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New York Times n'est pas Charlie? In which Michael Kupperman (previously here) relates his own "freedom of speech" experience when he and David Rees (previously here) were hired to create editorial comics for the Week in Review section of The New York Times.
comment posted at 5:55 PM on Jan-12-15

Could I have played with these words if I had been a racist? No—I couldn’t be a racist. Even as a boy I had been shocked by what happened in Little Rock, the spectacle of pompadoured thugs and women in curlers yelling insults and curses at black kids trying to get to school. With my brother, I joined the March on Washington. We were there.

Yet there was that joke: in the New Yorker Tobias Wolff writes about how deep racism has seeped into his consciousness despite his best efforts.
comment posted at 8:40 AM on Jan-9-15

Republicans in state governments plan juggernaut of conservative legislation - "Enjoying a majority of unprecedented breadth, Republicans plan a new tide of conservative initiatives targeting the Common Core, abortion, income taxes, labor unions and the EPA." (via)
comment posted at 3:00 PM on Jan-6-15

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch writes about why the forties are such a hard age for so many people.

Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.”

(Previously on Metafilter: another thoughtful essay by Rauch.)
comment posted at 4:18 PM on Jan-5-15

Being a black man in Ukraine showed me everything that's wrong with race in the U.S.

My introduction to racism in Eastern Europe had come swiftly and severely. Over my next 18 months in Ukraine, race would remain a constant obstacle to normal life and interactions with Ukrainians. Certainly, black skin creates hurdles in the United States, as well. Here, racism systemically – but usually covertly – obstructs African-Americans from fully enjoying all the freedoms afforded to white people. But racism in Ukraine was much more blunt – always in my face, unabashed and in plain view. I never had to guess whether a person’s remarks carried racist undertones or if an officer’s stop was fueled by prejudice. Ukrainians always let me know where I stood with them, good or bad. And I appreciated it.

comment posted at 7:14 PM on Jan-2-15

The notion that thermal environments influence human metabolism dates back to studies conducted in the late 18th century by the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, but only in the past century has it really become relevant to daily life. Cronise believes that our thinking about the modern plagues of obesity and metabolic disease (like diabetes) has not addressed the fact that most people are rarely cold today. Many of us live almost constantly, year-round, in 70-something-degree environments. And when we are caught somewhere colder than that, most of us quickly put on a sweater or turn up the thermostat.
comment posted at 3:03 PM on Dec-30-14

"20 years of news and photos from Iran have been fairly uniform: a woman in a burqa, public executions, demonstrations with burning flags and rumors of nuclear weapons. However, the reality of everyday life in this ancient country is more complex and diverse." A Different View of Iran: photos from award winning photographer Hossein Fatemi.
comment posted at 11:34 AM on Dec-20-14

41 men targeted, but 1,147 people killed: New analysis of data conducted by the human rights group Reprieve raises questions about the accuracy of intelligence guiding 'precise' drone strikes.
comment posted at 11:45 AM on Dec-20-14

"With Mary Landrieu’s ignominious exit, the Democrats will have lost their last senator in the Deep South. And that’s a good thing. They should write it off—because they don’t need it." Michael Tomasky's 12.08.2014 column provoked a storm of controversy, outraging many, particularly conservative commentators. Meanwhile, white flight from southern Democrats doomed Landrieu in the Deep South, where the parties are nearly completely divided by race. 'Democrats have been worried about the African-American vote in Louisiana for months. But what really doomed Sen. Mary Landrieu's reelection bid was the near-monolithic white vote against her.' Tomasky is calling for the death of Dean's 50 state strategy.
comment posted at 11:13 AM on Dec-8-14

For the first time in its 39-year history, the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation of the University of Oregon is on strike, and here's why .
comment posted at 4:54 PM on Dec-5-14

Today, The New Republic's editor-in-chief Franklin Foer and literary editor (and thirty-year veteran of the magazine) Leon Wieseltier both resigned in a shake-up that also includes moving the magazine to New York from Washington and reducing its number of print issues from 20 to 10 per year. Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker reports that "the top editors are gone & mass resignations are imminent." The impetus for the resignations, according to Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, is apparently that Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who purchased the magazine in 2012 at age 28, and Guy Vidra, its new CEO, "are afflicted with the belief that they can copy the formula that transformed the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed into economic successes, which is probably wrong, and that this formula can be applied to The New Republic, which is certainly wrong."
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Dec-4-14

"It is no longer true that the divorce rate is rising, or that half of all marriages end in divorce. It has not been for some time. Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time. The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since."
comment posted at 2:03 PM on Dec-2-14

Chris Rock, in conversation with Frank Rich
comment posted at 9:31 AM on Dec-1-14
comment posted at 9:37 AM on Dec-1-14

Finland commemorates the 75 anniversary of the start of the Winter War today with services held across the country. Hostilities began on 30 November 1939 with an attack by the Soviet Union including bombing raids on the capital Helsinki. via
comment posted at 3:03 PM on Nov-30-14

What happens when a male TV presenter wears the same suit all year? Nothing. (SLGuardian)
comment posted at 7:20 PM on Nov-17-14

For the first time, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints(Mormons) has admitted that their founder had up to 40 plural wives, some as young as 14, others already married to other men. This is the latest essay in a series of essays covering some of the more controversial claims of the church. Others have included the ban on blacks until 1978, Joseph Smith's ability to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, and using seer stones to translate the Book of Mormon
comment posted at 4:45 PM on Nov-11-14

You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy
comment posted at 2:22 PM on Nov-10-14

The Death of the Southern White Democrat Hurts African-Americans the Most (previously) while the South’s Republicans Look a Lot Like Its 1970s Democrats
comment posted at 8:55 AM on Nov-10-14

"The researchers found that conservatives tend to react more strongly to disgusting images having increased activity in regions of their brain that are involved in processing disgust and regulating emotion. The liberals, on the other hand, had increased activity in different brain regions." Study
comment posted at 9:03 AM on Nov-5-14

Kurdistan
The Kurdish people have had a pretty brutal recent history.
Adam Curtis explains that the Kurds have a vision of creating a completely new kind of society that is based on the ideas of a forgotten American revolutionary thinker, Murray Bookchin.
comment posted at 6:56 PM on Oct-27-14

"A child’s body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror — that is me? Who’s me?

And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy."
Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means
comment posted at 9:07 AM on Oct-26-14

The Whiteness Project is a multiplatform investigation into how Americans who identify as “white” experience their ethnicity.
comment posted at 12:54 PM on Oct-15-14

"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West."

- The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons (SLNYT)
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Oct-15-14

12-year-old calls out Dick's Sporting Goods chain for being sexist. We might never have known about her exceptional letter, but one of her parents is a reporter.
comment posted at 7:58 AM on Oct-11-14

"I had an opportunity to attend a presentation by retired NSA technical director, William Binney, which provided context for some of the published documents released by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden. Because of the public value of Binney's expertise on the subject, I decided to publish his presentation and comments on my website." Via Bruce Schneier. (Previously: We Are Watching; Not My Department.)
comment posted at 9:28 AM on Oct-4-14

The United States Secret Service finds itself deep in turmoil, with Director Julia Pierson resigning this week after an increasingly alarming series of security failures and oversights in the agency's role protecting the President of the United States. Pierson had been widely criticized for scaling back security around the White House, during international summits, and a recent visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She startled supervisors with her view that the Secret Service needed "to be more like Disney World. We need to be more friendly, inviting." (multiple WaPo links)
comment posted at 2:57 PM on Oct-2-14

Rodney Durham stopped working in 1991, declared bankruptcy and lives on Social Security. Nonetheless, Wells Fargo lent him $15,197 to buy a used Mitsubishi sedan. “I am not sure how I got the loan,” Mr. Durham, age 60, said.

Mr. Durham’s application said that he made $35,000 as a technician at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., according to a copy of the loan document. But he says he told the dealer he hadn’t worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now, after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has repossessed his car.
_______________

The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender.

_______________

This is the face of the new subprime boom.
comment posted at 9:52 AM on Oct-1-14
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Oct-1-14

what it's like to fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class (includes lots of photos)
comment posted at 6:15 PM on Sep-30-14

As Western universities drag their feet, the future of China’s soft power push might be in the developing world. Confucius Institutes have been under close scrutiny recently, as many academics argue the Chinese government-funded institutes wind up restricting academic freedom at their host universities. In July, the American Association of University Professors published a report blasting the Confucius Institute model as a partnership “that sacrificed the integrity of the [host] university and its academic staff.” The AAUP recommended shutting down U.S. Confucius Institutes unless they could meet certain standards of academic freedom and transparency.
comment posted at 4:40 PM on Sep-30-14

Of course long before my boyfriend cheated on me or I made awful carrot/goldfish cum pasta sauce, cooking shame and sexual shame have gone together. For each, you put the very core of yourself out there in a very pointed attempt to give someone a one-of-a-kind sensual experience, and to differentiate yourself, to declare, "Please notice and appreciate my singular talent" and when at your urging they sample and reject, well, it is not good.

An Argument for Never Cooking Again
comment posted at 12:15 PM on Sep-30-14

"No matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what God you pray to, or who you love, there is something fundamental that we all share."

