Gleanings: February 8, 2012
Florence Green, Last World War I Veteran, Dies at 110
“It seems,” she remarked to The Independent last year, on the occasion of her 110th birthday, “like such a long time ago now.”
Category: Almanac
Gleanings: February 7, 2012
Rabbis oppose Minnesota marriage amendment
“Throughout history the Jewish community has faced discrimination, and therefore we will not stand by while others are targeted.”
The Downward Mobility of the American Middle Class
But Romney and other Republicans have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in benefits is Americans got clobbered in 2008 and many are still sinking. They and their families need whatever help they can get.
How Modern Life Is Like a Zombie Onslaught
Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche.
Coelacanths are not living fossils. Like the rest of us, they evolve
But the truth is that evolution leaves no fish behind. Coelacanths are as much affected by evolution as finches, ferns and flying lemurs. They have their own evolutionary history – we only need to look for it.
Gleanings: February 6, 2012
Two Deaths: A Poet And A Beetle : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR
She’d wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper’s hop, an infant’s fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, a vividness.
Why publishers should give away ebooks
Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right – in tune with the universe, somehow.
William Burroughs Birthday
Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus
Wulf’s findings fit well with the idea that flow – and better learning – comes when you turn off conscious thought. “When you have an external focus, you achieve a more automatic type of control,” she says. “You don’t think about what you are doing, you just focus on the outcome.”
Bill Moyers Makes Newt Gingrich Look Like an Idiot
By explaining who Alinsky was and even how Gingrich himself has adopted at least one of Alinsky’s talking points, Moyers shows that the candidate, who claims to be a historian, is either ignorant of Saul Alinsky, or is deliberately misleading people.
Cartographies of Time
‘Stay Awake’: Stories On Grief And Everything After
Although each story contains different characters, there’s an unsettling thematic commonality among them. People are lost — to car accidents, suicides or diseases — and their loved ones do their best to get by. Often unsuccessfully.
The Lads in Their Hundreds: the Music of World War I
In his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell insists that the ironies of the war — the deep discrepancies between the heroic ideals of fighting the war and its ultimate realities — marked the beginning of habits and expressions that still resonate with us today. The Great War, he says, introduced irony as a pervasive mode of thinking. For many, it reversed the idea of Progress. Words like heroism, courage, honor and authority became tarnished, and would have to be shined up again for later conflicts and later generations.
7th Grader Suspended for Saying I Love You in Native Language -NativeNewsNetwork
The alleged ‘attitude problem’ turned out to be that Miranda said the Menominee word
“posoh”
that means
“hello”and said
“Ketapanen”
in Menominee that means “I love you.”
Evening Harvest: February 4, 2012
The Millions : I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs
It’s tempting to look back no further than the origins of the word “blurb,” coined in 1906 by children’s book author and civil disobedient Gelett Burgess. But blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them (“bullshit,” in case you were wondering, appeared in 1915)
Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death
Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality.
Social networks 10,000 years before Facebook
When the researchers put this information together, they found that Hadza who contributed more to the common good were more likely to be friends with other cooperative people. These connections formed clusters that were often near the center of the social networks.
Evening Harvest: January 31, 2012
Have Your Cake And Eat Its Package
Maybe in the future you’ll be able to sip some juice, and eat the package.
Major undertakings.
No More E-Books Vs. Print Books Arguments, OK?
We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.
Evening Harvest: January 30, 2012
The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg – NYTimes.com
This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.
Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital
A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online.
SETI Research Is Revived
Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — SETI, for short — which had been interrupted last year by a lack of financing.
Gleanings: January 29, 2012
‘The Snowy Day’: Breaking Color Barriers, Quietly : NPR
“It was no longer necessary that the book say, ‘I am an African-American child going out into the snow today,’ ” Pope says. “They realized that you don’t put a color on a child’s experience of the snow.”
Beautifully Shot Short Film About the Art of Letterpress – My Modern Metropolis
China’s advantage- Serfdom
China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape.
After the death of Jack Kevorkian, a new public face of American assisted suicide
As he did with the death penalty doctors in Texas, Egbert weighed the choices that Nazi doctors made — choices that eventually led to unspeakable evils — against the choices he made.
“It makes me suspicious of everything I do — that I might be doing something evil,” he says. “I think about it a lot.”
Evening Harvest: January 27, 2012
Chicago’s Hull House, founded by Jane Addams, closes doors after more than 120 years
“I wish we would have known. Why weren’t they screaming this from the rooftops?” said [Victoria] Brown[, author of "The Education of Jane Addams"]. Addams “was known as gentle, not confrontational, but one of her favorite words was `stupid.’ She would say, `This is just stupid. How could this have happened?’”
‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine
“Part of what made it seem so liberating to so many girls is that it allowed those with an analytic mind and an interest in the pursuit of science to read about a subject that at the time was not perceived of as a suitable course of study for girls,” said Leonard Marcus, author of a biography of L’Engle, “Searching for Madeleine,” to be published this fall. “At the same time, at its core it’s about a girl’s love for her father, and that emotional level transcends the genre aspect of the book.”
Lessons I’ve Learned Starting a Micropress by Roxanne Gay
Writers are generous enough to gracefully, patiently work with a micropress. They are generous enough to let you publish their work for little or no money up front. These presses would not be possible without writers being great. I’ve heard horror stories about writers but have not experienced any yet. I hope to never be a horror story as a publisher.Check out Tiny Hardcore Press–great stuff!
The Devil’s Trumpet
The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In Witten’s theory, the girls went crazy. In Norton’s, the town went crazy.
Newspoet: Tracy K. Smith Writes The Day In Verse : NPR
History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman
Corralling her children onto a crowded bus.
Gleanings: January 27, 2012
RIP Dick Tufeld, voice of “Robby the Robot”
Dick Tufeld, a longtime radio and TV announcer who intoned “Danger, Will Robinson!” as the voice of the robot in the 1960s science-fiction TV series “Lost in Space,” has died. He was 85.
Happy Birthday, Charles Dodgson
Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.
Publicity and the Introvert | Theodora Goss
Some time ago, a writer friend told me that he was working on a novel, and that once the novel was finished, he would begin to publicize it. He would update his website, go on Facebook. Maybe even tweet. And I thought, how do I tell him that he’s leaving it way too late? That you should start doing publicity at least a year before you have anything coming out? If you start doing it when you have a novel coming out, no one will know who you are.
Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future
But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.
Some of my worst friends are books – Rick Gekoski
Writers and readers coexist and invent and reinvent each other in some symbiotic way, but that doesn’t make me mistake James Joyce for a friend. He died before I was born. I would never have met him even if he hadn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have liked him and he wouldn’t have been interested in me. Not a friend.
In the Land of the Non-Reader – Jonathan Gourlay
I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
“Apocalypse Soon” by Daniel Baird
It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting. At least then, the human story, swinging unstably as it does between heights of imagination and bottomless depths of depravity, doesn’t end, as T. S. Eliot’s bleak The Hollow Men would have it, with a whimper.
Thank You, Anarchists | The Nation
The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us.
Someone Else’s Children by Christopher Benfey
His iconic image, “A Morning’s Work,” shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day.
Gleanings: January 25, 2012
The Hazda
I’d brought along a photo album, and passing it around helped mitigate the awkwardness. Onwas was interested in a picture of my cat. “How does it taste?” he asked.
“Murder is My Business” – Photos by Weegee at I.C.P. – NYTimes.com
“He was a serious and well-respected photographer who worked in a tradition that was denigrated as tabloid photography. He didn’t know the world of museums and galleries, but he did know one thing very well: the streets of New York. He took that seriously.”
