


In 1969, the BBC’s James Mossman conducted an extensive interview with Vladimir Nabokov, which was first published in a magazine called The Listener, and later in a book entitled Strong Opinions. Some of Mossman’s questions were serious: “You’ve said that you’ve explored time’s prison and have found no way out. Are you still exploring…? Some were lighter: “Why do you live in hotels?” (Answer here.) And still other questions fell somewhere in between, like: “If you ruled any modern industrial state absolutely, what would you abolish?” It turns out that loud noises, muzak, bidets, and insecticides made the great novelist and lepidopterist’s list.
Which raises the question, if allowed to play benevolent dictator for a day, what would you obliterate? Me? I’d probably start with almost anything likely to appear in today’s Billboard Top 5 — dreck that’s not too far from muzak.
Related Content:
Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century
Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings
Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis
As Benevolent Dictator, Vladimir Nabokov Would Abolish Muzak & Bidets: What Would Make Your List? is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
You remember in high school history, when the teacher brought up the old, bad days of Jim Crow? With tales of poll taxes and literacy tests to ensure that access to the ballot remained exclusive to white people?
We like to think that those days are gone, that the...
Raw Story reports that a new research study at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business has found that "white people respond to evidence that they are privileged by their race by insisting that they face greater hardships in life". WTF?! The study was conducted by researchers L. Taylor Phillips and Brian S. Lowery, and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Phillips and Lowery state: “Despite this reality, policy makers and power brokers continue to debate whether racial privilege even exists and whether to address such inequity [...] One reason for this inaction might be an unwillingness among Whites to acknowledge racial privilege — acknowledgment that may be difficult given that Whites are motivated to believe that meritocratic systems and personal virtues determine life outcomes.” The denial is real! CLICK HERE to read more.
By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor
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“Our work suggests that privilege reduction efforts might need to focus not only on convincing or educating advantaged group members about privilege, but also on reducing the feelings of self-threat this information induces [...] The existence of hardships does not reduce racial privilege, since racial privilege entails comparison to someone of a different race with equivalent hardships. People may erroneously think privilege entails complete ease in life and that the presence of any hardships denotes an absence of privilege.”
here we can see that Florida is actually a poorly written artificial data matrix, as evidenced by this poorly rendered police vehicle clipping through the environment due to similation processor loads being too high during the rainy season.
Check out the latest poster campaign from Indian fashion designer Manish Arora, featuring legendary model Debra Shaw. The 90's fashion fixture is photographed in Arora's debut fall winter 2015 collection, dressed as a “modern-day warrior" (states the designer). The campaign was shot by French photographer Charles Fréger - known for his portraits of sportsmen and soldiers - and styled by Joanna Schlenzka; and appeared on the streets of Paris during the fashion capital's recent fashion week. Explore below.
By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor
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The women’s petition against coffee : representing to publick consideration the grand inconveniencies accruing to their sex from the excessive use of that drying, enfeebling liquor, 1674.
“Our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome; But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigor; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us. Never did Men wear greater breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.”
The mens answer to the womens petition against coffee : vindicating their own performances, and the vertues of that liquor, from the undeserved aspersions lately cast upon them, by their scandalous pamphlet, 1674.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Reblogging for National Coffee Day.
English, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.
Printmaker & Artist:
Toshihiko Ikeda
池田俊彦
「笑う老王―美しい黒い角―」
エッチング、
雁皮紙
Ed.9
990 mm × 725 mm
2014
Etching on Rice Paper
Edition of 9
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI will begin collecting and providing to the public more information about police shootings of civilians, FBI Director James Comey said Monday as the agency released annual data on crime nationwide.
Read More →Slate has an interesting interview with Leon Nayfakh speaking to John Pfaff, here is the critical excerpt from Pfaff:
What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.
You will note that district attorneys are relatively politically independent at this level. And this:
But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.
Keep in mind that some in prison on drug charges are actually violent offenders who did a plea bargain down to a drug charge.
The interview also offers evidence against alternative explanations of the boom in the prison population, such as putting the blame on longer sentences. Here is Pfaff’s home page and his related papers.
Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives is on. They play 5 episodes in a row. They play the same five episodes again. And again. And again.
You are watching Chopped. Someone is crying over an unsupportive parent. You wonder what it has to do with their food. The answer is nothing. The judges chop them. The pasta water was not salted.
