MetaFilter comments by Postroad

7989 MetaFilter comments by Postroad (displaying 651 through 700)

The vote of 67 - 32 will move the measure to President Obama's desk. Previous reports suggest that he will sign it immediately.
comment posted at 2:53 PM on Jun-2-15

Why is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in NYC full of shuttered storefronts?
comment posted at 12:32 PM on May-29-15

Nebraska is the 19th U.S. state to repeal the death penalty.
comment posted at 3:43 PM on May-27-15

The Trials of Hannah Arendt by Corey Robin [The Nation]

There’s a history to the conflict over Eichmann in Jerusalem, and like all such histories, the changes in how we read and argue about the book tell us as much about ourselves, and our shifting preoccupations and politics, as they do about Eichmann or Arendt. What has remained constant, however, is the wrath and the rage that Eichmann has aroused. Other books are read, reviled, cast off, passed on. Eichmann is different. Its errors and flaws, real and imagined, have not consigned it to the dustbin of history; they are perennially retrieved and held up as evidence of the book’s viciousness and its author’s vice. An “evil book,” the Anti-Defamation League said upon its publication, and so it remains. Friends and enemies, defenders and detractors—all have compared Arendt and her book to a criminal in the dock, her critics to prosecutors set on conviction.

comment posted at 1:59 PM on May-21-15
comment posted at 5:07 PM on May-21-15

"Moral injury is not unique to veterans. But as psychologists and advocates come to understand it better, they are discovering that the problem is widespread in that community, and can be deeply damaging to veterans who suffer from it." (SL Vox with YouTube)
comment posted at 1:15 PM on May-8-15

I Don't Think David Brooks is Okay, You Guys Albert Burneko is worried about America's foremost thinkfluencer.
comment posted at 8:21 AM on May-8-15

"The administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, in rejecting Professor Steven Salaita’s appointment without demonstrating cause, and in doing so only after the appointment had been approved and courses had been assigned to him, acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the university’s own stated policies on the subject." The American Association of University Professors has issued its report on the Salaita case.
comment posted at 7:39 AM on May-6-15

Vermont Public Radio reports that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will announce his run for the Democratic nomination for US President. Other sources - among them, the Guardian and the Washington Post - have confirmed the scoop.
comment posted at 4:57 AM on Apr-29-15

The Governor of Maryland has declared a state of emergency due to the situation in Baltimore. For several days protesters have been highlighting the cause of Gray, an African-American who died after being taken into police custody for making eye contact with an officer, then attempting to run away. Gray's spine was nearly severed at the time of his death, possibly having to do with his seatbelt not being fastened in the police van.
comment posted at 8:00 PM on Apr-27-15

[F. Scott] Fitzgerald saw homosexuality as a weakness—less a sexual predilection than something one undergoes in times of emotional distress. [Ernest] Hemingway used fiction to broadcast his virility after a sexually confusing childhood. Both were more sexually fluid than their contemporary reputations suggest. Cody C. Delistraty in The Paris Review
comment posted at 10:58 AM on Apr-26-15

Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviews Don Lemon for GQ. The results are amazing.
comment posted at 1:22 PM on Apr-21-15
comment posted at 2:42 PM on Apr-21-15

The Ghost of Cornel West. President Obama betrayed him. He's stopped publishing new work. He's alienated his closest friends and allies. What happened to America's most exciting black scholar?
comment posted at 9:06 AM on Apr-20-15
comment posted at 1:00 PM on Apr-20-15

Fish oil: it's been touted as a solution to heart health, dementia, glaucoma, and a host of other ailments. Unfortunately, it turns out that most of the evidence for its benefits is equivocal at best. And it turns out that fish oil isn't particularly useful for our pets, either. Worse, it turns out that the foundational study that kicked off interest in fish oil as a supplement is not quite as promising for fish oils as it is usually construed and cited. Given that fish oil can induce strokes in high quantities (and may interfere with treatments like chemotherapy), is poorly regulated, and is expensive, should we be promoting fish oil supplements as strongly as we do?
comment posted at 12:31 PM on Apr-6-15

The Urban Death Project is a Seattle-based nonprofit that will help turn you into compost when you die. "We aren’t just creating a new system that turns bodies into soil – we are striving for an entirely new paradigm of death care."
comment posted at 1:04 PM on Apr-3-15

Last week, two critiques of Kevin Carey's new book, The End of College, coincidentally appeared on the same day in Inside Higher Ed: one by Joshua Kim and the other by Audrey Watters and Sara Goldrick-Rab.
comment posted at 9:33 AM on Mar-30-15

You know all those blackheads on your Biore nose strip? Turns out they mostly aren't blackheads; they're sebaceous filaments and they were supposed to be in your nose. They help channel the flow of oil in the pore, and cannot be permanently removed (the pore will refill within 30 days).
comment posted at 2:58 PM on Mar-17-15

