March 2012
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If No One Wants Them, Where Do We Resettle The... →
In the case of Somalia, neighboring Kenya doesn’t want the refugees. “Personally, I’ve done what I could,” Kenya’s immigration minister Gerald Otieno Kajwang told The New York Times in July, before the U.N. had even officially declared a famine. “But the numbers coming in are too large that they threaten our security.”
Somalia was one of the world’s largest sources of...
February 2012
336 posts
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Banksy on Advertising →
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most...
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“The same thing happened to me that, according to legend, happened to...”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
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I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave →
My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.
“Leave your pride and your personal life at the door,” the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.”
The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He’s speaking to us...
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“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the...”
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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Jonathan Evison on The American West →
FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic.
The acclaimed novelist, and resident of Washington state, recommends fiction that captures a sense of the rugged landscape and people of the American West
You were born in California, but now live in Washington State. What is it that attracts you to the American West?
I’m actually...
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The Jerusalem Syndrome →
There’s a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it’s called praying; if God talks to you, you’re nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas—the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming...
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“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil...”
– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
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Adam Curtis on Think Tanks →
The guiding idea at the heart of today’s political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society.
But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no...
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On David Graeber’s "Debt: The First 5000 Years" →
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though...
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“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to...”
– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
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There Are No Ethical Electronics, So Buy Less... →
In a piece on Salon last week, writer Andrew Leonard laid out the raw truth: There is no ethical smartphone. The sins of Apple’s iPhone factories, where laborers literally and figuratively kill themselves in pursuit of faster gadgets, are well-documented. But the problem, Leonard notes, extends far beyond Apple. “For every smartphone manufacturer,” he writes, “the...
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“My adversaries created and maintained numerous misunderstandings on the subject...”
– Simone De Beauvoir on the publication of The Second Sex
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Race Finished: The Debunking of a Scientific Myth →
Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept? Is race nevertheless a fundamental reality of human nature? Or...
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“The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world...”
– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Absent Things as if They Are Present →
Essay on the practice of erasures in literature.
The dictionary defines erase as “to scrape or rub out (anything written, engraved, etc.); to efface, expunge, obliterate.” Its Latin root roughly translates as “to scrape away.” These definitions imply loss and destruction. They call to mind Richard Nixon’s audio-tape gaps, the photographic manipulations of Stalin, the Archimedes Palimpsest,...
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"We live in fear of a massacre" →
Marie Colvin was the only British journalist reporting from inside the besieged Syrian enclave of Baba Amr. This is her final report.
I entered Homs on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches. Arriving in the darkened city in the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the...
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A Night in Arzamas →
How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment.
In 1869, just after he finished War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis as the result of an incident during a journey through the city of Arzamas, which is on the Tyosha River about 250 miles east of Moscow. As he described it in his unfinished story Notes of a Madman (so titled because Tolstoy was ...
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Protecting the Rights of Planet Earth →
“All human beings”, according to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “…are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This one statement forms the rationale by which the United Nations deemed it necessary to define the structure of...
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Anonymous asked: What are some blogs you recommend?
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“When the newspapers were full of alarms about Iran possibly developing a nuclear...”
– Howard Zinn on Kurt Vonnegut