Portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln Is Deemed a Hoax

When he died less than a year after the painting’s public unveiling, an obituary in a Reading, Pa., newspaper noted that he “dabbled in oil paintings.” Apparently he dabbled more than anyone at the time realized.

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Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate’s Income Inequality Hearing

A major source of inequality in the tax code comes from how it treats investment income. Just ask Mitt Romney, who paid 13.9 percent of his income in taxes in 2010. Most of his earnings came from capital gains, which only get taxed at 15 percent. Proponents of the loophole argue that it helps spur investment, but it also disproportionately helps the rich.

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A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit

Not only was Eliot at the bank, but as the letter above demonstrates, he was happy to be there. A certain pride creeps in to his accounting of his accounting: the salary, the hours, the filing cabinet which is “my province.” To read Eliot’s letters is to get a full picture of the routine demands of this job, which he clung to despite rigorous efforts from his friends and supporters to free him from the shackles of international finance.

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Time for the Tumbrils! by Alexander Cockburn

Also, “conversation” — used as a way of taming all debate and doctrinal struggle into demure prattle. And let us note and deplore the meteoric rise of “existential,” which appears to be “going viral.”

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The Shirley Temple – Graham Greene Connection

How a review that pointed out the creepiness of Shirley Temple movies led to “The Power and the Glory”

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Cindy Sherman talks to Simon Schama

Sherman is often mistakenly thought of as a one-note impresario of the grotesque, working in a range from neurosis to horror. For sure, the eloquent, impish person I’ve been talking to has always had a yen for the weird and the wondrous, but I tell her how struck I am by the sheer range of human types she manages to print on her face.

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RIP John Christopher (Samuel Youd), author of the Tripod books

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Shadow and Smoke by Charles Wright

Live your life as though you were already dead

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American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem.

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How to Officially Forget

Look: The same junk from Nanchang has washed up here in Wal-Mart. It’s the end of 2011, and we are wondering what to make of a bunch of people who decided occupy a space. Is it meaningful, important, ridiculous, futile, or some combination of these?

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‘Rasputin Was My Neighbor’ And Other True Tales Of Time Travel

There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him…” long ago jumps closer.

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The Great Illusion of Gettysburg

Hundreds of black veterans made the journey to Gettysburg to mark the 50th anniversary. They greeted the reenacted rebel yells with cold silence. And, like many of their white comrades in the Grand Army of the Republic, they distinguished between forgiving and forgetting.

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The Storytellers of Empire

I don’t mean Americans looked at America uncritically. I mean they looked at it merely in domestic terms.

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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.”

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Rabbis oppose Minnesota marriage amendment

“Throughout history the Jewish community has faced discrimination, and therefore we will not stand by while others are targeted.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Why publishers should give away ebooks

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right – in tune with the universe, somehow.

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William Burroughs Birthday

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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.”

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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.

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Cartographies of Time

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‘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.

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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.

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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.”

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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)

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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.

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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.

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Have Your Cake And Eat Its Package

Maybe in the future you’ll be able to sip some juice, and eat the package.

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Major undertakings.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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