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It’s the best time in the history of the world to be a child, a parent, or a grandparent. Photo by iStockphoto/Thinkstock Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's…

Added sugar is bad for your health, studies indicate, while sugar substitutes do not deserve the bad reputation they have acquired.

While the members of On A Friday, the band that later became Radiohead, were on a break as they attended college, Thom Yorke was a member of a band called Headless Chickens. This is a video of a circa-1989 performance by the band of "High and Dry", a song that later on Radiohead's second album, The Bends, released in 1995.

Tags: music   Radiohead   Thom Yorke   video

A district judge in Montezuma County on Wednesday issued an injunction against the "Bong-a-Thon" from holding their 32-year-old annual event in the small unincorporated town of Stoner.

Like Guy Noir, private eye, Garrison Keillor is preparing to turn out the light on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building and slip into the dark night of a city that knows how to keep its secrets. The longtime host announced Monday he would step down from A Prairie Home Companion, his 41-year-old public radio variety show, in a year’s time. But his retirement isn’t the death knell for the Keillor universe—the twilight of those Norwegian bachelor farmers, the last batch of Powdermilk Biscuits, Dusty and Lefty’s last roundup—because Chris Thile, the one-time child prodigy mandolinist for Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers, will take over in his stead.

Thile’s anointment will be a test of just why people feel so strongly about A Prairie Home Companion—some positive, some extremely negative, some just drowsy from the soothing tones of Keillor’s gravelly bass intonation. In a statement to the AP Monday, Thile said he and the incumbent “have lengthily discussed the future of the show with me as host and agree that we should give it a go. There are, for course, plenty of details to iron out, but I'm very excited!” Keillor, for his part, said he expected Thile to return the show to its roots as a musical variety show. If you listen to PHC regularly, it’s clear that Keillor cares a great deal about the music programming. He chooses the guests carefully, speaks to them with real interest and obvious research, and joins them for musical numbers. This may be a peculiar sort of music—it’s literally your father’s music—but it isn’t just window dressing in the way musical guests often can be.

But is that why listeners tune in week after week? I suspect not. What they want is to hear Keillor’s self-consciously cheesy skits—Guy Noir and the American Duct Tape Council and the old-school radio special-effects gags. And, of course, they want to hear Keillor’s soothing, mellow relation of that week’s news from the fictional Lake Wobegon. What Keillor is offering listeners is a set of comfy, musty, fusty, and dusty Midwestern roots: “The little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve.” It’s a place the listeners probably didn’t come from—these are coastal NPR elites, after all—and that never existed anyway, which is the attraction: familiar enough to soothe, fictional enough to be endearing.

The Lutheran church choir director; the wistfully aging parents; the above-average children; the matronly, melancholy, good-hearted waitresses; the thick, red-velveted town theater and its majestic old Wurlitzer—it’s this idealized image of middle America that either draws listeners in, hoping for a brief respite in their Saturday night, or drives them away, rolling their eyes at the cornball shtick. Peter Ostroushko is a great musician, but it’s unlikely 4 million listeners a week are tuning in to hear him play folk standards.

So the question is whether they’ll tune in to hear Thile do it. In some ways, Thile is a natural choice. Like Keillor, he’s a consummate showman with a flair for the whimsical, though his sensibility may skew closer to the twee than the corny. He loves roots music and has cred with musicians. He’s already a ubiquitous presence on public radio. But the Californian doesn’t have much of a claim on the Midwest, and it seems much of his success will hinge on his ability as a raconteur. Although Keillor says the news from Lake Wobegon will go the way of so many small-town news outlets and vanish, some fancy Keillor as a modern-day Mark Twain, and storytelling is a fundamental element of the show.

