January 2012
5 posts
Lew to Replace Daley as White House Chief of Staff... →
Hugely smart move
Kanye West – DONDA Lyrics | Rap Genius →
i love this man
The Rites of a Prison Cemetery - Slide Show -... →
“It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going...”
– The Joy of Quiet - NYTimes.com
December 2011
1 post
Beijing air goes from 'hazardous' to off the... →
November 2011
3 posts
“WHITE DUDES CRY AND DO MIXTAPES, WHITE GIRLS WILL RAPE YOU. THEY WILL ALSO ASK...”
– How White People Date, Part 2 | The Impersonals
“A campus chorus sang “believe in freedom” around midday, and several...”
– More than 1,000 UC students strike on Sproul Plaza
Does our generation really not have anything of our own to shout?
All of this has left Oakland’s blacks and Latinos in a difficult position. They rightly criticize the police, but they also criticize the other invading army, the whites from other cities, and even other states, whom they blame for the vandalism that tends to break out whenever there is a heated protest in town: from the riots after the murder of Oscar Grant by a transit police officer in 2009, to the violence of the last two weeks downtown and, most recently, near the port.
Someday we may discern the deeper historical meaning of these latest events. For now, what’s striking are the racial optics. How did Asian-Americans respond to the sight of a diminutive Asian-American mayor being hooted off the stage by a largely white crowd at an Oct. 27 rally? And where was the sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed? Why did it take the injury of a white protester to attract attention?
October 2011
8 posts
“China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and...”
– Steve Jobs’s Genius - NYTimes.com
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs - NYTimes.com →
“Berkman, meanwhile, reflected on a prayer he had said earlier in the day. He...”
– For DeWitt and Selig, the Game of a Lifetime - NYTimes.com
“One of the things that makes me feel as though this bike ride is like my life is...”
– Bicycling Across the Country - Bruce Weber Reflects - NYTimes.com
Capitalism and its critics: Rage against the... →
The Depression - If Only Things Were That Good -... →
For example, we overestimate the importance and power of recent experiences. You might have had a pretty great day. But if it ends with a frustrating, annoying experience, the recency of that experience might lead you to think the entire day was sort of a wash. Another bias is that we overestimate the value of those experiences that are most perceptually salient. We act as though the loudest is the truest. So, even if you had a pretty great day, a loud argument with a loved one might cause you to undervalue an interesting day spent in the flow of good work.
Again, there’s a fix. Don’t do it alone. Any existential audit that has a chance of being appropriately accurate needs a partner. Self-knowledge happens in dialogue, not isolated introspection. Sometimes, because of language, that other person does not need to be there in the flesh. They can even be present as the author of a book, or an imagined reader for those who like to write. Sometimes it can even be in an interior dialogue with an imagined other. But sooner or later, you’ll need intimate dialogue with an actual other person if you want to know yourself.
So, listen to Steve, he really knew what he was talking about: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Just don’t do it all alone by looking in the mirror in the morning. Instead, find and engage others about your day. Ongoing dialogue about your sources of gratitude is where you’ll find the information you need.
“for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his...”
– Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
September 2011
15 posts
Dan Johnson saves the day for the Tampa Bay Rays —... →
On the Loss of My Mother and the Importance of... →
An Obsessive Oakland A's Fan's Take on "Moneyball"... →
Watch(via LiveLeak.com - Timelapse of the ISS flying over Earth)
““The market inefficiencies have corrected,” Lewis said....”
– Michael Lewis on A’s ‘Moneyball’ legacy | Page 2 of 2
“S. K.: Il s’agit avant tout d’un drame familial et amoureux,...”
– “Circumstance”, charge sensuelle contre la République des mollahs - FESTIVAL DE DEAUVILLE - FRANCE 24
‘Circumstance,’ a Film of Underground Life in Iran... →
Vladimir Putin, Action Man - Alan Taylor - In... →
if only this were actually a joke
Aguanomics: Ten years of digging →
Thank you David Zetland.
2011: Fleet Foxes - Interview / Helplessness Blues... →
Ever wonder where the Windows XP default wallpaper... →
Kanye West doesn’t care about Iraqi people - By... →
“That important step away from the idea of threatening jobs, threatening...”
– Greens Gain in Germany, and the World Takes Notice - NYTimes.com
And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.
More broadly, if you’re going to do environmental investments — things that are worth doing even in flush times — it’s hard to think of a better time to do them than when the resources needed to make those investments would otherwise have been idle.
August 2011
30 posts
The "O Children" sequence in "Deathly Hallows: Part 1," and indeed the entire haunted, lonely middle section of that vastly superior movie, have stayed with me powerfully. Hours after seeing this one, I don't look back on it with any emotion, or even much in the way of sense-memory. Radcliffe as Harry, and even more so Fiennes as the wounded Voldemort, who feels victory escaping his grasp as evil wizards always will, are both splendid. But the final confrontation between these intertwined geniuses, at least as we see it here, has no moral or intellectual heft; it's a lightning-bolt battle out of a 1980s "Doctor Strange" comic. (I'm not saying that's the worst thing in the world.) Seconds later, I was out on the sidewalk in front of the theater, feeling a little baffled and irritated: Wait, Dumbledore said what to Snape and what to Harry? Voldemort is incapable of killing Harry because ... why, exactly? Which Horcrux is the giant snake and which one is the Magic Cup of H.R. Pufnstuf? What the Sam Hill are the Deathly Hallows again, and what do they have to do with anything? (Answer: They don't.)
So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper. Nothing quite like this series has ever been tried before in cinema history, and as I wrote last year, following the central trio of Radcliffe, Grint and Watson through the aging process has itself forced the movies to confront Rowling's central themes, which I take to be "the painful transition from childhood to adulthood, the loss of parents and loved ones, the first intimations of personal mortality." For better or worse, Rowling's books and the hit-and-miss movies based on them have reshaped not just the marketplace for fiction and film but the contemporary cultural imagination, re-establishing fantasy as the central narrative mode (arguably for the first time since the Middle Ages). I suspect that Rowling will remain popular for a long time while the films fade a lot more rapidly into the background. But we have only begun to live in the world they made.
“It’s a pleasant irony that, just as the first installments of Rowling’s oeuvre...”
– ‘Harry Potter’ Ends With a Bang - Christopher Orr - Entertainment - The Atlantic
Despite Rick Perry, consensus on climate change... →
BBC News - Stephen Fry on Steve Jobs' legacy →
UCLA Emmett Center Assessment of California’s Cap... →
On Maud Newton On David Foster Wallace | Koreanish →
The recent DFW critique meshes well with the Lethem technology piece.
“Nas’ body language that day told the whole story of where we were about to...”
– Pitchfork: Interviews: ?uestlove: 15 Years
“i asked him how do other cribs rate….like i know white people dont like or...”
– @hypnagogics x @questlove
Fox News Admits the Facts Back Man-Made Global... →
This is awesome. Thank you Huntsman!
Huntsman Slams Perry on Climate and Evolution: We... →
Why hasn’t Obama had the guts to say things like this?
The Environmental Journalism Issue in the... →
“unbiased” journalism has its own bias
∫ California Raids Efficiency Funds | Carbon... →
Visa Exposed As Massive Credit Card Scam | The... →
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com →
like.
Watchazizisbored:
Watch the video for “Otis” by Kanye West and Jay-Z featuring a tiny Aziz cameo!
Directed by Spike Jonze.
Aziz cameo is HILARIOUS
Preserving human history in a National Park –... →
Countless examples of this.