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Misadventures meant that I should try again. With each triumph over fear and physical adversity, I gained confidence. (slNYT)
comment posted at 2:43 PM on Feb-21-16

Combine the violent arrogance of barbarian royality with US politics and you have... Winter Is Trumping.
comment posted at 12:22 PM on Feb-21-16

China Has Overtaken the U.S. as the World’s Largest Economy
comment posted at 10:34 AM on Feb-21-16

One hundred years ago today began the terrible battle of Verdun. The German strategy called not so much for territorial conquest as for simply killing as many Frenchmen as possible, to "bleed France white". The name of the plan was Operation Gericht, as in judgement or, grimmer still, the place of execution. Up to nearly one million casualties resulted.

The battle was the most bloody and destructive of World War One up until that point. It would last for the rest of 1916, continuous fighting lasting for more than 300 days.
comment posted at 7:06 AM on Feb-21-16

Salon interviews music critic Jim Fusilli:

“We’re surrounded by people who, despite a narrow perspective, insist the music of their youth is superior to the sounds of any other period,” he writes. “Most people who prefer old music mean no harm and it’s often a pleasure to listen to them talk about their favorite artists of the distant past. But others are bullies who intend to harangue us into submission, as if their bluster can conceal their ignorance. They ignore what seems to me something that’s self-evident: rock and pop today is as good as it’s ever been.”

comment posted at 8:05 AM on Feb-21-16

"The Complete Review, “a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new,” sits on the margins of the literary world, where it has flourished for sixteen years. As of last Friday, according to an analog counter on the site’s decidedly unglamorous homepage, it had reviewed three thousand six hundred and eighty-seven books, from a hundred different countries, originally published in sixty-eight different languages—an average of two hundred and thirty books a year. Virtually all of this criticism, and everything else on the Complete Review, is the work of Michael A. Orthofer, a fifty-one-year-old lawyer who was born in Graz, Austria, and brought up in New York City. "
comment posted at 9:45 AM on Feb-19-16

Tonight, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will face off in a town hall from Nevada that will also will stream live at MSNBC.com and NBCNews.com and the Spanish-language version on Telemundo.com, ahead of this weekend's Nevada caucus. Meanwhile, three GOP hopefuls, Donald Trump, John Kasich and Jeb Bush will be in Columbia, South Carolina to answer questions from voters ahead of the Feb. 20 Republican primary in the key Southern state. The event starts at 7 p.m. and will be moderated by CNN's Anderson Cooper.
comment posted at 4:11 PM on Feb-18-16

E-Commerce: Convenience Built on a Mountain of Cardboard (sl; nyt) Online shopping is even worse for the environment than traditional retailing, with environmental costs including additional cardboard and other packaging plus emissions from "increasingly personalized" freight services. "Consumers expect that even their modest wants should be satisfied like urgent needs [....]From a sustainability perspective, we’re heading in the wrong direction."
comment posted at 11:54 AM on Feb-17-16

Investigations into the San Bernardino attack by the FBI have been potentially impeded by information locked in an iPhone 5c found on one of the perpetrators. A federal court judge has ordered Apple to assist the FBI in defeating any and all security measures built into the device. In a turn similar to Ladar Levison's letter to Lavabit users (previously), Apple has written a letter to end users about the civil rights at stake.
comment posted at 7:22 AM on Feb-17-16
comment posted at 10:00 AM on Feb-17-16

DON’T WORRY, I CHECKED MY PRIVILEGE By Elliot Kalan at McSweenys.
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Feb-16-16

Blogger suggests that a win For Hillary Clinton's methods on the way to the White House is a loss for participatory democracy. Alongside the quiet rollback of Obama's ban on contributions from federal lobbyists within the DNC comes what appears to be a novel tactic to maintain control of the nomination process by the Democratic establishment or HRC: the formation of fundraising agreements between HRC and state Democratic parties. The implications for participatory democracy do not seem good given that state parties with their success financially tied to HRC's success must oversee very narrow caucuses and primaries.
comment posted at 4:59 PM on Feb-16-16

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: An interactive look at the demographics of more than 400,000 professors at 1,500 colleges, showing where those of each rank, gender, race/ethnicity, and tenure status can be found.
comment posted at 10:06 AM on Feb-16-16

"Minutes after Kendrick Lamar scored his fifth Grammy of the night for Best Rap Album, he won the stage. Performing a medley that included "Alright" and "The Blacker the Berry," he approached the microphone chained to other black men in a makeshift prison block. What followed was a Biggie-invoking, glow-in-the-dark, Fela!-inspired event fit for Broadway."
comment posted at 8:55 AM on Feb-16-16

The History of the Cucumber. Or how to ferment a cucumber, badly.
comment posted at 12:52 PM on Feb-15-16

What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage "You are both screwed, everything will be exactly this unexciting until one of you dies, and it's the absolute greatest anyway."
comment posted at 8:42 AM on Feb-15-16