Even if Thile is a good fit for A Prairie Home Companion, A Prairie Home Companion is a curious fit for Thile. At 34, he’s less than half Keillor’s age and has a busy musical career. He has frequent gigs with Punch Brothers, your snobby bluegrass-fan friend’s answer to Mumford and Sons. Nickel Creek, the band he co-founded at 8, recently reunited after a hiatus. He’s a sought-after instrumentalist for other musicians and collaborates with symphonies and classical musicians like Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma. In 2012, he won a MacArthur Genius grant. Thile isn’t a lazy revivalist or formulaic pop-confectioneer—though he’s an earnest young man, his mandolin playing is truly astonishing, and Punch Brothers strives for musical innovation. A typical set might include a few bluegrass standards, a passel of originals, a dash of Debussy, and one of the all-acoustic Radiohead covers that have made the group Internet celebrities:

What will Thile have to sacrifice to take on the show, and how long will he do it? Having been a national star before he was even in his teens, Thile may be aging more quickly than the rest of us, but he still seems too young and ambitious for the velvet handcuffs of a weekly radio show that’s had a single host for the past four decades.

Of course, Keillor has never been quite as fusty and backward as his detractors like to assume—or as his fans like to imagine. Like Thile, he keeps a prickly, challenging interior under a crunchy, sugary shell. Even as Keillor plays with the nostalgia of old-time radio, he’s subverting those tropes and tweaking historical memory and the mores of small-town Minnesota. The show has long been a platform for its host’s progressive politics (this is public radio, after all), and anyone who doubts Keillor’s sharp edge should read his famous 2006 evisceration of a book by Bernard-Henri Levy, whom he describes as “a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore” with a “childlike love of paradox,” who “worships Woody Allen and Charlie Rose in terms that would make Donald Trump cringe with embarrassment.” (Timely!)

When I first read the Levy review, it was a revelation—I’d always suspected Keillor’s tongue was lodged in his cheek, but could never quite tell for sure, or how much. Reading him mow down Levy’s lazy stereotypes of Americans and America, it becomes clear how much A Prairie Home Companion is a loving skewering of many of the conventions that it seems to propagate.

Does earnest young Mr. Thile have the skepticism required to carry through this satire? Most listeners probably won’t care. But his success will likely hinge on whether he can offer a satisfying replacement for Keillor’s grandfatherly, Midwestern balm. If he can’t it will indeed be a very quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, out there on the edge of the prairie.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/garrison-keillor-prairie-home-companion-chris-thile/399077/

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/398864/an-evening-with-ta-nehisi-coates/

Why is the new Wilco album called Star Wars, and why is its cover a painting of a fluffy white cat? Here’s hoping that we never really find out. “I cry / at a joke / explained,” Jeff Tweedy sings four songs in, his voice a vampy impression of Bob Dylan’s as the band lays down a fuzz-rock flamenco backing. The rest of the song is a barrage of riddles: “It's a staring contest in a hall of mirrors / I sweat tears, but I don't ever cry.”

The song, “The Joke Explained,” is a worthy entry in Wilco’s long catalogue of songs that capture the idea of life as impossible to capture. Whether we’re all speakers speaking in code or one-way radios transmitting nonsense, Wilco’s adventuresome yet consistently tuneful music says that it’s normal and sometimes glorious to misunderstand and be misunderstood. As they’ve kept chugging into middle age, this core artistic premise has often been obscured by the dismissive description “dad-rock,” factually accurate though it may be (after all, Tweedy recently put out a record with his teenage son). Star Wars, the band’s ninth album, released by surprise and for free on the Internet, reminds that Wilco aren’t just reliable, safe rockers; they’re some of the most generous experimentalists to ever pick up guitars.

A crackling 33-minute trip, the album has way more in common with ‘90s indie pranksters like Pavement than it does with the Americana scene that Wilco’s long been associated with. While a few of these songs won’t stick in listeners’ heads for long, all of them feature a delightful sonic twist of some sort. You can tell what mood they’re in within a second of turning on the opener “EKG,” an instrumental whose migraine-frequency guitar stabs eventually lock onto a kraut groove that suggests liftoff into another world. In that world, we get a tune like “More…,” which sounds a bit like Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” except for the fact that its riffs pan between ears and the song drowns itself in distortion before the three-minute mark.

There’s precisely one track that sounds like the stereotype of a Wilco song—“Taste the Ceiling,” featuring acoustic strum, some soloing, and a tempo suited for lo-fi rom-com montages. It’s fine. Far more wonderful is the closer, “Magnetized,” which uses soft organ pulses and a theremin to portray love as something that warps a person as surely as an electromagnet warps a TV set. Another would-be ballad, “Where Do I Begin,” interrupts its lullaby for a punk-psychedelic eruption in its final seconds. I wish the band had rode that noise wave longer, maybe adding a soaring chorus on top of it. But doing so might have defeated the point of the album—ambitions low, surprise factor high.

