July 2011
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Fifth-Year Senior: Why Making High School Longer... →
infoneer-pulse:
After four years of high school, you were probably pretty ready to graduate. But what if you could have earned college credit if you stayed for a fifth year? Students in Maine might soon get the option to do just that. In order to ensure that the state is truly preparing the workforce of the future, governor Paul LePage followed up on a campaign promise this week and issued an...
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The Second Most Poetical Topic in the World →
If the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, as Edgar Allen Poe famously argued in 1846, then is the death of a beautiful woman’s child the second most poetical topic? So it would seem to filmmaker Terrence Malick, whose artful Tree of Life tries to gain emotional weight from actress Jessica Chastain’s soulful eyes and shapely ankles in the role of...
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The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest from Utne
A plain writing convert bids fond farewell to polysyllabic prose.
Previously unpublished Yeats play, Love and Death, is now available online.
Step aside, Golem. Make way for real life Jewish strongman Zisha Breitbart in Superman’s creation myth.
George Saunders dissects the curse of the creative writer: the impulse to convert every involuntarily thrilling moment in one’s life into story...
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mental_floss on tumblr: Message in a Bottle →
mentalflossr:
When Josh Baker was 10 years old, he dumped an entire bottle of his mother’s vanilla extract down the sink. He then wrote a quick note that said, “My name is Josh Baker. I’m 10. If you find this, put it on the news. The date is April 16, 1995.” He stuffed the note inside the empty extract…
An ephemeral, bittersweet story.
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The Longform.org Guide to Rupert Murdoch →
futurejournalismproject:
Six profiles spanning 34 years in the life of our favorite media villain.
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Discrimination Against the Unemployed Still... →
(via MediaJobsDaily)
A review the New York Times conducted of job postings on Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist found that hundreds of employers are still requiring (or “strongly prefer”ring) applicants to be employed when jobhunting.
It’s not illegal (yet) to require an applicant to be employed, as it would be to require an applicant to be a specific race or gender. But New Jersey...
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Susana Baca's World of Song →
More than a decade ago, Susana Baca was one of the standout voices on The Soul of Black Peru, a compilation on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label that found its way into the collections of many budding lovers of global music. Her version of the classic song “Maria Lando” was hauntingly memorable, and it launched her successful career at the forefront of an Afro-Peruvian music revival. Keep reading...
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Juvenile Delinquents Hit the Dirt →
How should a civil society manage its juvenile delinquents, those that “grew up on the streets and have only known a life of crime, slums, and jail”? Imprisonment and other costly government-funded programs are the most commonly used options. But Shimon Shocken, an IT professor from Ra’anana, Israel, sees a different path to delinquent recovery—a dusty, rocky, uphill trail best traversed on...
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How Default Threatens National Security →
motherjones:
The answer: A whole lot.
Money quote:
“It would be myopic in the extreme to view the flow of oil to the United States as a legitimate national security issue but to view the flow of foreign capital into Treasury securities as a matter of no particular concern.”
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Amy Winehouse and the Pop Authenticity Trap →
(via Salon)
Offstage, we watched her stumbling around London in a bedraggled beehive and a pair of dirty ballet flats, buying bags of potato chips, her tiny shorts barely supported by her toothpick-thin frame, bloodied and hollering at reporters. It was impossible not to draw easy parallels between Winehouse’s art and her apparently tumultuous life. And while her fans ostensibly blanched at...
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Burning Man festival sells out for first time in... →
(via Denver Post)
Spokeswoman Marian Goodell says ticket sales were cut off on Monday as they approached the 50,000 limit set by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
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With Us or Against Us →
A few weeks ago, a strange, seemingly anachronistic snippet of text momentarily flooded the viralsphere. Versions of it had appeared over the past year or so in various and disparate Facebook Users’ status updates, as material on robotic news aggregation sites, and as posts on unscrupulous and content-desperate blogs around the world. “Charles Beaumont’s ‘The Crooked Man’...
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London During WWII, In Colour →
ckck:
Rare colour photographs of London in ruins during The Blitz of 1940-1941.
Cool/sad thing of the day.
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Has Electronic Music Lost Its Human Soul? →
(via Discovery)
From the use of Auto-Tuned pop music to such popular subgenres as dubstep, electronic music seems to be everywhere. But is it “real music,” or something inauthentic and artificial?
“I would’ve heard that much more maybe five or 10 years ago,” says Atlanta-based electronic artist Richard Devine, “but I think now the digital age has pretty much...
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Why are Hollywood trailers so rubbish? →
(via The Telegraph)
There’s a great talent in Hollwood for making a $200 million movie look cheap, tacky and ugly, says David Gritten.
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Writing September 11th, an American impossibility →
Many American novelists have tried their hand at what is now widely referred to as “9/11 fiction,” more often than not, to mixed reviews. Often novels by writers from other countries are cited as the most successful books on the matter. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, who was born in Ireland and schooled in The Netherlands, is often said to be the best novel about September 11, 2001.
This,...
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