December 2010
“An exclusive appeal to aesthetics and poetry [is] politically inadequate. On the...”
– Bob Scholte
I must remember to discuss this with my students.
“NOBODY MAY COME INTO THIS ROOM IF THE DOOR IS SHUT TIGHT (IF IT IS SHUT NOT...”
– Barbara Follet
What is negative anthropology? →
I’m trying to find the Julia Lupton reference for the definition of negative anthropology as “an account of human life in the absence of any culture” - which didn’t make any sense to me until Kunin suggested it’s related to misanthropy and now I’d like to know more.
(Thanks to unburyingthelead for stimulating this quest.)
The 25 Dumbest Tweets of 2010 →
@LeighyahBaby: Ladies that fall in luv with other peoples boyfriends have low selves of steam
@itorria05: Question off the day!! why must women be called a hoe when they sleep with many but a guy is placed on a petal stool?
The Boiler Room →
“The Boiler Room (Auckland, NZ) use quality salvaged furniture and demolition materials to create one off pieces of furniture.”
2011
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The coming year will be a time to think big — maybe even bigger than you’ve dared to think in over a decade. That doesn’t mean you should be rash, reckless, or unrealistic. On the contrary. Your expansive dreams should be carefully wrought and anchored in a detailed understanding of how things actually work.
“A patriarchal bargain is a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage...”
– Why is Kim Kardashian Famous?
On the Boardwalk in a War Zone →
“A Time magazine slideshow, titled ‘R&R at Kandahar Airfield,’ uses images to describe how the busiest airport in the world ‘tries to re-create the comforts of home for the coalition forces in Afgahnistan’ … These images of the Kandahar’s ‘Boardwalk’ recreation area are striking for a few reasons. First, they show a blurring of the line...
Farm Animals Get 80 Percent of Antibiotics Sold in... →
“When organisms become resistant on the farm to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact same drugs used in humans.”
The Grim Threat to British Universities →
“The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They...
On Education →
“The global skill gap arises because neither the high-level specialist within a discipline nor the policy-school graduate is likely to be equipped with the skills needed to solve global problems of a cross-disciplinary nature. The experts provide crucial insights, but their skills are typically focused on generating research, debating ideas, and addressing narrow issues rather than...
Some Google employees defect, then rebel →
“Any data that’s collected has the potential to escape the collector,” Kennish said. “So I would like to see Google only collect data that I explicitly allow them to collect.”
“I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer’s is not...”
– Bob Demarco
Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on... →
“It is important to read. But by the end, I felt Bruce Sterling the fiction writer’s presence was too strong in painting a problematic, one-dimensional and static picture of the role of hacker culture in the WikiLeaks saga.”
Analysing WikiLeaks: Bruce Sterling's plot holes →
As the title says.
The Blast Shack →
Bruce Sterling’s take on WikiLeaks.
For These Young Nuns, Habits Are The New Radical →
“Called to the unbending rhythms of prayer and silence and worship…”
Slow Dance by Matthew Dickman →
More than putting another man on the moon, more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga, we need the opportunity to dance with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance between the couch and dining room table, at the end of the party, while the person we love has gone to bring the car around because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart if any part of us got wet. A slow dance to...
“If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims,...”
– Arthur Koestler
'It Can Thereby Be Shown ... ' →
“I knew a professor who not only held on to, but exaggerated, his working-class New Jersey accent (he’s many decades out of the Springsteen ‘hood) because it seemed to gain him street cred as a labor historian. Never mind that his father was a physician and that he went to elite institutions.
Another old friend, a world-renowned theologian, swears like a sailor. Whether...
Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers... →
Nothing much of interest in this “review/interview” except for the phrase “modern meat scene.”
Graduate who wrote to Lego asking for a job at the... →
“A spokesman for Lego said: ‘At almost every job interview we have potential candidates telling us about their childhood experiences with Lego bricks, or their children’s love for our products. ‘But I have to say Sam’s case is very special, since he so determinedly followed the advice he got from us about employment when he was a young boy’.”
The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not... →
Better farming makes for happier animals and more nuanced arguments. Win-win.
Is China's Mosuo tribe the world's last... →
“As commerce tries to elbow tradition out of the way and younger generations of the Mosuo are tempted by outside influence, a darker, seedier side has emerged in recent years. Tourism is booming, and the Chinese government is keen to market and monetise the Mosuo to Chinese tourists, even installing a toll booth charging $5 to enter the area from the newly laid main road. Curious and...
“Objects, the everyday clutter that surround us, are no longer seen for what they...”
– Hacking the Everyday
The Weirdest People in the World (pdf) →
Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative...
WatchHow Do They Knit A Chain-Link Fence? Don White, NFB, 1998