The most fully formed thing here is “Random Name Generator,” which surges and struts as Tweedy riffs on the song title—his latest metaphor for the universe’s insane incomprehensible beauty. “I change my name every once in a while,” he sings with a touch of hair-rock hamminess, “A miracle every once in a while.” It’s impossible to know what he means for sure, but when I hear the song, I think about how this low-stakes, playful freebie of the album fits in with Wilco’s many reinventions over the years. Fans, at least, should be able to appreciate it deeply. “Your prayers,” Tweedy once sang, “will never be answered again.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/wilcos-star-wars-is-a-random-act-of-love/398993/

“I’m in somebody else’s house. How did I get here?” says an elderly man, with deepening fear. He’s blind and deaf, scooting himself across a dusty floor on his knuckles, his voice growing more urgent as his thin fingers reach out to touch the walls of his own home. “Help me,” he cries. “I’ve wandered into a stranger’s house ... He’s going to beat me up!”

There are any number of scenes like this in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breathtaking new documentary The Look of Silence, in which a 44-year-old optometrist named Adi Rakun confronts the men who killed his brother in the 1965 Indonesian genocide of more than a million alleged Communists. The film is laden with similar moments: symbolic and resonant, but rooted in a grim reality. The man crawling on the floor is Adi’s father, who suffers from dementia and is trapped in a surreal nightmare.

The film, which opened for a limited U.S. release Friday, is the companion to 2012’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, which offered a harrowing look at the aging perpetrators of the U.S.-backed genocide in Indonesia. Today, many of those men are still in power. Celebrated as national heroes, they brag openly about the mass murders they committed, reenacting for Oppenheimer in detail how they strangled, tortured, and beheaded people.

The first movie attempts to understand the circumstances that created an environment for such men to be revered, how the killers truly see themselves, and whether they’re capable of repenting for their actions. Released three years later, The Look of Silence switches to the perspective of the survivors and the victims’ families. It follows Adi, whose brother, Ramli, was among those murdered by paramilitary groups two years before Adi was born. With the help of Oppenheimer, who remains a largely invisible force behind the camera, Adi finally confronts his brother’s killers face-to-face. The documentary looks at what it’s like to live surrounded by the people who murdered your family—and how dangerous it can be to seek truth and healing in a country with a legacy of lying about and defending atrocities.

Though Adi didn’t witness firsthand the choking effects of violence, he grew up in a village that did. He learned of Ramli’s death from his mother (the only person who would speak about him), and, later, from Oppenheimer’s on-camera interviews with the perpetrators. The audience, in some ways, learns and processes facts alongside him. In scenes interspersed throughout the film, Adi sits quietly in an empty room before an old TV set. In one, he’s watching an excerpt from a 1967 NBC News report, where an Indonesian man tells a receptive American journalist how beautiful his country is now that it’s been cleansed of Communists. In other scenes, Adi watches two old men reenact with glee how they’d slit people’s throats, castrate them, and drag them through the fields to be dumped into the river.

But in the film’s most gripping scenes, Adi sits with his brother’s killers in real life—often while testing their eyesight—and asks them to take responsibility for their crimes. Before knowing Adi’s identity, most eagerly profess their deeds. One admits to bringing a woman’s head into a store to frighten the Chinese owners, and others to drinking their victims’ blood because it was the only way to avoid going crazy. “Both salty and sweet, human blood,” the death-squad leader, Inong, tells Adi, unprompted, during their exchange. “Excuse me?” Adi asks, as if unsure he’d heard correctly. “Human blood is salty and sweet,” Inong repeats.

After enough of these kinds of unimaginable details—both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are rife with them—it’s easy as a viewer to feel numb. Not from desensitization, but from the exhaustion of being pulled apart by competing emotions: horror, disgust, and disbelief on one hand, and  admiration and empathy for Adi on the other, who never once even raises his voice with his guests. His bravery—there’s no other word for it—causes his family to balk once he tells them he’s been meeting with Komando Aksi death squad leaders. “Think about your children!” his wife warns him. His mother advises him to carry a butterfly knife or a club, and to not drink anything he’s offered in case there’s poison in the cup (“Tell them you’re fasting,” she says.)

