May 2011
20 posts
“Worst of all, they [college graduates] are sent off into this world with the...”
– Great read from David Brooks. Check out the whole article.
Can’t help but see in these wise words the lyrics of the Fleet Foxes new song “Helplessness Blues”:
I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can...
Eccentricity Gives Way to Uniformity in Museums →
Most of all, however, they are the product of an art world in which people too often don’t want to offend the powers that be for fear that they might not be invited back to the party. The Barnes, the Gardner and the Getty, for all of their flaws, sprang from a time when even the very rich wanted to ruffle the feathers of the establishment now and again, and in doing so, to open up new...
“Americans feel entitled to happiness, and once they manage to find it, they feel...”
– ALL THINGS SHINING: The Terrence Malick BLOG: Exclusive Terrence Malick Interview - May 17, 1979
“The more seriously I took everything, and how serious life was in general, the...”
– Buster Keaton
(via austinkleon)
Deadly Medicine | Politics | Vanity Fair →
Conservatively, then, the annual American death toll from prescription drugs considered “safe” can be put at around 200,000. That is three times the number of people who die every year from diabetes, four times the number who die from kidney disease. Overall, deaths from F.D.A.-approved prescription drugs dwarf the number of people who die from street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. They...
Malick's Tree of Life →
This has sitting in my drafts for awhile - evidenced by the fact that now many critics have seen the film at its premiere in Cannes. But I love this description, and I can’t wait to see it the last week of June at the Belcourt!
Speculation about the new film is rife, fuelled by trailers and posters that play up its abstract gorgeousness and make the plot – spanning decades in the lives of a...
Another Kink in the Reducing Healthcare Costs... →
Forty or fifty years ago, hospitals would often have trouble negotiating with large companies who sold important medical supplies. In order to help keep costs down, they formed Group Purchasing Organizations (GPO) that functioned similar to Costco - the hospitals paid membership dues to the GPO, and the GPO had more negotiating clout with the medical suppliers.
Then, in 1986 Congress passed a...
jaredsinclair + com: Three shocking facts about... →
jaredsinclair:
There are three basic facts about healthcare in the US that we have all heard so many times that it’s become easy to let them lose their shock value. I’ll list them again here as a reminder to myself as much as for anyone else reading this: The US is the only major industrialized nation not to…
Death to high school English →
I’ve stared at the black markings on the page until my vision blurred, chronicling and triaging the maneuvers I will need to teach them in 14 short weeks: how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb, how to organize their paragraphs around a main idea, how to write a working thesis statement or any kind of thesis statement at all. They don’t know how to outline or how to...
The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone... →
“Remember that crazy guy in the commercials who ran around covered in dollar bills shouting, ‘The government is giving out free money!’ ” says Black. “As crazy as he was, this is making it real.”
Start off your morning with a bit of frustration at our government.
Recent Reading
In an effort to encourage myself to read more, I’m going to start logging the books I read here on my blog, and including a brief review or some thoughts I have regarding the book. Here’s the first batch, with the books that I’ve been reading in early 2011.
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
I love reading fiction where the setting is as much a character as the...
“I need a website that says we’re a perogie company that cares about middle class...”
– (via clientsfromhell)
Stanley Kubrick →
You’ve quoted Pudovkin to the effect that editing is the only original and unique art form in film.
I think so. Everything else comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new...
“No government is truly democratic unless voters treat each other as partners...”
– Ronald Dworkin
(via) 