Posts Tagged ‘Gaddafi’
Monday Night Infinite Jest (and More)
* The MLK Memorial opened today on the Washington Mall. Pretty visually stunning.
* zunguzungu has your Libya links.
* The headline reads, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins.”
* Kaufman, who has a lifelong passion for American folk music, has just written a biography of Guthrie. And, much more unusually for an academic, he is singing his way across the US to promote it. He is performing Guthrie’s songs, which he mixes with short lectures and projected images in what Kaufman calls a “live musical documentary.”
* Grant Morrison: The Rolling Stone interview. More here. Via Bleeding Cool.
* The New Yorker profiles Clarence Thomas. Via just about everybody.
* Also via literally everybody: The Decembrists’ new Infinite-Jest-themed music video.
* Don’t miss Brad DeLong’s brief history of the Obama administration. Via Digby.
* 2010: Detroit apocalypse porn. 2011: Detroit is the new Brooklyn.
* Inside the mind behind Feminist Hulk. If you’d bet the account was owned by a graduate student in English literature, pick up your money at the front desk.
* Inside the Tea Party: a UNC professor has polled Tea Party supporters to determine that the Tea Party’s core values are “authoritarianism, fear of change, libertarianism and nativism.” I can’t imagine anyone anywhere will find this study remotely controversial.
* Kevin Drum asks: Can we fix the economy? Sign me up for Krugman’s Lament (first comment); we can fix this, we just won’t.
* And a look inside how Scrabble warps your brain.
Competitive Scrabble players’ visual word recognition behavior differed significantly from non-experts’ for letter-prompted verbal fluency (coming up with words beginning with a specific letter) and anagramming accuracy, two Scrabble-specific skills. Competitive players were faster to judge whether or not a word was real. They also judged the validity of vertical words faster than non-experts and were quicker at picking up abstract words than non-competitive players. These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information.
The End of Gaddafi
What was premature yesterday is history today: Juan Cole has details.
The Social Safety Net Is for Closers (and More Links from the Weekend)
* Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories. Are you listening, English department hiring committees? Look for my dossier this fall. (Thanks, Erica!)
* For the first time in years, the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA), the largest union representing coal miners, has found common cause withenvironmental and community advocates who are seeking to end mountaintop-removal coal mining.
* Ten Charts That Prove the U.S. Is a Low-Tax Country.
* In a Pure Coincidence, Gaddafi Impeded U.S. Oil Interests before the War.
* Democratic Leaders Perfectly Coordinate Message on Anthony Weiner, Can’t Do It For Anything That Actually Matters. I happen to agree that Weiner should probably resign—if only to finally end the story—but why aren’t Democratic leaders sending synchronized press releases on jobs or Medicare?
* MetaFilter covers the weird, sad decline of David Mamet. We’ll always have Glengarry Glen Ross…
* And the first bit of remotely interesting news from the D.C. relaunch: Grant Morrison will be writing Action Comics. Now that’s something I might actually read.
Thursday
Oh, Thursday.
It’s not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond’s worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.
I can’t wait to drink bottled moon water. Delicious.
* NeilAlien has some good links about the Kirby heirs’ attempt to reclaim their Marvel copyrights in the wake of the Siegel heirs’ successful lawsuit against DC.
* Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore about who hates America more.
* For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table. In the past three decades, the earth’s dominant carnivores have tripled our average per capita consumption; in the next four decades global meat production will double to 465 million tons.
* Salon on the end of oil and the era of extreme energy.
Gerry Canavan 