March 2011
25 posts
“I can’t help thinking that a reason that nobody talks about intervening in...”
– Journalist Peter Godwin, on watching NATO and the U.S. intervene in Libya (via nprfreshair)
Fascinating theory. Do you know of the atrocities in Zimbabwe?
“They think we’re criminals, but we came here to do good and we’re all children...”
– Migrant farm workers: Fields of tears
Migrant farm workers: Fields of tears →
At a time of high unemployment, many Americans are convinced that these aliens take American jobs. As a test, this summer the United Farm Workers (UFW), the main agricultural union, launched a campaign called “Take Our Jobs”, inviting willing Americans to work in the fields. In the following three months 3m people visited takeourjobs.com, but 40% of the responses were hate mail, says Maria...
“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is...”
– Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O'Connor
During my two year stint in college I took a class taught by John Stonestreet called “Contemporary Apologetics.” Rather than being about how to defend Christianity in the modern world, he challenged those of us in the course to examine all the areas that Christians are doing a poor job of living out the Gospel. This meant that each week in the course we would read hundreds of pages on...
1 tag
The Stoner Arms Dealers →
he persuaded the State Department to allow him to substitute Korean-made knockoffs instead of the high-end Herstals — a swap that instantly doubled his earnings. Diveroli did the same with a large helmet order for the Iraqi army, pushing the Pentagon to accept poorer-quality Chinese-made helmets once he had won the contract. After all, it wasn’t like the military was buying weapons and helmets...
Excellence, Not Elite - an interview with Andy... →
I’d much rather have everyone, whatever their prospects for being elite or not, pursue excellence. Excellence is often accompanied by humility, whereas being elite often is not. People who have obtained mastery of certain fields, I’ve found, are surprisingly humble, because they’ve become aware of how difficult their work is.
This, please.
What's Your Favorite Film? →
It used to be that a good liberal-arts education gave a young person a solid foundation in fields like music and art. I took two four-credit semesters of classical-music appreciation as a freshman and have benefited ever since. I took literature courses, and although I took only one semester of art appreciation, I have filled in by visiting museums all over the world. Even so, I would be cautious...
Time to declare war on the shaky camera →
I’ve decried the shaky, shallow-focus, cut-cut-cut, all-exclamation-points style of Michael Bay (“Transformers”), but I’ll say this for him: He can frame a shot. He understands depth, balance and the concept of blocking physical action in a way that is dynamic and attractive to look at. You cannot say the same for “Battle: Los Angeles,” which looks as if the cinematographer strapped cameras to...
“If there’s one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be:...”
– The Age of the Essay
This essay - about writing essays - is wonderful. Some good history about why we are taught to write the way we are, and some great analysis as to why that method does not reflect the reality of a good essay.
Read it, think about it, then join other writers in figuring out...
A Web Designed for Reading
And yet, people do read online. They read more than they ever did. They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day—waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between...
“What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he...”
– Haley Barbour, Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Right to Judge - NYTimes.com
Great essay from Stanley Fish about the problem with “So’s your old man” arguments, or our modern insistence of equality in argumentation as opposed to a desire to seek truth.
“We used to be content to outspend Australia on aircraft. Now we literally spend...”
– The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More than Australia
The meat of this article is in the part about how Republicans would sooner cut education funding than military spending, and Democrats can’t do anything for fear of looking weak on defense. That’s a huge problem, and until politicians...
2 tags
David Simon on the Arrest of "Snoop" from the Wire
This young lady has, from her earliest moments, had one of the hardest lives imaginable. And whatever good fortune came from her role in The Wire seems, in retrospect, limited to that project. She worked hard as an actor and was entirely professional, but the entertainment industry as a whole does not offer a great many roles for those who can portray people from the other America. There are,...
Designer Qualities
OK: Could you please provide us with a list of top qualities you think a designer should possess? JT: Learn to ask good questions. Learn to listen well. Learn to look for real people who have ambition and positive energy. Learn how to coordinate mixed groups of people in co-design activities, or find someone else with that talent and make him or her your partner. In summary, get out of the...
Shutting Up
He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you...
“Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die,...”
– How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (via Instapaper)
“If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a...”
– Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books
I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: this idea of personhood is certainly...
“I think it’s pretty good, but not if you’re alone or scared or dead...”
– A 4 year old’s answer to the question “What do you think of the world?” as asked by Reddit. There is surprising wisdom in this answer.
“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Finished reading “Letters to a Young Poet” yesterday. Probably going to start it again today. Amazing. 