In a review for the New Yorker in 1959, film critic Kenneth Tynan mistakenly referred to “the late Eric Blore,” and the magazine’s famously vigilant fact-checking department failed to note that the English comic actor was still alive.
Blore’s lawyer demanded a retraction, and a chastened Tynan prepared an apology, which was scheduled to appear in the following issue.
After that issue had been printed, though, the actor really did die … so while that day’s newspapers were reporting Blore’s death, the New Yorker was apologizing for saying he was no longer alive.
And also, the extent to which those manufacturing jobs are “good jobs”? That’s because of fucking UNIONS you shitheads, the same organizations you just voted to continue to attack.
I vaguely remember reading this as a kid, but I picked it up again on a friend’s suggestion and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s really not so much a history of the world as a bit of illustrated info on a bunch of really interesting points in time. The one strike against it is that it’s often, well, a bit wrong. Some of this is because it’s simply out of date, but (for example) at one point he mentions the infamous Aquatic Ape hypothesis, and it wasn’t (I don’t think!) as a joke.
One of the great Vietnam memoirs, which I hadn’t yet read. This book is a bit more dreamlike than some of the others, dealing not just with war stories, but with his attempt to adjust back to society afterward despite an injury that leaves him paraplegic. In a sense, that makes this book a bit more unique (and perhaps timely) than a lot of other Vietnam memoirs, in that it’s really more about what war does to you *after* you get home.
This is A+ non-fiction. This book is a history of the idea that you can sell attention for money, using content as merely the attractor of the attention. Wu traces the whole history of this concept from early newspaper sales tactics, through war propaganda techniques, on through Google, Facebook, and so forth. One thing I really appreciate is that Wu isn’t explicitly arguing that the paradigm of attention sales is a bad one - he’s asking us to deal with what it means. I wish everyone in tech would take a peek at this book.
My political pitch to racists is already, “hey, if you chill with hating people of color, I will do my best to get you health care and financial help” so maybe chill with telling me I need to be nicer to them.
Is it unjust to adopt a constitution that binds both ourselves and future members of our society? We need a set of fundamental laws to regulate ourselves, but is it fair to extend that to future citizens? Shouldn’t they have the right to choose their own rules?
Thomas Jefferson thought so. In a 1789 letter to James Madison, he held that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”: He thought a constitution (or any law) should expire automatically when succeeding generations make up a majority of the population. “The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished … in their natural course with those who gave them being,” he wrote. “This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. … If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”
There’s a tension here: In order for a constitution to be successful, it has to define the organization of its society and the freedoms of its citizens, and these rules need to remain in effect for at least several generations in order to produce a healthy liberal democracy. “But those born under a perpetual constitution are expected to acquiesce to the foundational norms approved by their predecessors with neither their consent nor their participation,” writes McGill University political philosopher Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli. “If a constitution is discussed, negotiated, and approved by citizens who are, necessarily, contemporaries, what normatively binding force does it retain for future generations who took no part in its discussion, negotiation, or approval?”
(Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli, “The Problem of a Perpetual Constitution,” in Axel Gosseries and Lukas H. Meyer, eds., Intergenerational Justice, 2009.)
In the chalky soil under the English seaside town of Margate, someone has hewn an artificial cave and lined it with millions of seashells. No one knows who, when, or why — the popular story is that a laborer was digging in a field in 1835 when his spade disappeared into a void. Alerted to this mystery, James Newlove, the master of the nearby Dane House School, lowered his son Joshua into the darkness bearing a candle. Joshua would have found himself in a domed rotunda lined with shells, beyond which a winding passageway leads to a rectangular chamber of uncertain purpose. Newlove later purchased the land, installed gas lighting, and opened them to the public.
Even then the origins of the grotto were a mystery — and, as no scientific dating has been undertaken, we still don’t know when it was created. R.F. LeGear, who made an assessment for the Kent Archaeological Society, wrote, “Whoever commissioned and/or planned the elaborate designs for the shell panels must have been a well educated person who managed to entwine many different themes into the intricate patterns of literally millions of shells.” He suspects that a medieval denehole, or chalk-mining shaft, was reworked and expanded in the 17th or 18th century.
But “[a]s to the purpose of this enigmatic structure the writer can make no useful comment except that it is highly likely that the Shell Grotto’s original designer, whoever and whenever that was, has accomplished exactly what he set out to achieve i.e., speculation, controversy and conjecture which started with the discovery in 1835 and continues to the present day.”
I did a worse job turning out the vote. I got a little lazy and a lot overconfident. It’s a hard lesson to remember, but find a way to be this mad in a year and a half during the midterms. And be as active as you can outside of politics, making sure to fucking TAKE CARE OF THE VULNERABLE PEOPLE who will be hurt by Trump.
Tourists traveling the Pan-American Highway can be startled to discover an enormous human hand emerging from the Atacama Desert in Chile. The 36-foot sculpture is Mano del Desierto, installed by artist Mario Irarrázabal in 1992.
A thousand miles away, in the Uruguayan seaside town of Punta del Este, lies La Mano de Punta del Este, completed by Irarrázabal 10 years earlier. One is a left hand, the other a right.
American artist J. Seward Johnson Jr. finished The Awakening (below) at Hains Point near Washington, D.C., in 1980, and a copy near Chesterfield, Mo., in 2009. What’s next?
Look, we’ve somehow gotten to the sad place where education is a political weapon, because the more educated people become, the less likely they are to be fucking bigots.
But also, let’s not pretend that these people are being ignored by the decent people in America. These people are being ignored by the very people who they elected into office, because people like Donald Trump NEED them to be ignorant, angry and poor. Decent people have been trying to help them for decades.
Yeah, it’s weird, they keep telling us, “we’re hateful above all else!” and we spend all this time not listening. I’m listening rural white America. You’re fucking racist. I get it.
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