August 2011
69 posts
White House Statement on the Debt Ceiling Deal →
isaacsmith:
At first glance, it seems less terrible than what was being reported earlier, in that important programs like Medicaid and Social Security are exempted, and defense is as open to cuts as domestic discretionary spending. It’s still terrible, though, and is still the wrong policy to be employed, given high unemployment and negligible growth. The deal — and particularly the way in which...
July 2011
45 posts
“You know what would make a good quirky lede,” my friend said, “is if...”
– The Cigarette Smoking Blog: The Dhofar Insurgency Produced At Least One Laugh
“A federal judge in Louisiana ruled that a law defending the funeral...”
– OrthoAnalytika: 20110729 Monasteries, Gardening, and Survival
My friend, a parish priest in New England, maintains a great weblog. I wish I had his bandwidth sometimes.
“Growing up in the city, I never went to a lot of malls, so I didn’t have...”
– Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker - Grantland
This is important. We sneer at shopping malls, but democratizing the sensation of moving through a groomed, constructed, expensive-feeling environment was a landmark in social psychology.
Lobsters
Lobsters
by Howard Nemerov
from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press).
Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank
Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water
Running down a glass washboard at one end
And siphoned off at the other, and so
Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster
Is made available to the customer
Who may choose whichever one he wants
to carry home...
“Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call “the...”
– “Google: The Beginning” par Douglas Edwards qui raconte son entretien d’embauche avec Sergey Brin chez Google en 1999 sur WSJ.com (July 16th, 2011)
On the other hand, Sergey Brin ended up having to listen to someone talk about the general theory of marketing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if...
“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a...”
– The Good Short Life With A.L.S. - NYTimes.com
If by “we” you mean the secular, urbane, cosmopolitan readership of the New York Times, then okay. But the rest of us have been known to pause and think about death once in a while, often on Sunday mornings.
“There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person — and not...”
– Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? — Paul Ford
“David and Victoria Beckham may have been overjoyed to welcome their new...”
– Beckhams a ‘bad example’ for families | Life and style | The Observer
The sooner the neurotic British left frets itself into extinction and is replaced by tiny David Beckhams and Boris Johnsons, the better.
“What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody’s...”
– Unemployment and jobs: Work for post-materialists | The Economist
“I’m an actual artist (as in paid for fine arts, working on an MFA, etc.) and I...”
– Ben Dean (via christmasgorilla)
See also the crushing Dabblers and Blowhards, in which Maciej Cegłowski does a number on Paul Graham’s “hackers are just like painters” notion.
“And since 1989? Who during the Happiness Explosion of the 1990s committed career...”
– The Black Iron Prison | HiLobrow
The underwhelming answer to this grandiose question turns out to be “independent magazines.”
Joshua Glenn, author of this engaging thumbsucker on “invisible prison” theory and the psychic domination of modern culture, is invited to attend...
WatchA friend gave our kids these toy walkie talkies for their upcoming birthday. Unfortunately, the strongest signal — far louder than the radios to one another — is a nearby resident discussing women.
“The partnership’s first task is to provide feedback on a performance measurement...”
– Charlottesville Tomorrow News Center: Community groups briefed on livability grant
This boring little bit of news from a local blog has sent me into a fuming, dizzying spiral of rage. If my city and county want to coordinate their planning efforts, and if doing so means hiring underemployed...
Being good Montessori parents, we got the triplets little brooms, that they might sweep the porch together, perhaps singing as they do so.
Here’s what happened instead:
(My first-ever animated gif.)
“It’s nothing new that geology is difficult,” Flyvbjerg says. “We know that...”
– Too Many Public Works Built on Rosy Scenarios: Virginia Postrel - Bloomberg
You can replace “geology” with so very many things.
Shock: The Tea Party, Not The Establishment GOP,...
James Poulos:
Even more important than lowering the tax burden is redirecting revenues into close enough proximity to citizens that taxes make a manifest, personal difference in the lives of people we encounter in real life. Today tax revenues disappear into the maw of Leviathan, and reappear in federal reports on aggregate populations of abstract beings whose “progress” can only be measured...
“For this, the city has enlisted six deep-sea divers who are living for more than...”
– An Effort by Deep-Sea Divers to Repair a New York Water Tunnel - NYTimes.com
Now I’m curious about what the 1940s construction looked like.
“Brown: In the new World of Beverly Cleary collection, the illustrations have...”
– Beverly Cleary at 95: A Talk With the Author Who Created Ramona Quimby - Rachael Brown - Entertainment - The Atlantic
This is an atrocity. See examples of the original work here.
“The concept of a ‘chemical imbalance’ in the human brain is one of...”
– Neuroskeptic: The Brain Is Not Made Of Soup
“You should turn it on and it should say, ‘Fourteen of your friends liked...”
– You should turn it on and it should say, ‘Fourteen of your friends liked “Entourage” this week. Click to de-friend them.’
Seriously.
“It’s not that I hate or disavow my own country. I’m kind of a...”
– The Canadian Wire: Watch Intelligence soon, OK? - By Matt Feeney - Slate Magazine
“Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American...”
– The American Conservative » The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama