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New NSA Revelations: Inside Snowden's Germany File
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Jun-19-14

"For a long time, being both liberal and a gun owner didn’t seem like a big deal. 'Guns were certainly an issue,' Robinson says, 'but owning firearms wasn’t enough to get you tossed out of the movement.' After Sandy Hook, though, that changed 'with a speed that was truly breathtaking.'"
comment posted at 1:23 PM on Jun-17-14
comment posted at 1:38 PM on Jun-17-14

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu said that the laws governing K-12 teacher job security were unconstitutional. Treu declared the rules governing K-12 teacher tenure in California were unconstitutional because they affect predominately minority and poor students, allowing incompetent instructors to remain in the classroom. He said in the decision that the protections "impose a real and appreciable impact on students' fundamental right to equality of education." He went on to say that the evidence for this "shocks the conscience." The decision ends the process of laying off teachers based solely on when they were hired. It also strips them of extra job safeguards not enjoyed by other school or state employees. And, lastly, it eliminates the current tenure process, under which instructors are either fired or win strong job security about 18 months after they start teaching. The case was brought by a Silicon Valley group, Students Matter. The suit has highlighted competing views of teacher tenure. The decision has lead to significant and spirited debate over K-12 teacher job protections.
comment posted at 9:07 AM on Jun-12-14

"Not Alone" is the title of the first report of The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. This report comes after a number of incidents of sexual assault were under-investigated or ignored at numerous college campus' in the US.
comment posted at 10:34 AM on Jun-10-14

The second-largest religion in each state
Christianity is by far the largest religion in the United States; more than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians. A little more than half of us identify as Protestants, about 23 percent as Catholic and about 2 percent as Mormon. But what about the rest of us?
comment posted at 4:57 PM on Jun-5-14

A study (pdf) released by the nonprofit Stop Street Harassment shows that 65% of American women have experienced some form of street harassment – 41% of women were subject to physically aggressive harassment in public like being flashed or fondled. Men also report being harassed (and men who identified as LGBT were much more likely to be harassed than heterosexual men). No matter who was being harassed, men were most likely to be the harassers.
comment posted at 5:05 PM on Jun-4-14

New York Times editorialist Maureen Dowd traveled to Denver to try some THC-laced cookies. Her experience was unpleasant.
comment posted at 1:08 PM on Jun-4-14

Joanna Piacenza tackles difficulties she sees in the American conception of Buddhism. She was spurred out of writing silence several months ago by Time Magazine choosing for the second time in a decade to sell their magazine with a consumerist representation of Buddhism depicted on their cover with an pretty and ethereal looking white woman. Today, she published an article in First Things on why she believes Buddhism can't be just "an add-on: an energy boost in your spiritual smoothie," but is a religion and the American attitudes that she sees as enabling this misconception.
comment posted at 12:21 PM on Jun-4-14

This week sees the publication of the third volume of “My Struggle,” the thirty-six-hundred-page autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist. It’s hard to overstate the strangeness of the book’s success. The six volumes of “My Struggle” chronicle, in hypnotic detail, episodes from Knausgaard’s life. There is no plot to speak of, unless you consider real life a plot.
comment posted at 3:44 PM on Jun-3-14

Most research on casual sex is done with college students. As a consequence, we know very little about hookup experiences of non-college students: those who never went to college, those who just finished college, and those who can barely remember their college years. At The Casual Sex Project, everyone is welcome, regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation… The more stories – and the more diverse stories – the better!

The Casual Sex Project was set up by doctor/sex researcher Zhana Vrangalova to, well, share stories about casual sex in a non-prurient, non-judgmental matter. It's of course NSFW.
comment posted at 9:49 AM on Jun-3-14

These Spelling Bee Champions Can Teach Us an Important Lesson About Race in America "In the past few years, the 89-year-old competition has seen a striking pattern in which Indian-American contestants have lifted the winner's trophy eight consecutive times and in 13 of the past 17 outings. Their streak feeds into years of conversation around race, achievement and immigrant success — all tied to problematic notions of what it means to be "American."
comment posted at 7:10 PM on Jun-2-14

Some of us have more toys and bigger homes than others. We all have a lot in common, but there are certain things that make us unique, too. Let’s talk about those things and celebrate them, even. This is not standard prekindergarten curricular fare, but it’s part of what the 4- and 5-year-olds at the Manhattan Country School learn by visiting one another’s homes during the school day. These are no mere play dates though; it’s more like Ethnography 101. Do classmates take the bus to school or walk? What neighborhood do they live in? What do they have in their homes? - For Lessons About Class, a Field Trip Takes Students Home (SL NYTIMES)
comment posted at 3:03 PM on Jun-1-14

Maybe it's time to put down that camera/smart phone. A short NPR article (including a link to the audio, an interview with Maryanne Garry, a psychology professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand) discussing why it's important to be thoughtful about the amount of time you spend experiencing life through a viewfinder and how the digital age has impacted on our parental role as archivist of our own and our children's lives.
comment posted at 12:40 PM on May-31-14

The Los Angeles Clippers will be sold to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. The sale -- forced by the NBA's kicking out current owner (and racist slumlord) Donald Sterling -- will be formally conducted by the Sterling Family Trust, which technically owns the team. The Trust is currently controlled solely by Sterling's wife Shelly, who had her husband declared mentally incompetent after a month of him declaring that he would never sell and that Magic Johnson is a bad role model.
comment posted at 8:17 AM on May-30-14

At the end of 2013 Eben Moglen (Metafilter Previously) gave a lecture in four parts ``Snowden and the Future´´ presented here in Audio, Video and Text:
Part I: Westward the Course of Empire.
Part II: Oh, Freedom.
Part III: The Union, May it Be Preserved.
Part IV: Freedom's Future.
From Al-Jazeera - A Timeline of the leaks.
From The Tow Centre - Journalism after Snowden. (scroll down for further links ).
From Foreign Affairs - How to Spy after Snowden.
comment posted at 11:42 AM on May-28-14

To enforce his orders—and to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees—Meigs evicted officers from the mansion, installed a military chaplain and a loyal lieutenant to oversee cemetery operations, and proceeded with new burials, encircling Mrs. Lee's garden with the tombstones of prominent Union officers. The first of these was Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine Infantry. Shot in the head during the Battle of the Second Wilderness, Packard had miraculously survived his journey from the Virginia front to Washington's Columbian College Hospital, only to die there. On May 17, 1864, he was laid to rest where Mary Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine. By the end of 1864, some 40 officers' graves had joined his.

So what's more fitting after Memorial Weekend to read about than how the US government took over Robert E. Lee's very own mansion and turned it into the nation's foremost military cemetery to honour the Union's war death?
comment posted at 1:42 PM on May-27-14

Spray on some friendly bacteria and skip the soap? (NYT) Plenty of people have tried the 'no-poo' method to switch from shampoos, but what about skipping everything, and adding some bacteria instead? We bathed without soap for a long time and antibacterial soap is really bad for us. AOBiome wants you to think Bacteria is the New Black.
comment posted at 7:44 PM on May-22-14

Metafilter is laying off 3 of its staff, including long time moderator and frequent moral compass Jessamyn who is moving on to Internet Archive’s Open Library. November 2012, Metafilter experienced a sharp drop in traffic. Slate asks "Why has Google forsaken Metafilter?" But the problem is endemic of a larger issue. Google is breaking the internet.
comment posted at 2:25 PM on May-22-14
comment posted at 6:29 PM on May-22-14

"The exhibition starts with one shining, unfathomably terrible morning and winds up as all of our lives, as banal and constant as laundry, bottomless. . . . I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark."
comment posted at 6:51 PM on May-19-14

Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds (SLNYT) 'At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012...The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.' Report here.
comment posted at 11:23 AM on May-19-14

"Britain's richest people are wealthier than ever before, with a combined fortune of almost £520bn, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. The total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals, couples or families jumped 15% in a year, the survey said. Wealth expert Philip Beresford, who compiled the list, said he had never before seen such a "phenomenal" rise in personal fortune... Mr Beresford said: "The richest people in Britain have had an astonishing year. While some may criticise them, many of these people are at the heart of the economy and their success brings more jobs and more wealth for the country." - The total figure for the Rich List is equivalent to a third of the UK's gross domestic product."
comment posted at 10:07 AM on May-18-14

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding , and the manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh.
comment posted at 9:18 AM on May-17-14

In the survey to be released Tuesday, which covered 101 countries plus the Palestinian territories, 26% of respondents agreed with at least six of 11 negative statements—what its sponsor called stereotypes—about Jews. The questions included "Jews are more loyal to Israel than [their home] country," and "Jews have too much power in the business world."

[Anti-Defamation League] Poll Says Anti-Semitism Is Global Matter
comment posted at 9:55 AM on May-14-14

Stayin in Black. What the hell just happened here?
comment posted at 10:05 AM on May-13-14

On losing your mother.
comment posted at 9:09 AM on May-11-14

In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class . Here's What $800 in Rent Gets You in 11 Major Cities
comment posted at 7:03 AM on May-11-14

Fuck Yeah, Thoreau is a Tumblr dispensing Thoreau quotes and Thoreau-themed art - "Everything Henry David Thoreau". A good place to begin is Ralph Waldo Emerson's powerhouse biographical essay, the conclusion of which perhaps still rings true more than 150 years after Thoreau's death: "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost."
comment posted at 11:16 AM on May-9-14

Staten Island, long a blue-collar bastion of police officers and other New York City workers, is confronting a heroin epidemic. Thirty-six people died from heroin overdoses in 2012, the highest number in at least a decade, according to the most recent available city health department records; the death rate was higher than the city’s other four boroughs had seen in 10 years.

Heroin’s New Hometown
comment posted at 12:42 PM on May-8-14

The Supreme Court ruled (PDF) this morning that the town of Greece, New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month."
comment posted at 7:23 PM on May-5-14

Yesterday, twenty three Columbia University students filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that the school "allows accused perpetrators of sexual assault to remain on campus, has too-lenient sanctions for perpetrators, discourages victims from reporting assault and denies accommodations to students with mental health disabilities (which they say result from their attacks)." The complaint is the first of its kind, linking Title IX and Clery complaints with alleged violations of Title II, part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which provides that schools must provide accommodations based on disability status.
comment posted at 8:34 AM on Apr-25-14

Introducing Sociology: Tim Kreider's influential 1999 essay (previously) on how Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut uses sex and infidelity to cover up a story of greed and murder by the elite gets a brand new afterward by the author to introduce a new site for his non-fiction writing, TimKreider.com
comment posted at 12:08 PM on Apr-23-14

How 38 year old Meb Keflezighi became the first American man in more than 30 years to win the Boston Marathon.
comment posted at 1:54 PM on Apr-22-14

A collection of every piece of art mentioned in Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch", latest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Mild spoilers in comments. [via mefi projects]
comment posted at 2:41 PM on Apr-20-14

I was a veteran, a father and husband and a small-business owner. Then I was deported.
comment posted at 2:44 PM on Apr-18-14

Victorian Prudes and their Bizarre Beachside Bathing Machines. If you were a beachgoer in Georgian or Victorian times, more specifically, a female beachgoer, your day at the seaside would’ve likely had all the fun sucked out of it by a little invention known as the bathing machine.
comment posted at 5:17 PM on Apr-16-14

The approximate moment when grumpiness kicks in for men is around age 70. Researchers found that as men grow older — from, say, 50 on — they have fewer obstacles and annoyances to worry about in life and, furthermore, they are more equipped to deal with adversity. But around age 70, life — or at least the perception of happiness — begins to go downhill.
comment posted at 12:39 PM on Apr-14-14

The depth of the problem - this WaPo infographic hints at the immense challenges that Australian and Chinese search teams will face in recovering the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 black box from its suspected location at the bottom of the Indian Ocean
comment posted at 1:42 PM on Apr-8-14

Using food-stamps as a way for corporations to subsidize their payroll, keep people at minimum wage, and profit from tax-payer funded low-income support programs, has become an increasingly well documented phenomena. But how much would it cost companies like Walmart (the largest that takes in food-stamps from their workers) to just pay their employees a living wage, and what impact would that have on the prices? [via]
comment posted at 1:06 PM on Apr-7-14

"When you say ‘war photographer’ the first image that comes to mind is someone crazy for the bang bang. Not Anja. She was an artist. She used her sensitivity and sense of understanding to access the human side of war." In Memoriam: Anja Niedringhaus (1965—2014). Her photographs are powerful and beautiful.
comment posted at 12:19 PM on Apr-4-14

Long Island teenager Kwasi Enin made headlines this week for having the honor of being accepted at all eight Ivy League colleges, as well as Duke, Stony Brook University, SUNY Geneseo and Binghamton University. This is the essay he credits with a big part of his success.
comment posted at 2:37 PM on Apr-2-14

There was a time when professional bowlers reigned supreme. In the "golden era" of the 1960s and 70s, they made twice as much money as NFL stars, signed million dollar contracts, and were heralded as international celebrities. After each match, they’d be flanked by beautiful women who’d seen them bowl on television, or had read about them in Sports Illustrated.
comment posted at 11:22 AM on Mar-29-14

The American Scholar recently shared their pick of 10 11 best sentences, plucked from novels. And if you fancy such lists, The Atlantic collected some authors' favorite first lines books, and Sabotage Times has a list of 20 best opening lines from books, while the Shmoop blog has 25 best opening lines, plus (snarky) speculations on the thought processes behind those lines. And then American Book Review goes all out with a list of the 100 best opening lines (3rd party commentary) and 100 best last lines from novels.
comment posted at 9:50 AM on Mar-27-14

Bill De Blasio blamed the lack of racial diversity in New York City's top high schools, such as Stuyvesant, on the standardized admissions test, and campaigned on ending it. The New York Times has written pieces reminding of it. But the parent of a biracial son attending Stuyvesant has a different argument: that the problem is not with the test, but with the substandard education system that dominates much of New York City.

"By having these pathetic SHSAT results publicized year after year, it shines a light on just what an awful job inner city schools are doing educating those students who can’t afford to buy their way out of a broken system, either through private schools or private tutoring centers. If the specialized high schools’ racial balances were “fixed,” we might be tempted to consider the problems they expose 'fixed,' too."

comment posted at 10:17 AM on Mar-26-14

Why Alain de Botton is a moron. Alain Botton on why he is not a moron.
comment posted at 3:00 PM on Mar-25-14

"I say “you” deliberately here, because much of the writing about low-wage workers tends to obscure just that fact — that these stories could well be about you. Too much writing on the left and the right has tended to treat the people in some of the nation’s most common jobs as if they are some exotic Other rather than our neighbors, our family members and ourselves. " --Sarah Jaffe on the media's strange ways of talking about low-wage workers.
comment posted at 10:48 AM on Mar-20-14

New Snowden disclosures: "The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place."
comment posted at 12:37 PM on Mar-18-14

Top-secret documents reveal that an elite unit at the National Security Agency has developed technology allowing it to automatically install malware on millions of computers worldwide in what it calls 'industrial-scale exploitation'. TURBINE, developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit (mentioned previusly here), is a command-and-control suite automating tasks that previously had to be performed manually: Using 'internet chokepoints' and a capability called SECONDDATE, the NSA can perform man-in-the-middle attacks to quietly redirect web browsers to FOXACID malware servers en masse.
comment posted at 12:35 PM on Mar-12-14

United States Senator Dianne Feinstein Publicly Accuses C.I.A. of Spying on Congress. 'The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of improperly removing documents from computers that committee staff members had been using to complete a report on the agency’s detention program, saying the move was part of an effort to intimidate the committee.' 'Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the committee, suggested on the Senate floor that the agency had violated federal law and said the C.I.A. had undermined Congress’s constitutional right to oversee the actions of the executive branch.'
comment posted at 5:43 PM on Mar-11-14