MetaFilter posts by digaman.
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Happy 10th birthday to Boing Boing!
posted on Jan-21-10 at 7:51 AM
Cancer is hilarious.
posted on Aug-13-09 at 9:49 AM
Why bureaucracy, like gas, fills up all available space. From the archive of The Economist, 1955 [via ArchiveDigger.]
posted on Jul-31-09 at 9:56 PM
On August 12, President Obama will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the nation's highest civilian honor -- to the late gay-rights pioneer Harvey Milk. Lesbian tennis star Billy Jean King and Teddy Kennedy will also be honored that day. Previous recipients include Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Colin Powell (twice), Muhammad Ali, Mother Theresa, Elie Wiesel, Vint Cerf, George Tenet (Bush fail), Irving Kristol (WTF?) Dick Cheney, Walter Cronkite, Julia Child, and Lucille Ball. Now about that DOMA thing...
posted on Jul-30-09 at 9:18 AM
"Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter -- at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo -- was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes... 'I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,' Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. 'She has really changed my life.' Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo." The New York Times' Lisa Katayama on "2-D lovers" in Japan, the latest outgrowth of otaku subculture.
posted on Jul-23-09 at 10:53 AM
Sassy lesbian couple in Florida celebrates 70 years together after having to keep their relationship secret for decades. You go, girls!
posted on Jul-18-09 at 12:29 PM
Rest in peace, Simon Vinkenoog [Dutch blog w/English option], poet, friend of artists like Karel Appel, translator of Beat Generation figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, psychedelic enthusiast and "weed ambassador" of Amsterdam, and author of such guides to hip living as How to Enjoy Reality. One of the European jazz-loving proto-hippies who made the '60s swing and mentored several generations of culture hackers, though he was never widely known in the US.
posted on Jul-14-09 at 1:07 PM
"Bartender, Make It a Stiletto." Meet Georgio, the human carpet.
posted on Jun-13-09 at 11:30 PM
Teh gay can be cured. So declared the most influential sexologists of the late 20th century, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, in 1979, providing much-publicized scientific backing for the "conversion" theory, and dozens of right-wing efforts to prove that homosexuality is a psychological aberration that can be fixed. Or were those case studies fabricated? In his new biography of the couple who helped spark the sexual revolution, Thomas Maier uncovers the truth and the cover-up.
posted on May-6-09 at 8:43 AM
Oh noes, those gay newlyweds are causing Biblical rainstorms!! An ominous new TV ad by the National Organization for Marriage -- who helped pass Prop. 8 in California -- features a "rainbow coalition" of folks to warn America that marriage equality advocates want to "take away" your "freedom" by pushing the issue "far beyond same-sex couples." Unfortunately for NOM, the profound seriousness of this threat has been undermined by a leak of audition reels for the ad.
posted on Apr-8-09 at 12:46 PM
Captain's Log, supplemental.
posted on Mar-19-09 at 8:05 AM
The 56-Euros-and-a-balloon teenage Catalonian space program.
posted on Mar-17-09 at 6:46 PM
Rethinking Earthrise. On the 40th anniversary of the NASA's Apollo 8 mission [caution: weird JFK animation], which answered Stewart Brand's epochal, LSD-inspired question "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" with an unforgettable image of a seemingly fragile and isolated blue planet, Nature editor Oliver Morton -- author of a new book on photosynthesis called Eating the Sun -- disputes the notion that the Earth is fragile and isolated. "The fragility is an illusion," he writes. "The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance -- but it does recast it."
posted on Dec-24-08 at 9:01 AM
Gay marriage equals incest and pedophilia. Abortion equals the Holocaust. Or so thinks "America's Pastor Rick "Saddleback" Warren, bestselling author of The Purpose-Driven Life, vocal supporter of Proposition 8, and the spiritual leader chosen by President-elect Obama to give the invocation at his inauguration. But hey -- don't call him a homophobe: He even eats dinner with gays.
posted on Dec-17-08 at 6:11 PM
With that meeting, Mr. Allo took his first step into an intricate trap. The deeply strange tale of one very determined woman's quest to overturn her son's conviction for murder.
