January 2012
4 posts
“I can only speak for myself here; I don’t know the reasons for other people’s searches, just as I don’t know why User #2446971 spent, according to her search timestamps, a sizeable portion of her Mother’s Day asking a data-mining algorithm why her son has abandoned her. Perhaps this is simply another iteration of calling out into the dark, whispering prayers on bended...
“There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless. ‘‘I don’t like how it would feel,’’ you could say, or, ‘‘It would change my behavior, make me self-conscious.’’ These are highly abstract, rather unconvincing arguments, especially when...
“… taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end...”
– Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via hateshiploveship)
December 2011
12 posts
“…But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be...
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself—for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test...
“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine....”
– Leo Tolstoy, from a letter to a friend on the advent of cinema (via confusionis)
“She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live; she read books as...”
– Annie Dillard, The Living (via thebronzemedal)
“Given the uncanny power of gum, it seems a little silly that we don’t allow it...”
– Wired’s Jonah Lehrer on the cognitive benefits of chewing gum (via curiositycounts)
November 2011
4 posts
“Do you never pick up the world as a child picks up a crystal globe – a thing of...”
– Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone (via gawdblimey)
October 2011
3 posts
Call the girl asleep on the bench an avalanche: swiftness is not her calling, but she will forgo stillness to become the eel in his big glass world, otherwise known as a jar. Call the boy on the terrace an insect. His thoughts, minuteness. Call him Yashpal, Surinder, Joseph, Millipede. Don’t call it to his face, or his million legs will crumble. Call that love Call this century a fortress. The...
September 2011
21 posts
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National Geographic Magazine: Beautiful Brains |... →
nationalgeographicmagazine:
By David Dobbs Photograph by Kitra Cahana Although you know your teenager takes some chances, it can be a shock to hear about them.
Through the ages, most answers have cited dark forces that uniquely affect the teen. Aristotle concluded more than 2,300 years ago that “the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.” A shepherd in William...
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Woods +
“…For example, I don’t know if you saw this but according to the New York Times Mark Zuckerberg is taking walks in the woods with people he’d like to hire. If he really wants you to work for him he takes you for a walk in the woods. It’s gotten that serious. And this is a responsibility of a well-educated American, to think about Mark Zuckerberg taking walks in the...
Letting go of Star Wars
Futurama executive producer (and formerOnion writer) Dan Vebber writes about watching a bootleg DVD of the old cut and offered another take on why the tinkering made so many angry:
IMHO, all this fan frustration comes from people who recognize that they will never in their lives produce anything as perfect as the original cut of Star Wars. So we’re pissed at Lucas because he was lucky enough...
Impossible
to understand the way a teenager hears questions,
like a whine disturbing their inner hum
you have forgotten it, that itching ache.
And the teenager thinks everyone is looking.
It makes them feel as if their limbs are swaddled
and so they hunch their shoulders, lower eyes,
leave the tap running, the top off, slam the door.
They cry, then laugh. They eat without looking
and don’t...
Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper &...
“The smallest, stealthiest words in our vocabulary often reveal the most about us”
– The Secret Life of Pronouns
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To the Dogs or Whoever - Josh Ritter
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“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification...”
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“A Room of One’s Own” (Virginia Woolf)
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August 2011
17 posts
Why Handwriting Must Die
Associate professor Anne Trubek argues that handwriting will soon be history, because writing words by hand is a technology that’s just too slow for our times, and our minds. A copy-paste summary from her essay:
“Handwriting has been around for just 6,000 of humanity’s some 200,000 years. Its effects have been enormous, of course: It alters the brain, changes with civilizations, cultures and...
Stanley Kubrick, not Apple, designed the iPad, Samsung says in a bizarre patent defence that cites 2001: A Space Odyssey as an argument for why its copycat tablet shouldn’t be pulled from sale in the US.
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The Devil's Double
Playboy, murderer and sadist, Saddam’s elder son left no shortage of people with horror stories to tell. Yet the trauma of Latif’s encounter with him was personal. In 1987, after noticing his striking likeness to Uday, Iraq’s secret service picked Latif to be his ”fiday”, or body double.
Being the stand-in man when Uday feared assassination was an occupational...
Love is the opposite of underwear
“Grit is not just about stubborn persistence. It’ no use persisting, after all, if a goal is truly impossible. While you’ve no doubt been bombarded with successful people telling you that dreams always come true, that we just need to believe, that if you can imagine it then it can happen, the dismal reality is that not every goal is worth pursuing. I might want to play in the NBA, but I’m...