In The Look of Silence, “blood-thirsty,” has literal meaning. “Eviscerating” and “heartrending,” too. To say that the film cuts deeply feels wrong, after hearing veteran executioners discuss how they removed the limbs of their victims. And so it’s no surprise that when the film ends, for many viewers, the only response that might feel right is to say nothing at all for a while.

But to do that is to do an injustice to the movie. Neither Adi nor Oppenheimer are passive witnesses to what they discover. While Adi’s job is to correct the vision of others, he also tries to rectify their flawed vision of themselves and their place in history. He tells the killers that their truth is mere “propaganda.” He tells his son that his teachers are lying when they say the Communists were evil and had to be crushed.

Oppenheimer’s own hand in the film is invisible but critical. Adi encouraged him to collect the stories of the killers, but Oppenheimer also paved the way for Adi to meet with them safely by ingratiating himself to leaders and paramilitary groups. After speaking with dozens of perpetrators, he came to understand their revisionism as a symptom of collective ignorance. “Because they’ve never been removed from power ... they try to take these bitter, rotten memories and sugarcoat them in the sweet language of a victor’s history,” Oppenheimer told me. If The Act of Killing strips away the facade to reveal the killers’ hypocrisy, The Look of Silence looks at the lies both the perpetrators and victims have told themselves for decades in order to survive.

Even for a film that chooses to convey horror in close-up, The Look of Silence’s message finds broad relevance across geopolitical lines. The film doesn’t shy away from the U.S.’s role in the genocide: In one scene, a murderer says he should be rewarded with a trip to the U.S. for his work; in another, a perpetrator says, “We did this because America taught us to hate Communists.” The Indonesian genocide, Oppenheiemer said, is as much America’s history as the mass killing of Native Americans. He thinks the film should also prompt viewers to think of America’s involvement in other wrongdoings, past and present, that allow its citizens to lead comfortable lives with cheap electronics, clothes, and oil.

And yet. “It’s very moving to me that the film is coming out in the United States this summer, after a particularly traumatic year in which we’ve been reminded again and again ... in unmistakable ways, of the open wound of race right here,” Oppenheimer said. The last thing he wants is for people to see The Look of Silence as “as a window into a far-off place about which we know little and care less.” The spirit of Indonesia’s anti-Communist killings, which lasted from 1965-1966, isn’t so foreign: Oppenheimer describes America’s history of racism in more global terms. White supremacists and the Klan were effectively “neo-Nazi paramilitary mobs” who carried out “state-sanctioned terrorism ” through lynchings and other acts of violence against blacks. He recalls his own childhood, going to high school in suburban Maryland, where his mostly white magnet school within a majority-minority school was effectively legal “apartheid.”

An American listening to Oppenheimer might feel defensive, or ashamed. But The Look of Silence is about how this impulse to turn away from blunt truths—about one’s country and history—harms progress and reconciliation. In Adi’s case, people would chastise him for bringing up “politics” or for “opening a wound” every time he talked about his brother, whose name had become verboten in his village as shorthand for the entire genocide. Before change can unfold at the top, transformation needs to happen at the bottom. “You can’t have democracy without community, and you can’t have community if everyone’s afraid of each other,” Oppenheimer said.

And change is happening. After The Act of Killing was nominated for an Academy Award, the Indonesian government finally acknowledged the genocide, saying that the country would deal with it in its own time. The Look of Silence has been screened over 3,500 times to more than 300,000 people in Indonesia, Oppenheimer said. Many of those people will be relatives of the killers, but the film offers a hopeful blueprint for how generations living in the shadow of past crimes can come together, and move forward.

All these lessons take time to materialize fully. The Look of Silence is an inherently political film, but not one that ends with a lengthy text crawl imploring the audience to do their part and change the world. Like its predecessor, it’s a devastatingly beautiful film about the power of cinema, and its ability to testify to some aspect of human nature with a veracity and elegance that escapes other mediums. Every scene weighs on the audience. But Oppenheimer and Adi manage to locate a lightness as well that lessens the burden.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/look-of-silence-joshua-oppenheimer-documentary/398672/

From Max Ehrenfreund:

…because of an obscure law known as the Jones Act, which bans foreign vessels from shipping goods between U.S. ports, businesses in Puerto Rico have to use the U.S. merchant marine to import anything. They can’t just hire whatever boats and crew are available, which makes shipping even more expensive. The cost of transportation in Puerto Rico is twice that in the neighboring Caribbean nations…

New book: Thing Explainer!