posted on Nov-29-08 at 11:38 AM
The perfect Sunday nosh: A short history of the bagel. In an age when allegedly edible breadstuffs that my grandmother would have barely recognized have become ubiquitous, did you know that even the Pharaohs had a yen for the iconic Jewish comfort food that is as much a symbol of New York City as baguettes are to Paris? Bagels turn out to be surprisingly easy to make at home, too, though they won't be the same without a schmear and some nice Nova. (Previously on Ask.) Extra credit: the history of everything.
posted on Nov-23-08 at 9:52 AM
The "blind watchmaker" may not be as blind as we thought. A team of scientists at Princeton University discovers that organisms are not only evolving, they're evolving to evolve better, using a set of proteins to "steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness" by making tiny course corrections.
posted on Nov-11-08 at 6:50 PM
It's morning in America again -- but for the thousands of committed gay couples who got married in California [warning: Dan Fogelberg music, sweet visuals], the long nightmare of intolerance and hate is not yet over with the probable victory of Proposition 8. Supported by the anti-equality stances of Sarah Palin and "divinely" inspired others, and paid for by members of the Mormon Church and the mother of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, many of the ads for Prop. 8 featured the faces of Obama and Joe Biden, who declared their opposition to the initiative but refused to support equal marriage rights for all, preferring to talk about "civil unions." Even excellent Democratic-leaning politics sites like Talking Points Memo were saturated with the deceptive ads, which overwhelmed those comparing the proposition to other forms of discrimination in California's history.
posted on Nov-5-08 at 8:11 AM
This f*cking election. A babble tower.
posted on Nov-2-08 at 8:41 PM
One minute and four seconds in London, 1904. Birkbeck College professor Ian Christie rediscovered this footage in an archive in Canberra, shot for a travelogue by film pioneer Charles Urban.
posted on Oct-24-08 at 4:01 PM
Worried about social-network data mining? Facebook hires Ted Ullyot, former right-hand man to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as its general counsel. Tapping Ullyot, who worked on the infamous torture memo and other illustrious projects, is a sign that the burgeoning Scrabble platform "is a little more grown-up," says Facebook public-policy VP Elliot Schrage.
posted on Sep-30-08 at 11:58 AM
The Surge is working [tm] -- but for gay Iraqis who face a murderous new spate of violence by theocrats and militiamen, notsomuch. "More than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003... [but] many officials say they feel that in a country at war, there are more pressing concerns than gay rights."
posted on Aug-27-08 at 9:15 AM
Cross another item off of President Bush's to-do list before he leaves the White House: hobbling the Endangered Species Act and allowing federal agencies to gauge the environmental impact of their projects for themselves. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the changes were needed to ensure that the ESA would not be used as a "back door" to regulate greenhouse gases.
posted on Aug-11-08 at 8:43 PM
Are you a young middle-class creative type (probably white) who has chosen to live in an urban neighborhood that your parents would have shunned? Have the families that formerly lived in your neighborhood (probably not white) been pushed out by soaring rents and real-estate prices to the city fringes or suburbs? The New Republic on demographic inversion.
posted on Aug-2-08 at 8:43 PM
NewsFilter: Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID - Conn.) strikes a decisive blow against another Islamic terror front group: YouTube.
posted on May-19-08 at 6:44 PM
Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted on May-7-08 at 9:15 AM
Keyboardist Danny Federici, founding member of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band, has died.
posted on Apr-17-08 at 10:26 PM
One nation under God. The "bold conservative" GOP Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia is intent upon removing a vexing comma from that phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, which was amended in 1954 when President Eisenhower was moved by a sermon by one Reverend George M. Docherty on the need to defend America from the "militantly atheistic communism that has already enslaved 800 million of the peoples of the earth, and now menaces the rest of the free world."
posted on Apr-15-08 at 1:32 PM
“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of "self-defense." Others say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously here and here.]
posted on Apr-3-08 at 7:53 AM
Gravelter Skelter [video, WTF content].
posted on Apr-1-08 at 9:50 PM
"I'm not a politician, I'm an artist. Depravity is part of the job description," says self-styled dandy, former drug addict, and controversial British author Sebastian Horsely, who was denied entrance to the US by customs officials at Newark Airport on the grounds of "moral turpitude," a wide net that encompasses everything from fornication to being a "nuisance." Shades of Oscar Wilde.
