June 27, 2014
There are two Baltimores
My black friends call it Murderland. My white friends call it Charm City, a town of trendy cafés. I just call it home.
"A debilitating brain drain has actually been under way in Congress"
The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid
A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress’s workforce. They cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.
The Preacher
Bobby Womack--one of the last surviving soul greats from the Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding generation--has died. Nicknamed "The Preacher" for his authoritative, church-trained voice and the way he introduced songs with long discourses on life, Womack never had the success of contemporaries like Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Otis Redding. For a good part of his career, he was better known as a songwriter and session musician. [more inside]
"That just blew my mind"
I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week. "The idea: I wanted to message friends using calligraphic texts for one week... Before I started, I established rules for myself: I could create only handwritten text messages for seven days, absolutely no using my phone’s keyboard. I had to write out my messages on paper, photograph them, then hit “send.” I didn’t reveal my plan to my friends unless asked, and I received a variety of responses." [more inside]
Routledge Gives Free Access to 6,000 eBooks
Unbundle it
Eddie and the Mythical 1958 Gibson Flying V Prototype
How Eddie Van Halen Got His Hands on an Ultra-Rare Flying V Prototype. In 1982, a guitar dealer hired by Eddie made a bogus deal for a legendary guitar and the original owner's son tells the tale.
"Be my pal, tell me, am I a good man?"
While the farewell scene between David Tennant's 10th Doctor and Billie Piper's Rose has just topped SFX magazine's poll of greatest moments in sci-fi, the BBC has announced that on August 23rd, Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor will appear in his first episode, entitled "Deep Breath" and directed by Ben Wheatley (previously). Here's a teaser. [more inside]
Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Meow. Here, Jonesy.
220 images from Alien including behind the scenes photos, concept art and early effects shots.
NASA Images Highlight U.S. Air Quality Improvement
It appears that we're doing a bit better... "After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide – a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems."
Chimp Fashion
For the first time, Primatologists have observed chimps in the wild spreading a cultural fad through their troop.
Peter and Patricia picked a peck of perfect partners
How to Pick a Life Partner. From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.
But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.
So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.
This is the second of two posts. The first one tells us why we suck at picking life partners. [more inside]
Exploring the Neverland Ranch
A Planet in 12 Photoshop Layers
Building a plausible world: a step-by-step tutorial, from plate tectonics to trade winds. [more inside]
Internet, Why So Blue?
100 Years on a Dirty Dog
See what's inside the tin
You got the right stuff, baby. You're the reason why I sing this song.
Now that's my kind of rich bastard!
The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats: "The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong." [more inside]
This is a presidential election, not a trust fall.
A Woman Should Run for President Against Hillary Clinton. Or Many Women. (Rebecca Traister for the New Republic)
Apocalypse uncanceled!
Film director Guillermo del Toro has confirmed that not only will there be a sequel to Pacific Rim on 7 April 2017, but also an animated series. No details, but in the meantime, enjoy these concept art clips and discussion about the Mako Mari test.
"This is what it looks like to be a professional athlete as a woman"
Very pregnant Alysia Montano runs at U.S. Championships Montano said she knew she wouldn’t advance out of the first round. Rather, she viewed her participation as a celebration. Video of the race and her finish.
Zoom and Enhance!
When Falcon 9 attempted its soft water landing it recorded video, sadly not in the best condition. But SpaceX released the video to the public in the hope of recovering more. The NASA Space Flight forums released a description of how they restored the video.
"a critical mass of people suddenly noticed just how rapey this show is"
To put it simply, this is why we can't have nice things. If the only thing that gets a serious segment of fandom up in arms about Game of Thrones's use of rape and violence against women is the fear of having tarnished the gleam of a favorite male woobie, then the showrunners have absolutely no reason to change their behavior. If they know that favorite characters can get away, literally, with murder so long as the person they murder is a woman who hurt them and slept with other men, they will simply keep showing us that. I'm not saying that I have the solution here, and god knows that simply by continuing to watch the show I'm part of the problem. But it is enormously frustrating to watch a critical conversation build around this show and its handling of violence against women, only to devour itself when it becomes clear that the real problem is a man.Abigail Nussbaum takes a long hard look at Game of Thrones, its fandom and the way both handle rape.
Home movies in SPAAAAAACE
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