August 2011
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
3 tags
Worried about your safety? Start unfriending. →
(via New Scientist)
It turns out that unfriending the least discreet friend increases your security by an average of more than 5 per cent—worth it for a casual acquaintance, but perhaps not so easy if your best buddy is a blabbermouth.
7 tags
3 tags
3 tags
5 tags
“Sorry, NYT, It doesn’t matter how many sleazy hack jobs like Ravi Somaiya...”
– A tweet from WikiLeaks after an article in the Tuesday New York Times alleged that WikiLeaks left the names of confidential sources in their latest document dump.
4 tags
5 tags
Syrian-born poet Adonis becomes first Arab writer... →
(via The Guardian)
The 81-year-old poet, a perennial favourite to win the Nobel prize for literature, was presented with the award by the city of Frankfurt on Goethe’s birthday, 28 August. The jury called him “the most important Arab poet of our time”, and praised his “eminent literary talent, his cosmopolitanism and his contribution to world literature”.
6 tags
3 tags
5 tags
The New York Times has the story of Exxon winning... →
inothernews:
Maybe they should just drill for irony.
“We might be able to accept that a modern American principle allows for...”
– For The Atlantic, I ask how American interventionism really is (hint: not very). (via theconjecturer)
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
4 tags
Why World Peace Has a Fighting Chance →
I’m not sure whether or not beauty pageant contestants wish for world peace these days, but lately the very idea, like Miss America herself, seems both antiquated and absurd. Including the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are 18 wars being waged at this very moment. And given America’s open-ended “war on terror,” the racial climate in Europe, the economic strife in Africa, and the...
4 tags
Surprise, surprise: China bans pop music →
(via Variety)
Lady Gaga is a threat to China’s “national cultural security,” according to the censors at the country’s Ministry of Culture.
As part of the “regulation of management of Internet culture,” music download sites have been told to remove around 100 songs, including 20 foreign songs, or face the consequences, with Lady Gaga leading the list of...
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
3 tags
7 tags
3 tags
5 tags
“Whether you’re a cupcake-baking porn lover, a Summer’s-Eve-hating urban farmer,...”
– 91 years after women won the right to vote, Bust Magazine’s Erina Davidson writes on mutual respect for all types of women.
Read more …
3 tags
The Utopian Education: Children Read, All Day... →
(via Harvard Magazine)
In my dentist’s office, when I was a child, was a sign that ran:
Without teeth there can be no chewing.
Without chewing there can be no nourishment.
Without nourishment there can be no health.
Without health, what is life?
Its rhetoric of concatenation struck me even then as irrefutable. I’d propose a different concatenation for the humanities: without reading, ...
9 tags
Yesterday's news could be tomorrow's fuel. →
(via Discovery News)
Tulane University scientists discovered a strain of clostridia bacteria, dubbed “TU-103,” that can devour old newspapers to produce butanol, a substitute for gasoline.
Old editions of the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper, have been successfully used by the researchers to produce butanol from the cellulose in the paper.
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
2 tags
2 tags
What I Learned in Two Years at the Tea Party | The... →
cameronr:
Teaser quote:
I concluded that trying to figure out what they wanted was a dead end because what they wanted was simply to complain—that the Tea Party “is not a group of listen and respond; this is a group of respond and respond.” Two years of Tea Party functions later, and I finally know what the Tea Party wants: A Christian nation.
6 tags
Haruki Murakami yanked from a New Jersey school... →
(via The Guardian)
Haruki Murakami’s venerated novel of love and mental illness, Norwegian Wood, has been pulled off a reading list for New Jersey teenagers after a rash of complaints from parents.
The novel, which has inspired obsessive devotion from its fans in Japan and around the world since it was first published in 1987, is set in 1960s Tokyo, and tells of 19-year-old Toru...
7 tags
“I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.,...”
– Outspoken environmentalist Bill McKibben on going to prison for the planet. Keep reading …
5 tags
Twilight of the Media Critics →
(via Gawker)
Yesterday, the already-shrunken world of media reporting lost its two grandest figures: Jim Romenesko, the quiet man who singlehandedly set the agenda, like a front page editor for all media news (semi-retiring, by choice); and Slate’s Jack Shafer—America’s most consistently fearless press critic (laid off). Step back. Look around at the smoldering carnage of the...
5 tags
4 tags
12 tags
The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest from Utne
Talk about a traffic jam: Globally, there are now 1 billion cars on the road.
Lori Adorable offers women 8 ethical tips in her guide to feminist erotic modeling.
A travel guidebook writer achieves transcendence on a 30-hour van ride across Mongolia.
French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s indictment may have been dismissed, but the case still shed light on the sexual assaults suffered by...
8 tags
4 tags
5 tags
What If Journalists Stopped Trying to Be Political... →
futurejournalismproject:
dominickbrady:
Jay Rosen, the astute press critic, is giving a speech today about the problematic ways the political press covers presidential campaigns. It’s a subject a lot of folks have addressed over the years, so it’s impressive that he’s added value to the conversation.
Raising hand: It would be a gazallion times better.
Liking this:
In politics, our...
4 tags
9 tags
5 tags
9 tags
7 tags
7 tags