posted on Mar-21-08 at 8:45 AM
The hidden factor in Hillary Clinton's rebound: committed Republicans voting in open primaries who want to prolong the messy battle for the Democratic nomination, encouraged by right-wing radio hosts like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh. Or is Hillary just suddenly more palatable to conservatives than multi-culti Obama?
posted on Mar-17-08 at 8:54 AM
"If Communists liked what we did, that was their good luck," said Lee Hays, founding member of the Almanac Singers. A fascinating portrait of one of the linchpins of the politically engaged folk movement of the '40s and '50s. Hays sang beside the more celebrated (and, on one important day in Bob Dylan history, infamous) Pete Seeger on such classic Almanac albums as Talking Union. [Listen here.]
posted on Feb-18-08 at 5:29 PM
Bruce Sterling's State of the World: an interactive discussion on the Well with the noted sci-fi author and futurist. "The political and economic landscape in 2008 is full of spinning, tottering Chinese plates poised on tall pool-cues." [An MP3 of his State of the World 2006 from SXSW was previously linked here.]
posted on Jan-3-08 at 8:39 AM
[archaic tech filter] Foreign correspondents and reporters in the field at the New York Times say goodbye to the paper of record's recording room.
posted on Dec-6-07 at 8:34 AM
Jonah Lehrer is becoming one of the most interesting science writers around. The 26-year-old Rhodes scholar and former Le Bernardin cook just published his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist [first chapter excerpt - NYT], an investigation of the ways poets, novelists, and artists accurately modeled the brain and memory before science did. This week he hilariously reenacted Escoffier's distillation of umami-rich veal stock [hit the audio link] with NPR's Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab. He also just published a very insightful profile of Oliver Sacks in SEED (addressing the pioneering neurologist's own recent struggles with an eye ailment) and writes a wide-ranging science blog. A new writer to watch.
posted on Nov-9-07 at 12:16 PM
Theodore Gray's interactive periodic table isn't the only periodic table online -- another one was posted to MeFi last month -- but I think it's the most gorgeous, informative, and ambitious periodic table I've ever seen, featuring actual samples of most of the elements and their practical uses, a fascinating display of uranium isotopes, and explosive "sodium party" videos and more from Gray's many years of obsession with the elements.
posted on Nov-1-07 at 11:26 AM
On ham, with a fascinating (well, unless you're kosher) history of colonial curing methods.
posted on Oct-19-07 at 9:48 AM
The SY Empire: A rare and fascinating look inside the secretive Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, which has drawn a bright line against assimilation called the Edict that casts out for life any "SY" who marries a gentile, even if they convert. (Crazy Eddie -- who knew? Seinfeld's mom -- who knew? Isaac Misrahi -- who knew? "J-Dubs" -- who knew?)
posted on Oct-15-07 at 8:14 PM
"I want those two minutes of my life back." Musique concrète Fred Thompson-style -- a merciless videohack of the candidate's performance at the GOP debate on MSNBC, October 9, 2007. While almost anyone can be made to look foolish edited this way, not everyone was impressed by Thompson's unedited presence at the debate, his TV debut as a presidential contender. Some believe, however, that the former Law and Order D.A. is just the man to "restore the Republican Party to Reagan's default settings."
posted on Oct-12-07 at 8:47 PM
Who's soft on terrorism? Surely not the Democrats, who are about to enable the National Security Agency to extend its secret domestic wiretapping program after saying otherwise for months. Surely not the Republican White House, determined to rush out a new Osama bin Laden video even if it burns an intelligence connection spying on Al Qaeda that has been carefully cultivated for years.
posted on Oct-9-07 at 8:02 AM
"Mem, mem, mem." A fascinating memoir of global aphasia -- total language loss -- following a stroke, by British poet and novelist Paul West.
posted on Aug-17-07 at 3:47 PM
Warning: Explicit sexual content. "These firefighters dedicated their lives to save the lives of others. They did not sign on to become unwilling props to a controversial political and social agenda," says Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, representing a group of brave men in uniform who were subjected to "vile sexual taunts" at a San Diego gay pride parade. Via Gawker.
posted on Aug-8-07 at 1:41 PM
In 1957, Swiss typographer Max Miedinger invented "the official typeface of the 20th century" -- Helvetica [previously discussed here, via Arts and Letters Daily].
posted on Apr-21-07 at 10:07 AM
Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed here and here.]