This month, Professor Mildred Dresselhaus became the first woman to receive the IEEE Medal of Honor for her leadership and contributions across many fields of science and engineering. 

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

She becomes the first African-American female principal dancer in the company’s 75-year history.

A years-long battle over a Colorado tax law went into another period of overtime on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court sent the fight back to a lower court.

Why is Canada so boring? It's a question that Canadian journalist Jeet Heer tried to answer in a series of tweets that are both quaintly earnest (this is a Canadian writing about Canadianness, after all) and surprisingly insightful. The question, it turns out, gets to the very core of what it means to be Canadian. That might sound to Americans like the setup to a joke, but to the country's 36 million citizens it's a very real — and not totally settled — issue.

The full series of tweets is embedded below and well worth your time, but Heer lands on two theories. (As he clarifies, these apply to English-speaking Canada, not to the culturally un-integrated French-speaking Quebec.)

The nice theory: Canadians have cultivated an identity of boringness as an alternative to the two other cultures that loom so large for them: the British, whose empire they were a part of until relatively recently, and the noisy Americans to the south. "Canadian boringness isn't intrinsic: it's something we work at, cherish and reward," Heer writes. Because both of those cultural forces exert such power in Canada, cultivated boringness is another way of saying, "We are not British and we are not American."

The less nice theory: Canada's self-made image of boringness is really just shorthand for whiteness. In other words, Canadian culture emphasizes "look at how charmingly boring we are" as a polite way of saying "this is a white, Anglo nation." Or, as Heer put it, "The constructed mask of boringness is also the mask of whiteness." This, he suggests, "presents the county as being much whiter than it is" and is a way to exclude First Nations and ethnic minorities from Canadian identity.

There is probably real truth to both of these.

One point I will add is that I've noticed Canadians frequently describe their culture in contrast to American culture. But talking so much about how you are different from Americans is really just another way of talking around all the ways you're similar, and this preoccupation with highlighting the differences and downplaying the similarities has always felt telling to me.

Canadian writer Bruce McCall, in a great 2013 Vanity Fair piece on why Canada produces so many successful comedians, explained it as a kind of resistance to American culture. "It is impossible to fully express Canadian resentment of America's cultural dominance, and the sense of impotence and helplessness," he writes. "Humor — subversive, ironic, usually dark — is one of the very few weapons available to the oppressed." But that's not just a reaction to American identity, of course; it's also a way of dealing with the fact that it leaves very little room for a distinct Canadian identity. Cultivated Canadian boringness is perhaps a way of owning that problem, and making it the identity itself.

Here's Jeet Heer's full series of tweets on the subject:

If you made it to the bottom, as a reward, here is a great old Jim Carrey standup bit on American conceptions of Canada that speak to my earlier points:

“Words have meaning,” Antonin Scalia insisted in 2013. “And their meaning doesn’t change.”

That second argument is something most linguists and lexicographers will, at minimum, quibble with. It is also, however, a foundation of Scalia’s particular approach to Constitutional interpretation. “I mean, the notion that the Constitution should simply, by decree of the Court, mean something that it didn’t mean when the people voted for it,” the associate Supreme Court justice explained to New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior—“frankly, you should ask the other side of the question! How did they ever get there?”

How indeed. Scalia is someone who loves words—not just as sources of literary performance (alliteration! puns! Kulturkampf! argle-bargle!), but also as sources of semantic stability. Words, Scalia believes, root us, collectively and epistemologically. So his famously saucy approach to language isn’t just about bringing literature to legalese, or about the schadenfreudic delights of sending reporters scrambling to dictionaries and thesauri when he issues a scathing dissent. It’s also a philosophical declaration about the unchanging nature of old truths, whatever document may enshrine them. As the speechwriter Jeff Shesol wrote in the New Yorker last year, “His approach has always been to reach for a dictionary; find, in one edition or other, a definition that drives toward his predetermined decision; and express, eyes wide with disbelief, utter amazement that anyone could even think of seeing it any other way.”

