The Best of #OccupySesameStreet. Since its launched two weeks ago, the #OccupyWallStreet movement has gone national, spawning copy-cat demonstrations in far-flung locales like Tulsa and Boise. Its members have serious concerns--about income inequality, the influence of large corporations in our political system, and their own financial futures. The #OccupySesameStreet movement? Not so much.
posted by sweetkid
on Oct 4, 2011 -
30 comments
Mr. Destructo (
previously) discusses the
inscrutable twitter bot named
horse_ebooks, a Russian spam account that communicates entirely through snippets of ebooks and is more hilarious (
1,
2,
3,
4), confusing (
1,
2,
3,
4) and philosophically poetic (
1,
2,
3,
4) than any non-spambot on the internet.
posted by cobra_high_tigers
on Sep 23, 2011 -
34 comments
Meet Karl Welzien. He lives in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He is recently divorced from Ann, and lives with his buddy Dave. He loves drinking cold ones, driving his Sebring, maxing out some karaoke, and knocking back some Chili's hot wings because they have big bold flavor. He's a big fan of Guy Fieri, and loves the occasional "toilet nap" during his workday. Karl is a fictional character that exists only on Twitter,
@DadBoner.
[more inside]
posted by jbickers
on Aug 16, 2011 -
44 comments
The Elusive Big Idea "It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief."
posted by bitmage
on Aug 16, 2011 -
92 comments
Fifty years after British colonialism, ten years after military rule, Nigerians are free. Not economically free, not yet, and we see the effect of that lack of economic freedom in the kinds of crimes that are committed. But they are free in important ways. You can live where you want, associate with whom you want. You can sue people in court, gather to practice your religion, under the leadership of whichever holy man or charlatan you prefer, and you can marry and divorce as you please. This is a major thing. This is modernity, and to tell these stories, to give the protagonists of these losses even that little bit of attention, is to honor the fact that they are there, that their life goes on.
On his
twitter feed, novelist Teju Cole has been taking the French literary tradition of
faits divers and adapting it to
"bring news of a Nigerian modernity."
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Aug 12, 2011 -
11 comments
William Lawrence Cassidy has been
indicted for a series of threatening tweets directed towards Alyce Zeoli, aka Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, the leader of a Buddhist organization known as Kunzang Palyul Choling (KPC) to which Cassidy had belonged. There is however a small problem that federal prosecutors are employing a
vague anti-stalking law that makes 'intentional infliction of emotional distress' through the use of 'any interactive computer service' a felony, rather than focussing more narrowly upon the outright threats.
[more inside]
posted by jeffburdges
on Aug 1, 2011 -
34 comments
#crashtags. Why,
MeFi’s own Adrian Holovaty asks, would one need to add hashtags – designed for space-economical Twitter, where every character counts – to Google+, which has orders of magnitude more space to express oneself? And should Twitter really be influencing our online behaviour thus, given “how limiting (and, frankly, silly) Twitter is”?
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Jul 15, 2011 -
98 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
Where’s @towerbridge? Even for non-Londoners the account
@towerbridge was a bit of "London flair" in their twitter stream. It was a bot mostly posting when the famous landmark opened and closed due to ships passing by, run by game designer Tom Armitage. Now it has been taken from him by Twitter and given to the official Tower Bridge museum, apparently on the basis of
trademark infringement. Twitter users both in the UK and abroad
are not happy.
posted by dominik
on Jun 12, 2011 -
44 comments
This is not an attempt to tweet mindlessly the entire contents of Ulysses
, word-for-word, 140 characters at a time. That would be dull and impossible. What is proposed here is a recasting or a reimagining of the reading experience of this novel, start to finish, within the confines of a day-long series of tweets from a global volunteer army of Joyce-sodden tweeps. (previously!)
posted by Trurl
on May 25, 2011 -
17 comments
How the news spread via twitter Interesting visualisation of tweets of Bin Ladens demise.
"...the Tweet by Rumsfeld chief of staff Keith Urbahn that got the ball rolling was retweeted more than 80 times within one minute after it was sent, and that by the 3-minute mark, it had led to more than 300 reactions"
posted by marienbad
on May 8, 2011 -
22 comments
Storify is a new social media platform that makes it easy to assemble and winnow Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook posts, Google search results and URLS into a coherent story. It went into
public beta on April 25th.
[more inside]
posted by msalt
on Apr 28, 2011 -
17 comments