posted on Apr-7-07 at 8:21 AM
I am sullied -- no more. Colonel Ted Westhusing was a soldier's soldier -- a multilingual West Point graduate, tough as nails, who was committed to the ancient Greek warrior's ideal of ἀρετή ("arete," excellence). He volunteered to go to Iraq, where he was commanded by another outstanding rising-star officer, counterinsurgency expert David Petraeus. (Westhusing's widow, Michelle, recalls that her husband thought his country was doing "a great thing" there.) After working with one of the shadowy contractors the US has relied on to train Iraqi security forces, USIS, Westhusing became increasingly despondent. In May 2005, investigators say, he put a 9mm bullet in his brain after writing a note that said, "Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it." Westhusing died, as was previously discussed here, and his former "cdr" is now running the war. Lots of new information in this article from the Texas Observer.
posted on Mar-10-07 at 8:27 AM
[ImageFilter] The Neolithic embrace. Happy pre-Valentine's Day.
posted on Feb-6-07 at 11:37 PM
A vanishing world... in a bowl of chowder. An extraordinary article by New York Times writer Molly O'Neill about how changes in the recipe for New England's favorite soup reveal sea changes happening at sea. [Images here.]
posted on Jan-18-07 at 10:51 AM
Now they tell us. Neocon hindsight is 20/20. War architect Richard Perle on invading Iraq, 2002: "We have no time to lose, and I think the president understands that and it's probably taken too long already, but I don't think it'll be much longer... Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.... Now, it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either." Four years later: "If I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies'... Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
posted on Nov-3-06 at 3:27 PM
Keith Olbermann's Edward R. Murrow* moment: A Textbook Definition of Cowardice. MSNBC's host excoriates Bush, FOX News host Chris Wallace, and the media for its response to former president Clinton's "tantrum" [still being discussed here]. Note: Don't just read the transcript. Watch the video, because Olbermann's use of visuals adds greatly to the power of his presentation. No matter which side of the red/blue-state divide you're on, students of politics and media will be reviewing this clip for years to come as a little cultural watershed -- if only a consummate example of "Democrat" angerTM.
posted on Sep-26-06 at 6:25 AM
posted on Jan-21-10 at 7:51 AM
Cancer is hilarious.
posted on Aug-13-09 at 9:49 AM
Why bureaucracy, like gas, fills up all available space. From the archive of The Economist, 1955 [via ArchiveDigger.]
posted on Jul-31-09 at 9:56 PM
On August 12, President Obama will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the nation's highest civilian honor -- to the late gay-rights pioneer Harvey Milk. Lesbian tennis star Billy Jean King and Teddy Kennedy will also be honored that day. Previous recipients include Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Colin Powell (twice), Muhammad Ali, Mother Theresa, Elie Wiesel, Vint Cerf, George Tenet (Bush fail), Irving Kristol (WTF?) Dick Cheney, Walter Cronkite, Julia Child, and Lucille Ball. Now about that DOMA thing...
posted on Jul-30-09 at 9:18 AM
"Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter -- at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo -- was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes... 'I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,' Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. 'She has really changed my life.' Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo." The New York Times' Lisa Katayama on "2-D lovers" in Japan, the latest outgrowth of otaku subculture.
posted on Jul-23-09 at 10:53 AM
Sassy lesbian couple in Florida celebrates 70 years together after having to keep their relationship secret for decades. You go, girls!
posted on Jul-18-09 at 12:29 PM
Rest in peace, Simon Vinkenoog [Dutch blog w/English option], poet, friend of artists like Karel Appel, translator of Beat Generation figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, psychedelic enthusiast and "weed ambassador" of Amsterdam, and author of such guides to hip living as How to Enjoy Reality. One of the European jazz-loving proto-hippies who made the '60s swing and mentored several generations of culture hackers, though he was never widely known in the US.
posted on Jul-14-09 at 1:07 PM
"Bartender, Make It a Stiletto." Meet Georgio, the human carpet.
posted on Jun-13-09 at 11:30 PM
Teh gay can be cured. So declared the most influential sexologists of the late 20th century, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, in 1979, providing much-publicized scientific backing for the "conversion" theory, and dozens of right-wing efforts to prove that homosexuality is a psychological aberration that can be fixed. Or were those case studies fabricated? In his new biography of the couple who helped spark the sexual revolution, Thomas Maier uncovers the truth and the cover-up.
