender is working just fine. They had an interesting theory that if you refuse to cooperate with efforts to make the country better, things won’t get better and the out-of-power party will benefit. The theory appears to be true.
In a review of John Cassidy’s book about the bad thinking that led to the global financial crisis, Satyajit Das offers an interesting take on the role that U.S. consumers played in this horrendous man-made disaster. It’s not, as many in finance and corporate circles hold, that consumers were greedy, irresponsible and stupid (though many [...]
Masse Critique by Kilian Rüthemann & Niklaus Wenger Out of the White by Michel de Broin
A rare mainstream peek at tensions within the U.S. Hispanic community, from the New Yorker: During the Administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Latino groups had repeatedly failed to coalesce around a candidate [for the Supreme Court.] This time, they were determined to wield their influence as a block…The Mexican-Americans did not have [...]
A great quote from Charles Taylor in an so-so piece: The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanises our efforts . . . and yet the sense that there [...]
Robert Reich on bumper stickers and Obama-Biden in 2012: The most painful political truth for Democrats is the nation won’t possibly be out of this jobs hole by the presidential election of 2012, even if the recovery is vigorous. Do the math. In order to get out of the hole, we’d need an average monthly [...]
Teach for America and its lessons for public school reform: Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.
Another casualty of the broken budgeting process in California: the quality of textbooks in other states. Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing [...]
Horrible.
Dan Moren on the text interface for the anticipated Apple tablet: Steve Jobs’s antipathy for buttons is well-documented. Why does he wear turtlenecks and sneakers? No buttons. via Daring Fireball.
The NYT reports on political turmoil in Malaysia where religious identity is being exploited for partisan gain. I found this detail interesting: at least 180,000 Facebook users have joined a group protesting the use of the word Allah in a non-Muslim context in Malaysia. One of the ways Facebook has managed its growth is by [...]
The pseudonymous mad hedge fund trader on the new world order: Cyber warfare is a huge new battlefront. Some 100 countries now have this capability, and they have stolen over $50 billion worth of intellectual property from the US in the past year. As much as I tried to pin [CIA Director Leon] Panetta down [...]
Margaret Atwood on why we should not assume any bird species will survive without our help: One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving goes to human causes. Of the remaining 3%, half goes to pets. That leaves 1½% devoted to the rest of nature – including the crisis-ridden oceans, the eroding, [...]
Watching The Girlfriend Experience on Netflix Instant Play: it’s like a movie, but not. It’s also like a reality TV show, but not quite that either. What is clear is that the dialogue is timely and the characters are, I guess, real-like.
Context transforms content. It’s not that people like reading at a computer, though many have more opportunities to do so in the modern workplace. It’s that writing and reading under new conditions transforms that writing. In the case of the web, which is driven as much by pleasure as by technology (as is everything), the [...]
America would be a stronger, more democratic and far wealthier nation if our journalists asked questions as directly as the team of Frank Dohmen and Klaus-Peter Kerbusk do in this interview for Spiegel: SPIEGEL: Is the crisis over for you? Kleisterlee: No, it isn’t. But we are getting it under better and better control, as [...]
A different take on last week’s terrorist attack in Afghanistan that killed a team of U.S. intelligence officers and an Al Qaeda double agent. The argument: it proves the terrorist group is not very well organized as they could have extracted more use from a live double agent. Silver lining to a very dark and [...]
Lillia Shevtsova skewers European politicians (and, well, the U.S.) for giving Russia a pass on human rights violations.
The NYT: “The Story lost its magic amid the realization that speculators had simply been selling to other speculators, making the real estate market look like a Ponzi scheme.”
Random Specific is a Meena Kadri’s delightful blog on visual culture and design, now focused on Mumbai, India. I especially liked the post on Dabbawallas or lunch delivery services which reminded me of packets in TCP/IP. via The Browser.
The NYT on last week’s suicide bombing by a double agent: The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper [...]
I’ve read and heard bits and pieces of arguments that claim Avatar is an old, racist narrative: the white man who comes to rescue the dark natives. Yes and no. Yes, that is what appears to be happening for much of the movie. But, no, that’s not the end of the story. The only way [...]