You are watching Chopped. A chef claims to be above a basket ingredient. They have not yet realized they are competing on TV for money. They serve uncooked chicken.
You are watching Chopped. For the dessert round, the ingredients are ground beef, cilantro, horse hooves and a rare fruit from Alaska that is poisonous if not peeled correctly. Both chefs make bread pudding and open the oven every 30 seconds to check it.
Bobby Flay has a new show. No one asked for Bobby Flay to have a new show. You wonder why no one has punched Bobby Flay on his show. You look up how to be a contestant on Bobby Flays show for the express purpose of punching him in the face when you meet him on his show. You watch three episodes.
A new daytime cooking show has appeared. You have never seen the host before. Their aunt is a guest and insults how they cook. They are already on season 6.
Ina Garten is having a dinner party. She has invited her friend who is a florist, her friend who does tablescapes, her friend who owns a bakery, her friend who owns a cafe in paris, her friend who has connections to an underground truffle ring, a friend who knows where the truffle pigs do not forage, a friend who owes Ina big time, a friend who can carry something roughly the weight of a medium sized human named Jeffery who missed his Friday chicken dinner and threw Ina a subpar anniversary party and should have known that store bought was NOT fine, and a friend who owns a million dollar fishing shack in Nantucket.
Giada is carefully sounding out words in an Italian accent. You didn’t know you said the names of so many ingredients wrong. You are not sure Giada knows this either.
There is a contest show about food trucks. Someone tries to sell a quesadillia off a truck for $25. There appears to be a line around the block. You question your college degree choices.
Iron Chef has given Morimoto a voice over. He is speaking perfectly understandable english.
Cupcake Wars is on. One contestant tries to put meat in a cupcake. The judges eat cupcakes gravely, with faces like they are sentencing people to death. The theme is clowns.
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There is a contest show about food trucks. Someone tries to sell a quesadillia off a truck for $25. There appears to be a line around the block. You question your college degree choices.
“
"Sugar was still a luxury in Europe and America until the 18th century, when demand led to the creation of sugar plantations in the New World, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and India, using slave and indentured labour."
"In a fantasy world similar to our Europe at any time up to the 18th century, sugar would most likely be a rare and expensive commodity."
"Without the large scale farming and production that we know today, meat would be less common and much more expensive."
"Even if a poor family lives next to a wood full of game, they may not necessarily be able to hunt there."This is technically true, but the poor family could easily raise chickens and pigs for their own consumption or to sell ... and they usually did.
"Vegetables are probably going to make up the main bulk of a fantasy character’s diet in any period or setting, unless the character is very rich."
"Potatoes, conversely, are notorious for growing almost anywhere."I think that sentence made me gag a few times. Yes, potatoes grow everywhere ... except for anywhere outside of the Americas before the year 1500. Potatoes are a new-world plant. They didn't have them in medieval Europe. So, just ... no.
Woman operating the first vending machine in Britain to sell potatoes, 1962.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a major shift in immigration patterns over the next 50 years, Asians will have surged past Hispanics to become the largest group of immigrants heading to the United States, according to estimates in a new immigration study.
Read More →While exploring an abandoned corner of the Zhukovsky airfield (Ramenskoye Airport) in Moscow two years ago, aviation photographer Aleksander Markin stumbled onto a forgotten relic of Russia’s Buran Space Program. This decaying wooden spacecraft was used as a wind tunnel model in the 1980s for the VKK Space Orbiter, the largest and most expensive Soviet space exploration program conceived as a response to the United States’ Space Shuttle. Despite its scientific purposes the wooden ship has the appearance of a fantastic children’s playground feature.
According to Urban Ghosts, this 1:3 scale replica was just one of 85 wind tunnel models used to test various aerodynamic properties of the orbiter. The testing would eventually reveal that NASA’s prototype for the Enterprise was ideal for spaceflight and the VKK Space Orbiter would take a similar design as a result.
Despite the ambitious size and scale of the Buran Space Program, the final craft would fly only a single unmanned mission in 1988 before being scrapped completely in 1993 due to lack of funding and political instability (and yet only modern Russia retains the ability to send people to the ISS today). Markin mentions in comments along with his photographs that this particular wind tunnel model has since been destroyed and no longer exists. (via Urban Ghosts)