Burlesqued

A Girls' Guide to Saudi Arabia (Vanity Fair) http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/08/maureen-dowd-201008?currentPage=all

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:36:16 -0400

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Coyote Tracks: The Emperor's New Antenna

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:27:19 -0400

Coyote Tracks: The Emperor's New Antenna:

So I’ve been thinking about “Antennagate.” First thought: stop fucking calling every scandal “-gate,” for Christ’s sake.

Next thought: so what’s the scoop here? Biggest problem in the history of all of mobile phones, or minor issue blown way out of proportion by the tech media? Neither, of…

Okay, it's about me, but I still love it: The Smart Set: Printing Money - July 19, 2010

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:44:36 -0400

The Smart Set: Printing Money - July 19, 2010
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article07191001.aspx

The Smart Set: Printing Money - July 19, 2010 ‘> “> Consumer Confidence
Printing Money
As the 50¢ newspaper fades, the $16 version blooms.
By Greg Beato
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The newspaper, Information Age dinosaur, superannuated leftover from the glory days of mass culture, cheap and disposable booster of middlebrow department stores and network TV shows, is about to become next year’s $299 chambray work shirt, the must-have accessory for signaling one’s artfully off-handed connoisseurship. Kill your Facebook page. Forget everything you know about Twitter. Box up your iPad. The age of heritage news is upon us.

On July 29, Monocle — the magazine for creative class hipsters whose idea of a good read is a tastefully edited tote bag — is publishing a 60-page summer newspaper called Monocle Mediterraneo. No preview is available, but promotional copy on Monocle’s website informs potential consumers that the paper will be on sale at “all the best resorts, from the West Coast to the eastern Med (and the key airports hubs in between).” If you only frequent non-key airport hubs, stay calm. You can also get it via Monocle’s web store and probably at its four retail boutiques as well (which are located in London, Santa Monica, Hong Kong, and Tokyo).

The newspaper will feature “leisurely reads” and “great reportage,” and most important, it will function as “your handsome companion from sun lounger to sun downers.” It is, in short, a lifestyle prop, a formerly utilitarian and now obsolete product retooled by world-class tastemakers, a designer newspaper. It can be yours for $10 and change, which, by Monocle standards, is a pretty good deal. (The publisher is currently selling a tiny bag of wood for $192.)

Analog information transfer makes sense at the beach. iPad screens may be built to shine brightly even in the glare of the Dubai sun, but they’re not built for dropping in the sand, or slathering with Shiseido sunscreen, or drowning in the pool. And let’s face it – Apple’s sold a gazillion of the things in the last three months. They’re a little too Nordstrom’s. Newspapers, on the other hand, are much rarer. Oh, sure, if you’ve seen one lately you know that today’s versions have gotten kind of skimpy and shoddy, what with their mish-mash of wire copy and helpful tips about lettuce. On a conceptual level, however, they remain tremendously appealing. First off, they’re made out of wood. They evoke a classy, stylish, more thoughtful era, when people wore hats. They have so much history, so much lore, to fetishize and streamline.

San Francisco Panorama, the first designer newspaper, showed up in December 2009. It was produced by the literary quarterly McSweeney’s as a one-time celebration of the virtues of print. “We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space — if you give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web — then they will spend $1 for a copy,” exclaimed McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers in a widely circulated e-mail. “With our prototype, we aim to make the physical object so beautiful and luxurious that it will seem a bargain at $1.” But if the goal of Panorama was to help real newspapers figure out how to remain relevant and extant in a digital world, the actual finished product was the surest sign yet that newspapers are, as a mainstream cultural force, officially dead.

