David Shields has a new book coming out called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. I saw Shields read from his manifesto a couple years ago and he sure had the fiction writers in the room riled up. I found myself both nodding along with Shields and…
Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home May 1945 to let family know he was still alive (h/t 3quarksdaily): Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped…
A couple years ago when the Saints played the Bears in the NFC championship game there was a lot of shock locally at how abusive the Bears fans were of Saints fans. I certainly wasn’t surprised. The Bears bring the worst out of the Chicago…
In honor of our expiring New Yorker subscription, this nugget from a profile of director James “Mij” Cameron: Making “The Abyss” was brutal … Cameron built the set in Gaffney, South Carolina, in the containment vessel of an abandoned (and never activated) nuclear-power facility, which…
I’m starting to get the feeling that at least part of Senator David Vitter’s motivation for frequenting prostitutes is he identifies with them. From Mother Jones: So why is Vitter so sympathetic to the formaldehyde industry? Campaign finance records show that many of Louisiana’s big…
Parts sound like a Fall song.
I can be a little paranoid about groups and the things groups do, but I’ve (almost) always been warmed by instances when people combine in mundane, anonymous ways to express a collective will. My favorite example of this is “desire paths” (also called “aspirational paths”). …
Source: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LXXII, No. 4, November 2006 Author: TED TUNNELL, Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University Whatever the terminology, carpetbagger and scalawag were crucial to the political language of Reconstruction. They expressed white southerners’ ideas and emotions about their…
Stan Mikita introduced the curved hockey stick, but Jacques Plante made an equally important innovation: the goalie mask. Imagine playing goalie in the NHL without a hockey mask. They used to (squeamish beware on that link).
Rangers forward Andy Bathgate played a key role in this historical development: Peeved at Plante for causing an earlier injury, he took a wrist shot at Plante’s face.
Sensitivities were high enough that in the season opener for Columbia [High School in 1970] after [Walter] Payton scored on two long touchdown runs, two white men approached Boston. They wanted to know if Payton raising his index finger the final few yards of those runs signified the black power sign.
Errol Morris has another great series of postings on his New York Times blog Zoom. He picks through the controversies of WPA photographers staging photos and concludes, Rothstein, Lange and Evans have been accused of posing their photographs, in short, of manipulating them to some…
Maybe we also need a national memorial and a national holiday to commemorate the 9/12 Tea Party march in D.C.
h/t 3quarksdaily