Alaska is home to two small villages of Russian Orthodox "Old Believers," whose ancestors left the church and their home in Siberia in 1666 in the face of state-issued church reforms. They have traveled more than 20,000 miles over five centuries in the search for the perfect place to protect their traditions from outside influences. Now,
assimilation into American culture is slowly overtaking them. (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 5, 2013 -
49 comments
I was staring at a week and a half of bone-deep cold, probable-verging-on-inevitable blizzards, baneful travel conditions, and total isolation from the civilized (read: broadband-having) world. I hate snow, do not play winter sports, keep the thermostat at 65 on a good day, and haven’t logged out of Spotify since 2011. I’m not even a dog person.
Grantland's Brian Phillips covers the Iditarod Sled Dog Race.
posted by Ghostride The Whip
on Apr 24, 2013 -
33 comments
"Like a lot of things in Alaska, the annual Mount Marathon Race in Seward is famously brutal, even dangerous. Which is precisely why Michael LeMaitre ran it--
the last day he was seen alive."
posted by vidur
on Feb 21, 2013 -
32 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
In light of
today's news that one of two Shell ships slated to drill exploratory oil wells in the Arctic waters of Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort Seas had slipped its moorings and was headed towards Dutch Harbor, in Alaska's Aleutian Islands... check out a collaboration between the Yes Men and Greenpeace that's been online since June:
arcticready.com (
Twitter) -- an elaborate site
spoofing Royal Dutch Shell Plc, who have uh...
promised not to sue.
posted by zarq
on Jul 16, 2012 -
15 comments
A massive rare 'superstorm' is currently
bearing down on Alaska, with hurricane force winds (100+mph gusts), blizzard, sea-surge flooding. "This is going to be one of the worst storms on record over the Bering Sea". The storm passed through an area of unusually high sea surface temperatures. "This may
help explain why the storm is turning from an ordinary Bering Sea disturbance into a ‘superstorm’."
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Nov 9, 2011 -
69 comments
"
Mother Jones [and, later, other media outlets] requested [Sarah] Palin's
gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. Almost three years later, the wait is over. ... Today, at [1:00 pm ET] in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State workers will distribute six-box sets and hand trucks (which must be returned) to representatives of
a dozen or so media outfits" "Volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska will be at Juneau's Centennial Hall convention center ... look[ing] for
any significant or interesting emails, stick a post-it note on the page, and pass them to journalists, who also will be reading through the 24,000 pages. Exact copies of the best of those emails will be posted online immediately. ... In the same room ... a second set of the documents will be scanned for msnbc.com by Crivella West, an analytics and investigative-research company from Pittsburgh, returning the records to their original electronic form, allowing anyone anywhere to join in the crowdsourcing. That free, public, searchable archive will go online, sometime later on Friday, at
http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com." "The
Washington Post is looking for '100 organized and diligent readers' to work with reporters to 'analyze, contextualize, and research the emails.'
The New York Times is employing a similar system.'"
* [more inside]
posted by ericb
on Jun 10, 2011 -
158 comments
As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics. She did this in a way that seems wildly out of character today—by cooperating with Democrats and moderate Republicans to raise taxes on Big Business. And she succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being. Since 2008, Sarah Palin has influenced her party, and the tenor of its politics, perhaps more than any other Republican, but in a way that is almost the antithesis of what she did in Alaska. Had she stayed true to her record, she might have pointed her party in a very different direction.
posted by -->NMN.80.418
on May 14, 2011 -
79 comments
Alone In The Wilderness "Documentary tells the story of Dick Proenneke who, in the late 1960s, built his own cabin in the wilderness at the base of the Aleutian Peninsula, in what is now Lake Clark National Park. Using color footage he shot himself, Proenneke traces how he came to this remote area, selected a homestead site and built his log cabin completely by himself. The documentary covers his first year in-country, showing his day-to-day activities and the passing of the seasons as he sought to scratch out a living alone in the wilderness." (Color, 57mins)
posted by puny human
on May 2, 2011 -
62 comments
Five Alaskans have been
arrested and
charged with plotting to kill judges and State Troopers. At the time of their arrests, they had
obtained illegal guns, grenades, and silencers.
Schaefer Cox, the leader of the group, identifies himself with the
Sovereign Citizen Movement and is a member of the Alaska Citizens Militia. The militia—one of
hundreds of active “Patriot” Groups in the United States—maintains a
website with pictures of bears, videos, and a list of Acts of War, which include “mandatory medical anything” and “involuntary involvement in anything.”
[more inside]
posted by charmcityblues
on Mar 24, 2011 -
90 comments
"I figured I'd explore for a bit and before I knew it I was 50 yards within a huge cave gazing at the most beautiful, otherworldly sight I had ever laid eyes on," he tells us. "It was like stepping into Superman's lair and every changing shade of blue lured me deeper and deeper."
Inside Glacier Caves. [more inside]
posted by Rinku
on Mar 9, 2011 -
20 comments
Vanity Fair recently published "
It Came From Wasilla", Todd Purdum's lengthy profile piece about Sarah Palin, her involvement with and the inside workings of the McCain campaign, and her political future.
[more inside]
posted by Weebot
on Jun 30, 2009 -
232 comments
Prominent blogger
Andrew Sullivan develops an unhealthy obsession over the (lack of) details surrounding the birth of Sarah Palin's youngest child.
Sullivan really, really won't let it go. Persistent rumors lead the editor of the Alaska Daily News to, "finally decide, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the 'conspiracy theory that would not die' and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all." Palin releases
press release slamming the paper. Editor of paper
publishes email from Palin's office along with his response.
Palin complains about "bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie," says episode is, "more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism." She also
thinks Katie Couric is bad at journalism, not the center of everybody's universe, and is exploiting Palin. Mike Huckabee disagrees, says Couric was
"extraordinarily gentle" with Palin. Political pundits and journalists are left scratching their heads - is she crazy?
Or a crazy genius? 2012 is just
around the corner.
posted by billysumday
on Jan 13, 2009 -
188 comments
Legislative panel concludes that Palin abused the power of her office. A Republican-dominated Alaska State Legislative panel voted unanimously this evening to release to the public the results of the investigation into Governor Sarah Palin's dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.
(Full report PDF here) Among four key points released in the report,
the most significant "concludes that Palin violated the state's executive branch ethics act, which says that 'each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.'"
posted by XQUZYPHYR
on Oct 10, 2008 -
477 comments