In the 20th century, newspapers evolved from their artisanal roots — think of the lone publisher/printer, putting out a new issue whenever he’d collected enough material to fill four pages — into a uniform and predictable product resulting from highly organized and highly automated processes. They’re mass-produced in intellectual factories with the same magnificently efficient and repetitive genius that produces Ritz crackers and $8 polo shirts from Target. In an age of pixels and bits, however, when Kim Kardashian’s latest tweet is composed in 10 seconds and distributed to four million people around the world in the blink of an eye, newspapers feel kind of hand-made. Painstakingly assembled by tradesmen devoted to the utilitarian beauty of 72-point headlines and the superior craftsmanship of a really good crossword puzzle. Panorama emphasized this aspect of newspapers to the point of self-satire. Its logo was hand-drawn by comic artist Daniel Clowes. Its small core staff of dedicated idealists collaborated with noted wordwrights and image-smiths to manufacture prose and pictures of a higher standard than one typically finds in a daily newspaper. Panorama reveled in the materiality of newspapers. Each page of its 120-page broadsheet section measured 15” x 22”. Its standalone book review section ran 96 pages. Its magazine added another 112. The entire package made a satisfying thunk when you dropped it on a table. Yes, it was only a one-time deal, but it was sure built to last!

Acting on faith that today’s soundbitten news consumers have a surplus of attention to devote to 20,000-word investigative pieces and 42-panel comic strips, Panorama gave its contributors room to be creative in ways the tight confines of an iPhone screen won’t permit. But all that paper made Panorama cost much more than the $1 Eggers originally envisioned readers paying for it. On the day of its debut, a couple dozen newsboy re-enactors were hawking it on the streets for $5 a copy. In bookstores and newsstands, it was $16, which was actually a pretty great deal for everything you got, but not exactly a price point designed for daily consumption. At that rate, a year’s worth would cost $5,840. Not that anyone could read a year’s worth of Panorama in a year, or even a lifetime. The single issue contained 350,000 words. But Panorama wasn’t really designed to be read. It was designed to be appreciated. Two-page infographics on the sun and the Bay Bridge are so big they actually make the information they present hard to assimilate; at a quarter of the size, they would have been four times as effective. The huge expanses of black text on clean white newsprint make a noble statement about The Value of In-Depth Investigative Reporting, but look as daunting as Yosemite’s Half Dome. It’s hard to imagine the broadsheet portions of Panorama being read on crowded buses or cramped cafes. It’s easy to imagine its most spectacular pages attractively curated in art galleries or museums.

The demand for products like Panorama — nobly constructed, produced in limited quantities, rich with authenticity, conspicuously tasteful — seems infinite these days. Our organic heirloom tomatoes are locally grown by agricultural craftsmen. We wear locally sewn, historically significant $35 T-shirts that come in “heritage packaging.” We lust after $90,000 bespoke Jeeps. We love bling-free but deluxe versions of the formerly practical, like Field Notes memo books and $600 duffle bags. Cue the newspaper. In its 20th-century heyday, it was the ultimate mass-market product, a cheap, daily commodity that was obsolete in a matter of hours. Exclusivity was the last thing a newspaper aspired to. The more people who bought them, the better they became. Printing costs went down, which kept the finished product remarkably affordable. Advertising rates rose, which meant publishers could set up foreign bureaus in dozens of cities around the world, pay book reviewers a livable wage, underwrite in-depth investigations, and make Dear Abby rich. Mass-production — and the mass-dissemination of news it enabled — turned papers into powerful forces for the civic good.

Thus, their future as premium-priced, limited-edition totems of refinement seems poignantly ironic. But not without hope! The web has created a culture of hyper-connoisseurship, with passionate enthusiasts forever in pursuit of the hardest to source, the most authentic, the original artifact. Designer one-offs like San Francisco Panorama and the Monocle Mediterraneo will set new newspaper acolytes on a path of exploration discovery, and the eventual appropriation of genuine heritage brands, forgotten by time but still quietly plying their in various quaint backwaters of the U.S. infosphere. Hold steady, Denver Post, Milwaukee Sentinel, Atlanta Journal-Constitution! Hipsters and tastemakers are on the way to save you from oblivion. • 19 July 2010 Greg Beato is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Follow @GregBeato on Twitter. RELATED SMART SET CONTENT

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I've got a solution: kill all the millionaires. Article: Too Rich to Live?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:45:55 -0400

Too Rich to Live? [longform.org]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703609004575355572928371574.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Too Rich to Live? [longform.org]

By LAURA SAUNDERS And MARY PILON

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On the question of radical & bourgeois art

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:26:53 -0400

“The October Revolution was accompanied by the vehement question of
revolutionizing art, including the bourgeois theater. Should the
theater of the scientific age emerge from a transformation of the
bourgeois theater, or as a radical new beginning, or did the only
solution consist in completely rejecting theater as a bourgeois
practice? Those who decided under the name “Theater October,” in favor
of solutions in between transformation and new beginning increasingly
dispensed with illusionist plots and the psychology of the figures,
did away with the peep show stage, the curtain, the backdrops, built
new theaters, left the theater” ~ Gerald Raunig. A Thousand Machines.