Obama delivers one of the most humanist, powerful, and intellectual speeches to the United Nations.
comment posted at 8:04 PM on Sep-24-14

How one developer is attracting the 'right kind of people' to new locales with, among others things, dance parties.
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Sep-24-14

From The Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75” and “What Happens When We All Live to 100?”
comment posted at 11:11 AM on Sep-18-14
comment posted at 12:42 PM on Sep-18-14
comment posted at 3:20 PM on Sep-18-14

...the reality of ISIS and what this group seeks is opaque to the public, and to policymakers not clued into the private salons where the details of secrets can be discussed. Even among those policymakers, the compartmentalized national security establishment means that no one really grasps the whole picture. The attempt to get the US into a war in Syria a year ago was similarly opaque. The public cannot make well-informed decisions about national security choices because information critical to such choices is withheld from them. It is withheld from them at the source, through the classification-censorship process, then by obfuscations in the salons and think tanks of DC and New York, and then finally through the bottleneck of the mass media itself.

The Solution to ISIS Is the First Amendment by Matt Stoler
comment posted at 9:51 AM on Sep-17-14

The class war in American politics is over. The rich won.
comment posted at 12:28 PM on Sep-13-14

With the war in Iraq winding down, colleges are are stocking up on surplus military equipment of all kinds at bargain prices from the Department of Defense. As two schools in Louisiana each receive a dozen M-16 weapons, the newspaper asks, "Is this a good idea?"
comment posted at 7:29 PM on Sep-11-14

Most people have probably never seen the magic of Steve Cohen, who for 14 years has held court in a private suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, to sold-out crowds of "celebrities, royalty, government officials, and other VIPs." But bits of his "Chamber Magic" show are available online to marvel at.
comment posted at 12:09 PM on Sep-10-14

A lot of the world’s most powerful people look like Lester Burnham: white, male, middle-aged, well off, and bored to death. There are Lester Burnhams in public office, in the Supreme Court, at billion dollar corporations, at record labels and movie studios. These people in power aren’t happy, and this movie gives them what must be a very comforting message: let go of your responsibility, but not your power. Don’t worry about what the world will look like after you die. You’ll be happy if you help yourself — not the people who need you.

Fifteen Years Later, 'American Beauty' is Just a Bad, Pretty Movie
comment posted at 9:12 AM on Sep-9-14

In a book to be released Tuesday, an 'armchair detective' claims to have solved Jack the Ripper's identity using DNA.
comment posted at 10:22 AM on Sep-7-14

Why Walking Helps Us Think: [The New Yorker] In a variety of ways, going for a stroll keeps our brains on their toes.
comment posted at 9:03 AM on Sep-6-14

I don't doubt characterising Orwell as a talented mediocrity will put noses out of joint. Not Orwell, surely! Orwell the tireless campaigner for social justice and economic equality; Orwell the prophetic voice, crying out in the wartime wilderness against the dangers of totalitarianism and the rise of the surveillance state; Orwell, who nobly took up arms in the cause of Spanish democracy, then, equally nobly, exposed the cause's subversion by Soviet realpolitik; Orwell, who lived in saintly penury and preached the solid virtues of homespun Englishness; Orwell, who died prematurely, his last gift to the people he so admired being a list of suspected Soviet agents he sent to MI5.

For the BBC's Point of View series, Will Self tackles the cult of Orwell.
comment posted at 7:28 AM on Aug-31-14

Wired 'Senior Maverick' Kevin Kelly suggests: Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It.
comment posted at 8:37 AM on Aug-27-14

Former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita's blocked appointment to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has ignited a debate over academic freedom.
comment posted at 6:39 PM on Aug-26-14
comment posted at 6:56 PM on Aug-26-14

In 1942, the US and Mexican governments created the Bracero Agreement, allowing Mexican agricultural workers to come into the United States for a limited time, to provide farm workers while the US was involved in World War II. The program was extended as a series of a series of laws and diplomatic agreements that finally ended in 1964. Probably the most famous popular memorial to the broad program was a poem by Woodie Guthrie, "the last great song he would write," after hearing about a plane crash in Los Gatos, which was reported as a flight full of nameless "deportees." A decade later, a young school teacher/folk singer named Martin (or Marty) Hoffman put the words to music, and Pete Seeger made the song popular, with numerous covers performed and recorded since. 65 years after the crash, those "deportees" were finally named, and that tombstone for "28 Mexican citizens" replaced with the names of those who died.
comment posted at 3:21 PM on Aug-24-14

If white characters were described like people of color in literature. (SLBuzzfeed)
comment posted at 8:50 AM on Aug-24-14