As a result, Scalia has cited, in his opinions, not just the Random House College Dictionary, but also Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (publication date: 1828), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1773), and Timothy Cunningham’s A New and Complete Law Dictionary (1771). Because words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.

It was itself meaningful, then, that in his dissent on Thursday in King v. Burwell, arguing against the Court’s latest upholding of Obamacare, Scalia concluded: “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’”

It was also meaningful that he added, of the majority decision:

“The Court’s next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act that purportedly presuppose the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges.”

And also that he called the Court’s upholding of Obamacare the result of “somersaults of statutory interpretation.”

And also that he concluded: “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

On the one hand, of course, this is just Scalia being Scalia (and the rest of us being Scalia’ed). Jiggery-pokery! In one of his earliest dissents, in 1987’s Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Scalia quoted that linguistic ur-innovator: Shakespeare. Citing an exchange from Henry IV, the new associate justice invoked “spirits from the vasty deep.”

In Romer v. Evans, a 1996 case on LGBT discrimination, he declared that “the Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite,” referring to “the German policies designed to reduce the role and power of the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck.”

In PGA Tour v. Casey Martin, a 2001 case addressing the Americans with Disabilities Act’s place in professional sports, he referred to the notion of “Platonic golf.”

In 2009, he debated a presenting lawyer about the ontology of the word “choate.” (“There is no such adjective,” Scalia insisted. “I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as ‘choate.’ There is ‘inchoate,’ but the opposite of ‘inchoate’ is not ‘choate.’”)

In his dissent in 2013’s Maryland v. King, a case that revolved around the constitutionality of taking DNA samples from arrest suspects, Scalia warned of the dangers of creating a “genetic panopticon.”

In his dissent against the striking down of the Defense of Marriage Act, Scalia famously categorized the majority opinion in the case as “legalistic argle-bargle.” (The term itself, its argliness and bargliness to the contrary, is not argle-bargle: It means, the lexicographer Ben Zimmer pointed out, “a description of ‘a verbal dispute’ or ‘a wrangling argument.’”)

And in that 2013 interview with New York magazine, Scalia used the word “ukase”—as in, the decision to strike down DOMA was “not at the ukase of a Supreme Court.”

His interviewer, Jennifer Senior—summoning the reaction most Americans would have to this creative diction—replied, simply: “What?”

“U-K-A-S-E,” Scalia answered, spelling it out. “Yeah. I think that’s how you say it. It’s a mandate. A decree.”

The Justice, the National Constitution Center notes, was correct. Merriam-Webster defines “ukase” as “a proclamation by a Russian emperor or government having the force of law.”

All of which—words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change—is classic Scalia. It’s words interpreted not just as conduits of meaning, but as solidifiers of it.

In The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman notes that Scalia “has the feel of an ambitious Scrabble player trying too hard to prove that a triple word score really does exist.” But the stakes in his game, argle-bargle and jiggery-pokery notwithstanding, are high. Words, in the Court, are—or, at least, they can be—proxies for Constitutional interpretation. Justices can see them either as living, breathing, contextual things, or as things that are inscribed to their original coinage. There cannot, Scalia insists, be two sides to this argument. Elena Kagan, in a back-and-forth opinion-battle with Scalia last year, declared that “we must (as usual) interpret the relevant words not in a vacuum,” but instead with regard to their “structure, history, and purpose.”

A notion to which, in a flourish fitting of his great philosophical frustration, Scalia has now replied: “Pure applesauce.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/antonin-scalia-word-nerd/396845/

Tasha Sturm, a lab technician at Cabrillo College, had her 8-year-old son put his handprint on a prepared petri dish and then incubated it for several days. This was the result:

If you'll excuse me, I have to go wash my hands about 4,000 times. Bacteria is cooooool though:

(via colossal)

Tags: biology   photography   science   Tasha Sturm

 

Dwarf goats will join chickens, bees and turkeys as animals Arvada residents can keep in their backyards after a 7-0 vote during Monday night's City Council meeting.

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we've invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we're honored to present a post from Ryan Cooper, national correspondent for the Week.