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Acts of Defiance (NFB Films)

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:59:28 -0400

Acts of Defiance This feature-length documentary recounts the events
that surrounded and led to the so-called “Mohawk Crisis” of the summer
of 1990. The film focuses on the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake, in
Quebec, but also reflects on the relationship between Canada and its
First Nations at a particular time in history.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/acts_of_defiance

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A second chance or a boot in the face

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:12:42 -0400

The Globe and Mail
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/a-second-chance-or-a-boot-in-the-face/article1629286/?service=mobile

A second chance or a boot in the face

Two protests, seemingly miles apart, were about the kind of country we want to live in

Margaret AtwoodFrom Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
Monday, Jul. 05, 2010 08:32PM EDT

A second chance or a boot in the face

The first protest was a bucolic occasion. On June 6, after an energetic SaveOurPrisonFarms rally in a Kingston church, during which we were meticulously instructed in the behaviour expected of us during a peaceful protest, we ambled along in the sunshine, accompanied by homemade banners, a hay wagon pulled by a tractor, a contingent of smiling nuns, a donkey, and some kids dressed up as sheep and cows. The community – solidly behind our efforts – cheered us on. We even did a tiny spot of civil disobedience as we walked up a driveway to Correctional Services headquarters and carefully taped our petition to the door, avoiding nails so as not to spoil the paintwork. The petition itself was a plea to the federal government not to go ahead with their scheduled closing of Canada’s prison farms – a vital element not only in local food chains but in the rehabilitation, mental health and socialization of minimum-security prisoners. Nobody beat us up, arrested us or tear-gassed us. We did not set any cars on fire or break any windows. The Black Blockers who trashed downtown Toronto during the G20 would have thought us despicably wussy. People are still poring through the fallout from that Toronto protest. Who did what, when, to whom and why? Why – knowing of the dangers of holding the G20 in a fenced-off, emptied-out downtown Toronto – did Prime Minister Stephen Harper not respond to Toronto’s pleas and change the venue? Why were legitimate NGOs blocked from access to the press, within the security-protected playpen? What accounts for the Ontario government’s confused instructions about security laws? Why the beat-up journalists? Why the nonchalance about the Black Bloc rampage? Why the wholesale roundups of bystanders? And why the factory-chicken detention facilities for those corralled – scant food and water, no calls to lawyers and, if witnesses are any indication, nasty language and harassment? Is this “normal” – give a group unlimited, unsupervised power over another group, and this is what happens? If so, who authorized that power? Was the treatment of those arrested some sort of dry run – a testing of the waters to see how far those in authority can move toward Tinpot Dictatorship North, without a vote-losing backlash? Was the Black Blocker mayhem allowed so there would be a justification for the undue force later? And why is not a public inquiry in order? At first glance, the Kingston protest and the Toronto one – and the very different responses to them – seem miles apart. Yet something unites them: They’re both about what kind of country we want to live in. They are about crime, or what is perceived to be crime, and they are about punishment, and what kind of punishment our society deems appropriate. Let’s consider the context. With the secrecy and autocracy we are coming to expect, the federal government has moved to close down Canada’s long-running prison farms, and to implement a mega-prison system modelled on some of those in the United States. The overall plan – called “A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety” – has now been denounced by, among many others, Conrad Black. “It is painful for me,” he said, “to write that with this garrote of a blueprint, the government I generally support is flirting with moral and political catastrophe.” (As he points out, he’s not exactly your average bleeding heart.) As for the Truth in Sentencing Act, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has produced an exhaustive report showing the government’s estimates of $2-billion in additional costs are way off – the PBO says the increase will be more in the range of $5-billion. It’s clear that neither the act nor the road map will do anything to decrease crime, but they will do everything to increase costs. Not “tough on crime,” but “stupid about crime,” as Jeffrey Simpson has written.