posted on May-6-09 at 8:43 AM
Oh noes, those gay newlyweds are causing Biblical rainstorms!! An ominous new TV ad by the National Organization for Marriage -- who helped pass Prop. 8 in California -- features a "rainbow coalition" of folks to warn America that marriage equality advocates want to "take away" your "freedom" by pushing the issue "far beyond same-sex couples." Unfortunately for NOM, the profound seriousness of this threat has been undermined by a leak of audition reels for the ad.
posted on Apr-8-09 at 12:46 PM
Captain's Log, supplemental.
posted on Mar-19-09 at 8:05 AM
The 56-Euros-and-a-balloon teenage Catalonian space program.
posted on Mar-17-09 at 6:46 PM
Rethinking Earthrise. On the 40th anniversary of the NASA's Apollo 8 mission [caution: weird JFK animation], which answered Stewart Brand's epochal, LSD-inspired question "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" with an unforgettable image of a seemingly fragile and isolated blue planet, Nature editor Oliver Morton -- author of a new book on photosynthesis called Eating the Sun -- disputes the notion that the Earth is fragile and isolated. "The fragility is an illusion," he writes. "The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance -- but it does recast it."
posted on Dec-24-08 at 9:01 AM
Gay marriage equals incest and pedophilia. Abortion equals the Holocaust. Or so thinks "America's Pastor Rick "Saddleback" Warren, bestselling author of The Purpose-Driven Life, vocal supporter of Proposition 8, and the spiritual leader chosen by President-elect Obama to give the invocation at his inauguration. But hey -- don't call him a homophobe: He even eats dinner with gays.
posted on Dec-17-08 at 6:11 PM
With that meeting, Mr. Allo took his first step into an intricate trap. The deeply strange tale of one very determined woman's quest to overturn her son's conviction for murder.
posted on Nov-29-08 at 11:38 AM
The perfect Sunday nosh: A short history of the bagel. In an age when allegedly edible breadstuffs that my grandmother would have barely recognized have become ubiquitous, did you know that even the Pharaohs had a yen for the iconic Jewish comfort food that is as much a symbol of New York City as baguettes are to Paris? Bagels turn out to be surprisingly easy to make at home, too, though they won't be the same without a schmear and some nice Nova. (Previously on Ask.) Extra credit: the history of everything.
posted on Nov-23-08 at 9:52 AM
The "blind watchmaker" may not be as blind as we thought. A team of scientists at Princeton University discovers that organisms are not only evolving, they're evolving to evolve better, using a set of proteins to "steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness" by making tiny course corrections.
posted on Nov-11-08 at 6:50 PM
It's morning in America again -- but for the thousands of committed gay couples who got married in California [warning: Dan Fogelberg music, sweet visuals], the long nightmare of intolerance and hate is not yet over with the probable victory of Proposition 8. Supported by the anti-equality stances of Sarah Palin and "divinely" inspired others, and paid for by members of the Mormon Church and the mother of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, many of the ads for Prop. 8 featured the faces of Obama and Joe Biden, who declared their opposition to the initiative but refused to support equal marriage rights for all, preferring to talk about "civil unions." Even excellent Democratic-leaning politics sites like Talking Points Memo were saturated with the deceptive ads, which overwhelmed those comparing the proposition to other forms of discrimination in California's history.
posted on Nov-5-08 at 8:11 AM
This f*cking election. A babble tower.
posted on Nov-2-08 at 8:41 PM
One minute and four seconds in London, 1904. Birkbeck College professor Ian Christie rediscovered this footage in an archive in Canberra, shot for a travelogue by film pioneer Charles Urban.
posted on Oct-24-08 at 4:01 PM
Worried about social-network data mining? Facebook hires Ted Ullyot, former right-hand man to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as its general counsel. Tapping Ullyot, who worked on the infamous torture memo and other illustrious projects, is a sign that the burgeoning Scrabble platform "is a little more grown-up," says Facebook public-policy VP Elliot Schrage.
posted on Sep-30-08 at 11:58 AM
The Surge is working [tm] -- but for gay Iraqis who face a murderous new spate of violence by theocrats and militiamen, notsomuch. "More than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003... [but] many officials say they feel that in a country at war, there are more pressing concerns than gay rights."