The connection between education and occupation is now so firmly ingrained as to seem almost a fact of nature. To get a good job, you get a diploma: at once time a high school diploma stuffed, and then a B.A., but now you're better off with a J.D. or an M.B.A...Yet this familiar system, far from evolving “naturally” or “unconsciously,” is the product of distinct cultural changes in American history. The process that left it in our landscape is less like the slow raising of a mountain range or the growth of oxbows on the Mississippi, and more like the construction of a dam. Three changes, which took place in the past hundred years, produced the system that is now producing M.B.A.s. They were the conversion of jobs into “professions,” the scientific measurement of intelligence, and the use of government power to “channel” people toward certain occupations. James Fallows explains in a 1985 article in The Atlantic. (See also William James 80 years prior on The Ph.D. Octopus).
comment posted at 6:26 PM on Mar-15-15

The Long Twentieth Century by Drew Gilpin Faust [The New Yorker]

The American Civil War anticipated transformations often attributed to the years between 1914 and 1918.

This essay is adapted from the Rede Lecture, which was delivered, earlier this year, at Cambridge University.
comment posted at 7:22 PM on Mar-14-15

There Is No ‘Proper English’. From Oliver Kamm of The Times:

It’s a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can’t express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. A few weeks ago, pundits and columnists lauded a Wikipedia editor in San Jose, Calif., who had rooted out and changed no fewer than 47,000 instances where contributors to the online encyclopedia had written “comprised of” rather than “composed of.” Does anyone doubt that our mother tongue is in deep decline?

Well, for one, I do. It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books.

comment posted at 9:35 AM on Mar-14-15

"You can’t remain static, or you go backward" Residents of Slab CIty (previously) debate how to handle the potential sale of state land.
comment posted at 12:28 PM on Mar-12-15

The recent Republican letter to Iran has received an impressive, diplomatically amusing response on Twitter from Iran's Foreign Minister, in which he schools the Republican Party on the intricacies of international law and the US Constitution. The letter, penned by a freshman senator who recently advocated regime change and an end to talks with Iran, appears to have violated the Logan Act, but probably can't be prosecuted. President Obama's response was short and classic.
comment posted at 2:02 PM on Mar-10-15

The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google: [Guardian Books]

There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t electronically documented. These days, it is software that maps our new experiences, our values and beliefs. How should a writer respond? Tom McCarthy on fiction in the age of data saturation.

comment posted at 6:25 PM on Mar-7-15

How To Be Cool So Girls Notice You. A brief but informative guide for the gents, courtesy of WikiHow.
comment posted at 6:27 PM on Mar-7-15

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.
comment posted at 12:42 PM on Mar-6-15
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Mar-6-15
comment posted at 3:21 PM on Mar-6-15

Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi has written a letter to Indonesian President Joko Widodo, in hopes of swaying him to stop the impending execution of two Australian men in their prison system. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Iommi joins the many international appeals urging the Indonesian president to save the lives of the two convicts.
comment posted at 4:49 PM on Mar-4-15

The White Negro, Norman Mailer, 1957.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.

comment posted at 6:24 PM on Mar-3-15

Magnus Irvin and Michael Ritzema, run a company called Edible Anus. For fifteen years they’ve been producing chocolates made from a mould created by an actual human anus! And now they’ve taken things a step further, offering personal anus castings... made of a more permanent material, like glass or bronze. (SLYT/NSFW)
comment posted at 5:05 PM on Mar-3-15

He was the worst kind of populist, and believed in a shortsighted, cheap, selfish populism. The kind of populist who sneers at wussy bleeding-heart Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson and their moralizing against Indian removal when there’s cheap land to be had. The kind who rages at the expertise of elitist eggheads like Nicholas Biddle and Henry Clay putting regulations in the way of easy profits. The kind who’s absolutely OK with Southern postmasters ripping up abolitionist pamphlets in the mail.

If the Reagan people want to put Ronald Reagan on the $20 bill and boot Andrew Jackson off, I’m all for it.
comment posted at 9:31 AM on Mar-2-15

John Gray: The Truth About Evil:

Blair made this observation in November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, when he invited six experts to Downing Street to brief him on the likely consequences of the war. The experts warned that Iraq was a complicated place, riven by deep communal enmities, which Saddam had dominated for over 35 years. Destroying the regime would leave a vacuum; the country could be shaken by Sunni rebellion and might well descend into civil war. These dangers left the prime minster unmoved. What mattered was Saddam’s moral iniquity. The divided society over which he ruled was irrelevant. Get rid of the tyrant and his regime, and the forces of good would prevail. If Saddam was uniquely evil 12 years ago, we have it on the authority of our leaders that Isis is uniquely evil today. Until it swept into Iraq a few months ago, the jihadist group was just one of several that had benefited from the campaign being waged by western governments and their authoritarian allies in the Gulf in support of the Syrian opposition’s struggle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Since then Isis has been denounced continuously and with increasing intensity; but there has been no change in the ruthless ferocity of the group, which has always practised what a radical Islamist theorist writing under the name Abu Bakr Naji described in an internet handbook in 2006 as “the management of savagery”.