The next several years will see a rolling 150th anniversary of Reconstruction, my favorite period in American history. From about 1865 to 1877, American society as a whole tried reasonably hard to do right by the freed slaves, before getting tired of the effort and abandoning them to the depredations of racist terrorism. For the next nine decades, black Americans had few if any political rights under the boot heel of Jim Crow.

It's both a shining example of what can happen when a society really tries to right a past wrong, and tragic, infuriating failure of will. But most of all it's very interesting. Things were changing, social orders were being overthrown, historical ground was being broken. At a time when few nations had any suffrage at all, roughly 4 million freed slaves got the vote in a single stroke, perhaps the single starkest act of democratic radicalism in world history.

So it's weirdly fascinating to read conservative historiography of the 19th century, such as this piece by Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, as an example of how Darryl Worley-style historiography irons all the best parts out of American history.

He's interested in trying to prove that a "non-coercive" economy is possible, by which he means that taxes and spending could be dramatically lower than they are today. Thus he charts government spending as a percentage of GDP, finds that it was pretty low for most of the 19th century, and claims victory:

What the left wants is not just to make America’s economic history disappear. It needs to make America’s political system disappear: to make truly small, truly limited government seem like a utopian fantasy that can safely be dismissed. Please bear in mind that this latest example came up in the context of a discussion about the justification for government force. So what they want to describe as an unrealistic fantasy is a society not dominated by coercion.

One might think that when writing a paean to a noncoercive century, it might be a good idea to address the fact that for 60 percent of that century, it was government policy that human beings could be owned and sold like beasts, or that half or more of the national economy was based on that institution. But no, the word "slavery" does not appear in the piece. Neither does "Civil War" or "Reconstruction," which as a literal war against and military occupation of the South would seem fairly coercive.

So speaking of the 19th century as one notably free of coercion is not just utterly risible, it's also a cockeyed way to look at what was good or bad about it. The economy of the antebellum South was founded on the labor of owned human beings, extracted through torture. Slave masters set steadily increasing quotas for cotton picking, for instance, and would flog slaves according to the number of "missing" pounds. As Edward Baptist writes, they thus increased the productivity of slave cotton-picking by nearly 400 percent from 1860 to 1865.

It was akin to the Gulag system of Soviet Russia, except that it had all the power of the red-hot Industrial Revolution, including cutting-edge financial technology, behind it. That combination of slavery plus explosive economic growth and innovation made the antebellum South one of the most profoundly evil places that has ever existed — one that was an absolutely critical part of early industrial growth in both Britain and the North.

But on the other hand, the war that ended slavery, despite involving coercion in the form of organized mass killing, was therefore good! And so was Reconstruction, even though that involved extremely harsh measures against the likes of the KKK. Whether coercion is good or bad depends on just who is being coerced and why.

And that, in turn, puts the lie to conservative complaints that liberals always "blame America first." On the contrary, grappling with the pitch-black periods of history makes the positive notes shine all the brighter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, the "epoch of slavery is…the quintessential romance of American history." It's just a romance difficult to detect in the GDP statistics.

Though the concept has been celebrated and criticized, it has come under scrutiny again, particularly as people are now retiring during a period of low interest rates.

D'Souza is the saddest, worst criminal alive, it's so entertaining

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 6, 2015

hard out there in Obama's America http://t.co/oXwQoN22y8 pic.twitter.com/UKLH8tStqe

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 6, 2015

From the NYPost article:

… D’Souza’s parole officer had included with the “summer vacation” request a recent Vanity Fair article about D’Souza — but the judge was unimpressed.

“With respect to the Vanity Fair article, the court has no immediate reaction other than the article suggests several fertile areas of discussion during Mr. D’Souza’s required therapeutic counseling,” wrote Berman…

Imagine a “celebrity boxing match” between Dinesh D’Souza and James O’Keefe III.

That would get me to sign up for cable, just to make sure I could access the pay-per-view…
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Apart from the Usual Gang of Sad GOP Klowns, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for “migraine(s),” “economist,” “sweater,” “Daily Show,” and “Lakers.”

That is from an interesting Wonkblog article, using Google searches, trying to estimate the most racist regions of America.  The rural Northeast and Midwest don’t do so well.

The pointers are from SV and AM.