posted on Aug-27-08 at 9:15 AM
Cross another item off of President Bush's to-do list before he leaves the White House: hobbling the Endangered Species Act and allowing federal agencies to gauge the environmental impact of their projects for themselves. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the changes were needed to ensure that the ESA would not be used as a "back door" to regulate greenhouse gases.
posted on Aug-11-08 at 8:43 PM
Are you a young middle-class creative type (probably white) who has chosen to live in an urban neighborhood that your parents would have shunned? Have the families that formerly lived in your neighborhood (probably not white) been pushed out by soaring rents and real-estate prices to the city fringes or suburbs? The New Republic on demographic inversion.
posted on Aug-2-08 at 8:43 PM
NewsFilter: Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID - Conn.) strikes a decisive blow against another Islamic terror front group: YouTube.
posted on May-19-08 at 6:44 PM
Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted on May-7-08 at 9:15 AM
Keyboardist Danny Federici, founding member of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band, has died.
posted on Apr-17-08 at 10:26 PM
One nation under God. The "bold conservative" GOP Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia is intent upon removing a vexing comma from that phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, which was amended in 1954 when President Eisenhower was moved by a sermon by one Reverend George M. Docherty on the need to defend America from the "militantly atheistic communism that has already enslaved 800 million of the peoples of the earth, and now menaces the rest of the free world."
posted on Apr-15-08 at 1:32 PM
“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of "self-defense." Others say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously here and here.]
posted on Apr-3-08 at 7:53 AM
Gravelter Skelter [video, WTF content].
posted on Apr-1-08 at 9:50 PM
"I'm not a politician, I'm an artist. Depravity is part of the job description," says self-styled dandy, former drug addict, and controversial British author Sebastian Horsely, who was denied entrance to the US by customs officials at Newark Airport on the grounds of "moral turpitude," a wide net that encompasses everything from fornication to being a "nuisance." Shades of Oscar Wilde.
posted on Mar-21-08 at 8:45 AM
The hidden factor in Hillary Clinton's rebound: committed Republicans voting in open primaries who want to prolong the messy battle for the Democratic nomination, encouraged by right-wing radio hosts like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh. Or is Hillary just suddenly more palatable to conservatives than multi-culti Obama?
posted on Mar-17-08 at 8:54 AM
"If Communists liked what we did, that was their good luck," said Lee Hays, founding member of the Almanac Singers. A fascinating portrait of one of the linchpins of the politically engaged folk movement of the '40s and '50s. Hays sang beside the more celebrated (and, on one important day in Bob Dylan history, infamous) Pete Seeger on such classic Almanac albums as Talking Union. [Listen here.]
posted on Feb-18-08 at 5:29 PM
Bruce Sterling's State of the World: an interactive discussion on the Well with the noted sci-fi author and futurist. "The political and economic landscape in 2008 is full of spinning, tottering Chinese plates poised on tall pool-cues." [An MP3 of his State of the World 2006 from SXSW was previously linked here.]
posted on Jan-3-08 at 8:39 AM
[archaic tech filter] Foreign correspondents and reporters in the field at the New York Times say goodbye to the paper of record's recording room.
posted on Dec-6-07 at 8:34 AM
Jonah Lehrer is becoming one of the most interesting science writers around. The 26-year-old Rhodes scholar and former Le Bernardin cook just published his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist [first chapter excerpt - NYT], an investigation of the ways poets, novelists, and artists accurately modeled the brain and memory before science did. This week he hilariously reenacted Escoffier's distillation of umami-rich veal stock [hit the audio link] with NPR's Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab. He also just published a very insightful profile of Oliver Sacks in SEED (addressing the pioneering neurologist's own recent struggles with an eye ailment) and writes a wide-ranging science blog. A new writer to watch.
posted on Nov-9-07 at 12:16 PM
Theodore Gray's interactive periodic table isn't the only periodic table online -- another one was posted to MeFi last month -- but I think it's the most gorgeous, informative, and ambitious periodic table I've ever seen, featuring actual samples of most of the elements and their practical uses, a fascinating display of uranium isotopes, and explosive "sodium party" videos and more from Gray's many years of obsession with the elements.
