Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake (disclaimer for benefit of my libertarian friends: this post is not about liberal politics) wrote on April 21st about Marcy Wheeler, linking to a FDL campaign to raise $150,000 so that Wheeler can set up shop as a full time writer with research support, a travel budget, etc., to continue breaking […]
The LA Times published a survey today called “If I ran the NEA…”, asking all sorts of public figures what they would do. I haven’t read them all, but so far I disagree strongly with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (”Public Works projects”) and Jon Robin Baitz, who gets the “nincompompous mentos” award (which I’ve just established in […]
According to The Consumerist, Facebook’s new terms of service assign the company perpetual ownership of all your posted content, even after you close your account. Yes, this means that years hence, when you run for President, win an Olympic Gold Medal, or marry one of Brad Pitt’s kids, Facebook has the right to sell your […]
“There is a languor of the life, more imminent than pain; it is pain’s successor, when the soul has suffered all it can.”
The other night I was watching the latest Battlestar Gallactica, when Adama spoke those words in voiceover and my hair stood on end. It was as if someone had reached into my […]
Today I am missing James Baldwin. I’d like to know what he would have to say about the rash of false memoirs, several of them Oprah-centric, starting with James Frey, and continuing today with the canceled publication of Herman Rosenblat’s wildly improbable–and as it turns out (tada!) untrue–Holocaust romance. Rosenblat got the book deal in […]
I made a visit last week to Dearborn, MI, where the Henry Ford Museum has Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House on permanent exhibit. First sketched in 1927, the idea when it was proposed for manufacture in the late 1940s was that the house could be manufactured using aircraft machinery by returning vets, and sold to those […]
TierneyLab is hosting a discussion of this odd concept, prompted by a new book on the subject of “Nudges,” which boils down to: non-binding directives issued by the government that strongly encourage a preferred behavior, while obscuring less preferred behaviors. One analogy given is prominently displaying fruit in a cafeteria, and keeping the chocolate cake […]