Reports indicate that he died of natural causes on a West Texas ranch.
comment posted at 6:12 PM on Feb-13-16

Strunk & White's Elements of Style, rewritten by a predictive text generator by Jamie Brew. Follow along at @elementstrunk.
comment posted at 6:47 AM on Feb-13-16
comment posted at 8:34 AM on Feb-13-16

Sweden's initial humanitarian response, and subsequent withdrawal in the face of the European refugee crisis. (Single link foreign policy article.)
comment posted at 8:37 AM on Feb-11-16
comment posted at 9:02 AM on Feb-11-16
comment posted at 11:10 AM on Feb-11-16

Everyone dies of something, but after slogging through the daily news, you'd think most people die from terrorism, shark attacks and gas explosions. But are these tragedies — not to mention deaths from lightning strikes, plane crashes and tsunamis — actually top killers in the United States?
comment posted at 1:11 PM on Feb-10-16

Loudly, and apparently without caring who heard her, a research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City charged that her boss—noted paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, the museum’s curator of human origins—had “sexually assaulted” her in his hotel room after a meeting the previous September in Florence, Italy. At the meeting, one person who heard the allegations was Bernard Wood, 70, a senior paleoanthropologist originally from the United Kingdom. In St. Louis, Wood canvassed younger researchers about their experiences with Richmond. He asked everyone the same question: “Does this alleged behavior come as any surprise to you?” He didn’t get the “yes” he was expecting.
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Feb-10-16

She’s the dead hooker in the trunk. A universal cautionary tale, the drug-using sex worker is too wretched to be relatable, too scorned for even countercultural cred. She is repulsive, unclean and immoral. She is pitiable at best, inhuman at worst—dismissed by police lingo about murders whose victims are drug-using street workers: “No Human Involved.” If she’s white, she’s lucky enough to be merely an abject victim. If not, she’s a deranged criminal. She’s a scarred, blotchy mugshot in your local paper’s coverage of prostitution stings—recycled without regard for privacy by anti-drug PSAs to let kids know that that’s what they’ll look like after years of doing dope. She’s the woman I’ve heard my escorting clients joke about not wanting to fuck with someone else’s dick—not realizing that they are talking to a sex worker who uses heroin, as I force myself to laugh along with them.
comment posted at 8:17 AM on Feb-10-16

"I thought I was pretty good at Snapchat. Then I watched my little sister ..." Buzzfeed's Ben Rosen learns to Snapchat like a boss from his 13-year old sister. "I would watch in awe as she flipped through her snaps, opening and responding to each one in less than a second with a quick selfie face. She answered all 40 of her friends’ snaps in under a minute. How was this even possible?"
comment posted at 3:40 PM on Feb-9-16
comment posted at 5:48 PM on Feb-9-16

New Hampshire votes today in the first primary of the 2016 US Presidential election.
comment posted at 1:47 PM on Feb-9-16

An open letter to Gloria Steinem on Intersectional feminism. By Sarah Grey at theEstablishment.co
comment posted at 6:56 AM on Feb-9-16

"Ed Koch once said that "to be a New Yorker you have to live here for six months, and if at the end of the six months you find you walk faster, talk faster, think faster, you're a New Yorker." On the search to find the realest answer (is it "until you cry on the subway"?), we decided to hit the pavement to ask locals to finish the sentence for us. "
comment posted at 12:50 PM on Feb-8-16

"It Started Here." With great excitement, living history attraction Colonial Williamsburg spent more than a million dollars to put out its first-ever TV ad during the Super Bowl. The splurge may have backfired, as its use of footage of the World Trade Center towers falling on 9/11 to a Tom Brokaw voice-over angered and upset many in its target markets and puzzled plenty of others. Takes from Daily News, Esquire, Gothamist, USA Today, NY Post, Slate, HuffPo.
comment posted at 1:29 PM on Feb-8-16

When a freak brain hemorrhage struck out of nowhere a couple of years ago, I became a little depressed, stuck in a rut, and strangely fearful of death. So when I heard about people (in my neighborhood, even) using hallucinogens to push beyond their preoccupations, to help them live without fear, I decided that was a trip I had to take.
comment posted at 9:41 AM on Feb-6-16

Every Coen brothers movie, ranked from worst to best.
comment posted at 5:23 AM on Feb-6-16

Missing Jon Stewart. Trevor Noah is smooth and charming, but he hasn’t found his edge.
comment posted at 9:49 AM on Feb-5-16

An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him "I was once a Coates fan", writes Cedric Johnson in Jacobin. Johnson criticizes Coates for his black nationalism at the expense of class based identification.
comment posted at 10:52 AM on Feb-3-16
comment posted at 11:49 AM on Feb-3-16

Trying to Separate Bill Cosby From Cliff Huxtable by Rachel L. Swarns [The New York Times]