posted on Nov-1-07 at 11:26 AM
On ham, with a fascinating (well, unless you're kosher) history of colonial curing methods.
posted on Oct-19-07 at 9:48 AM
The SY Empire: A rare and fascinating look inside the secretive Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, which has drawn a bright line against assimilation called the Edict that casts out for life any "SY" who marries a gentile, even if they convert. (Crazy Eddie -- who knew? Seinfeld's mom -- who knew? Isaac Misrahi -- who knew? "J-Dubs" -- who knew?)
posted on Oct-15-07 at 8:14 PM
"I want those two minutes of my life back." Musique concrète Fred Thompson-style -- a merciless videohack of the candidate's performance at the GOP debate on MSNBC, October 9, 2007. While almost anyone can be made to look foolish edited this way, not everyone was impressed by Thompson's unedited presence at the debate, his TV debut as a presidential contender. Some believe, however, that the former Law and Order D.A. is just the man to "restore the Republican Party to Reagan's default settings."
posted on Oct-12-07 at 8:47 PM
Who's soft on terrorism? Surely not the Democrats, who are about to enable the National Security Agency to extend its secret domestic wiretapping program after saying otherwise for months. Surely not the Republican White House, determined to rush out a new Osama bin Laden video even if it burns an intelligence connection spying on Al Qaeda that has been carefully cultivated for years.
posted on Oct-9-07 at 8:02 AM
"Mem, mem, mem." A fascinating memoir of global aphasia -- total language loss -- following a stroke, by British poet and novelist Paul West.
posted on Aug-17-07 at 3:47 PM
Warning: Explicit sexual content. "These firefighters dedicated their lives to save the lives of others. They did not sign on to become unwilling props to a controversial political and social agenda," says Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, representing a group of brave men in uniform who were subjected to "vile sexual taunts" at a San Diego gay pride parade. Via Gawker.
posted on Aug-8-07 at 1:41 PM
In 1957, Swiss typographer Max Miedinger invented "the official typeface of the 20th century" -- Helvetica [previously discussed here, via Arts and Letters Daily].
posted on Apr-21-07 at 10:07 AM
Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed here and here.]
posted on Apr-7-07 at 8:21 AM
I am sullied -- no more. Colonel Ted Westhusing was a soldier's soldier -- a multilingual West Point graduate, tough as nails, who was committed to the ancient Greek warrior's ideal of ἀρετή ("arete," excellence). He volunteered to go to Iraq, where he was commanded by another outstanding rising-star officer, counterinsurgency expert David Petraeus. (Westhusing's widow, Michelle, recalls that her husband thought his country was doing "a great thing" there.) After working with one of the shadowy contractors the US has relied on to train Iraqi security forces, USIS, Westhusing became increasingly despondent. In May 2005, investigators say, he put a 9mm bullet in his brain after writing a note that said, "Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it." Westhusing died, as was previously discussed here, and his former "cdr" is now running the war. Lots of new information in this article from the Texas Observer.
posted on Mar-10-07 at 8:27 AM
[ImageFilter] The Neolithic embrace. Happy pre-Valentine's Day.
posted on Feb-6-07 at 11:37 PM
A vanishing world... in a bowl of chowder. An extraordinary article by New York Times writer Molly O'Neill about how changes in the recipe for New England's favorite soup reveal sea changes happening at sea. [Images here.]
posted on Jan-18-07 at 10:51 AM
Now they tell us. Neocon hindsight is 20/20. War architect Richard Perle on invading Iraq, 2002: "We have no time to lose, and I think the president understands that and it's probably taken too long already, but I don't think it'll be much longer... Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.... Now, it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either." Four years later: "If I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies'... Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
posted on Nov-3-06 at 3:27 PM
Keith Olbermann's Edward R. Murrow* moment: A Textbook Definition of Cowardice. MSNBC's host excoriates Bush, FOX News host Chris Wallace, and the media for its response to former president Clinton's "tantrum" [still being discussed here]. Note: Don't just read the transcript. Watch the video, because Olbermann's use of visuals adds greatly to the power of his presentation. No matter which side of the red/blue-state divide you're on, students of politics and media will be reviewing this clip for years to come as a little cultural watershed -- if only a consummate example of "Democrat" angerTM.
posted on Sep-26-06 at 6:25 AM