comment posted at 6:18 PM on Mar-1-15

Building the First Slavery Museum in America - David Amsden, The New York Times

"From their weathered cypress frames, a dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail — an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old 'Big House' will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell. A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a slave’s life."

comment posted at 5:41 PM on Feb-27-15

In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil. Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul.
comment posted at 1:18 PM on Feb-16-15

Here’s a personal confession.
comment posted at 3:20 PM on Feb-15-15

“[M]uch of the music he recorded this way, including many blues and work songs, are powerful expressions of overlooked cultures. But his quest for a ‘pure’ black music untouched by white influences was problematic... This much is undeniable: right at the time the Civil Rights movement was trying to bring whites and blacks together in a common cause, Lomax drew a hard line between white music and black music that — with help from the record companies — helped keep us apart.” How Alan Lomax Segregated Music.
comment posted at 6:29 PM on Feb-8-15

You can tell a lot about a Jewish male by the type of yarmulke that he wears. Like the jacket and shirt on his back, the absence or presence of peyes, the headgear announces to the world his family’s tradition and his Jewish denomination.
comment posted at 2:21 PM on Feb-6-15

Michael Pollan in the latest New Yorker about the mainstreaming of research on psychedelic treatment for depression, anxiety, and addiction. "The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”
comment posted at 8:08 AM on Feb-6-15

The Upper Middle Class is Ruining America, by Reihan Salam, for Slate.
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Feb-4-15

The ephemerality of professional blogs.
comment posted at 4:18 PM on Feb-2-15

Don't Mess With Texas' Chili. 'So when a cookbook author like Mark Bittman writes—in How to Cook Everything—that chili means “slow-cooked red beans seasoned with cumin and chiles,” he betrays his ignorance of the dish and its history. When he writes that a true chili dish, one made with meat and no beans, has “entered the realm of cassoulet,” he might confuse chili-heads who don’t know what cassoulet means—but they’ll always recognize when someone’s messin’ with Texas. It’s when Bittman advises amateur cooks to make chili with tofu or espresso that he is doing something worse than disrespecting the dish—he is suggesting that the names of foods can mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean.'
comment posted at 2:03 PM on Jan-30-15

This fundamental lesson is conveyed by a metric known as the number needed to treat, or N.N.T. Developed in the 1980s, the N.N.T. tells us how many people must be treated for one person to derive benefit. An N.N.T. of one would mean every person treated improves and every person not treated fails to, which is how we tend to think most therapies work.

So it turns out that e.g. you need 2000 People to take a daily aspirin for two years to prevent one heart attack.
comment posted at 10:58 AM on Jan-28-15

Deathhacks: Tech tips for people who are going to die (someday) Jessamyn West (Mefi's own) describes the challenges that came with being executrix of her father's estate, and his house.
comment posted at 12:05 PM on Jan-27-15

UK should consider ban on Mein Kampf, says Scottish Labour MP [The Guardian]

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, Scottish Labour MP Thomas Docherty has written to culture secretary urging a ‘sensitive debate’ on allowing its sale.

comment posted at 1:30 PM on Jan-26-15

On Running and Street Harassment

This past Saturday, eight different men verbally harassed me. Two stepped into my path and said they wouldn’t move unless I gave them a high five. The murmurs, the coos and looks, all serve as reminders that I am not a person to them.

By the seventh man, I was tired. He told me he could look at that ass all day. I told him to shut up. He said to me, “Don’t worry, baby, I still love you,” and my skin went clammy with defeat. And there was something about hearing the word “love” come out of his mouth that made me want to push him into traffic.

comment posted at 1:37 PM on Jan-26-15

The Arab Spring is failing not for lack of bandwidth, but for lack of human understanding that can only be forged when someone is late for breakfast, and you say, "Thank you for being late."

...a lot of people have asked me whether it’s real, and, if so, what on earth Tom Friedman was saying. The answer to the first question is that yes, it is absolutely real. Tom Friedman really did say this, and it really did elicit a hearty round of applause from the assembled plutocrats. The answer to the second question is that I don’t honestly know what Tom Friedman was talking about. But at least I can give you a bit of context. ...

comment posted at 7:54 PM on Jan-23-15

Oxfam's latest report ahead of the World Economics Forum in Davos says that "by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%."
comment posted at 2:49 PM on Jan-19-15

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