"It was hard then to know where Dr. Huxtable ended and Mr. Cosby began. Mr. Cosby inhabited the role so completely that for a long time I thought character and creator were pretty much one and the same, at least until the allegations of rape began surfacing with increasing frequency. Then I went from feeling certain that Mr. Cosby was just like Dr. Huxtable, to wondering whether Mr. Cosby was like Dr. Huxtable, to desperately hoping that Mr. Cosby was the devoted family man I once thought he had been."

comment posted at 2:23 PM on Feb-2-16
comment posted at 3:03 PM on Feb-2-16

Amidst an increasingly unpredictable political season, tonight the Iowa caucuses will finally cast the first votes of the 2016 presidential campaign. It's an outsider vs. establishment war in both parties, as Republican leaders struggle to dislodge Donald Trump and Ted Cruz from the top while Hillary Clinton marshalls her endorsements and long résumé against the populist zeal of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. The best guesses of FiveThirtyEight, BetFair, and Ann Selzer's gold-standard Des Moines Register poll all favor Trump and Clinton, but the race remains very close, and turnout in the demanding and complicated caucus events will be key. Vox provides a helpful video explainer on the process [previously]. Pass the time with FiveThirtyEight's 40-minute elections podcast, and keep an eye on the New York Times live blog of the caucuses for real-time updates once voting starts at 8:00 PM Eastern -- and don't forget to leave your two cents in the MeFi election prediction contest!
comment posted at 2:39 PM on Feb-1-16

... conventional history teaches that the Americas were discovered by the Europeans either in 1492 by Columbus, or maybe a few hundred years earlier by the Vikings. There still seems to be an aversion among the establishment historians to even consider the idea that ancient Mediterranean peoples from the Middle East might have traveled to the Americas in the centuries before Christ. Only so-called diffusionists would have accepted a different view. And yet, there it is, this inscription in New Mexico, an undeniable witness from an ancient past telling its history ...

Behold, The Los Lunas Decalogue, a fascinating "old" site south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Feb-1-16

The last local honky tonk (slCreativeLoafingAtlanta)
comment posted at 10:58 AM on Feb-1-16

"Every day during Black History Month, we will publish at least one of these photographs online, illuminating stories that were never told in our pages and others that have been mostly forgotten.... other holes in coverage probably reflect the biases of some earlier editors at our news organization, long known as the newspaper of record. They and they alone determined who was newsworthy and who was not, at a time when black people were marginalized in society and in the media."
comment posted at 11:31 AM on Feb-1-16

By spreading malaria, dengue fever, West Nile, yellow fever and now the Zika virus, they are the most dangerous animal in the world. What would happen if we got rid of them? It sounds like a promising idea, but what would take their place and would the rainforests survive?
comment posted at 2:12 PM on Jan-29-16

On This Spot is a history blog that focusses on then and now photography, comparing historical and contemporary photographs of the same locations. Locations include cities and battlefields in the UK, Germany, France, Japan and Canada.
comment posted at 8:29 AM on Jan-29-16

Donald Trump begins and ends each of his presidential campaign rallies with “The Music of the Night” from The Phantom of the Opera and “Memory” from Cats.
comment posted at 12:27 PM on Jan-28-16

The 6-Pack Band, a collaboration between Bollywood composer Shamir Tandon and Indian tea brand Brooke Bond Red Label, consists of 6 women from the hijra community in India. They have two singles out: Hum Hain Happy, a remix of Pharrel Williams's Happy, and Sab Rab De Bande (with playback singer Sonu Nigam) based on a central Sikhism tenet of "we are all children of God".
comment posted at 7:19 AM on Jan-28-16

After sifting through more than 100,000 hours of broadcast television coverage and counting, the Internet Archive last week launched its new, free Political TV Ad Archive website —PoliticalAdArchive.org — with more than 30,000 ad airings archived. This new resource will bring journalists, researchers, and the public resources to help hold politicians accountable for the messages they deliver in TV ads.
comment posted at 9:33 AM on Jan-26-16

The Great Race—for what a Western ambassador in Tehran described as “the last gold mine on Earth”—has begun. With eighty million people, Iran is the largest economy to return to the global marketplace since the Soviet Union’s demise, a quarter century ago. It urgently needs to refurbish its crumbling infrastructure. Unlike Eastern Europe, however, Iran is flush with cash, after gaining access to a hundred billion dollars in oil revenues that had been locked in foreign banks during sanctions. [NewYorker]
comment posted at 7:48 AM on Jan-26-16

A grand jury in Houston investigating the recent videos that claimed that Planned Parenthood sold fetal organs (previously) has cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. Instead they indicted two videographers, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, on charges of Tampering with a Governmental Record. Mr. Daleiden has also been charged with violation of the Prohibition of the Purchase and Sale of Human Organs.
comment posted at 3:35 PM on Jan-25-16

"If you have a Democratic frontrunner who is opposed to capitalism and a Republican frontrunner who wants to deport 10 million immigrants, that'll make a difference."

Michael Bloomberg set to run for President.
comment posted at 1:26 PM on Jan-23-16