12Next

Margaret Atwood’s latest novel is The Year of the Flood.

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[LETTERS] A proposal for inquiry: Were rights infringed during G20 in Toronto?

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:24:50 -0400

The issues being discussed, or not discussed, during the G20 require discussion and thoughtful reflection. This is not the place.

The police response to peaceful protesters and lack of response to wanton vandals needs no discussion, it needs external inquiry. Here are three letters I have mailed to the appropriate authorities urging such a matter. Feel free to copy and paste and send on your own behalf.

Sincerely,

Quinn

The Honourable Dalton McGuinty

Premier of Ontario

Legislative Building
Queen’s Park
Toronto ON M7A 1A1
Dear Premier McGuinty,

I have been a proud Ontarian for over 5 years now, having come to Toronto from BC for graduate school, however, recently I am less proud. Enacting secret laws to enable clearly unethical and undemocratic police tactics tarnishes your Premiership. I appreciate that special provisions need to be made to accommodate the G20, but some actions are off-limits in Western democracies. Even though I was not involved in any protest (because I believe that protests are no longer effective mechanisms for activism) it worries me to think that I live in a place where I could be harassed or arrested for failing to show identification, or happen to enter a public area for which I am discouraged from being at. A cornerstone of Western democracy is the right to be left alone, and to pursue a flourishing life whichever way one chooses, so long as it does not directly and unnecessarily impact others’ ability to do the same.

As my elected representative I strongly encourage you to seek out those that created this law and punish them with the greatest force for which you are able. Further, you should work to enact rules and laws that prevent the passing of any other future laws that unnecessarily harm my ability to be left alone to flourish as I see fit.

Sincerely,
Isaac Quinn DuPont
Toronto, ON

Mayor David Miller
City Hall, 2nd Flr,
100 Queen St W
Toronto,Ontario
M5H 2N2

Dear Mayor Miller, I am a concerned citizen. I am concerned that during the G20 weekend the Toronto police have acted poorly towards peaceful protesters, while letting a violent few escape unscathed, and without justice. The security costs for the G20 were unjustified and, evidently, poorly allocated. Proportionality is a Canadian virtue, and a legal principal—-even if the peaceful protesters were breaking the law (and I doubt they were, especially since very few were actually charged), the response was not proportionate. The Toronto Police failed to act professionally, and failed to properly police.

The Toronto Police needs oversight, regulation, and punishment. As a citizen of Canada and a resident of Toronto, I demand that an inquiry is launched, and that the responsible agents of this poor policing are held accountable. The City of Toronto needs to restore public confidence in Toronto Police, and this will not be accomplished through denial or public relations. The results of an external inquiry must be enacted judicially and swiftly. Sincerely,

Isaac Quinn DuPont
Toronto, ON

Police Chief Bill Blair
40 College Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5G 2J3

Dear Bill Blair, I am a concerned citizen. I am concerned that during the G20 weekend the Toronto police have acted poorly towards peaceful protesters, while letting a violent few escape unscathed, and without justice. The security costs for the G20 were unjustified and, evidently, poorly allocated. Proportionality is a Canadian virtue, and a legal principal—-even if the peaceful protesters were breaking the law (and I doubt they were, especially since very few were actually charged), the response was not proportionate. The Toronto Police failed to act professionally, and failed to properly police.

The Toronto Police needs oversight, regulation, and punishment. As a citizen of Canada and a resident of Toronto, I demand that an inquiry is launched, and that the responsible agents of this poor policing are held accountable. I realize that you are likely personally responsible, so, I ask that you resign and punish any others that were responsible. I am contacting my elected representatives, Prime Minister Harper, Premier McGuinty, and Mayor Miller with the hopes that they may force this investigation and bring oversight to the Toronto police. Sincerely,

Isaac Quinn DuPont
Toronto, ON

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Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate. Stoicism says just the opposite.

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:43:17 -0400

Stoicism Is Just So Yesterday — Review — In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues by the John Templeton Foundation
http://incharacter.org/review/stoicism-is-just-so-yesterday/

home > Review > Stoicism Is Just So Yesterday

Stoicism Is Just So Yesterday

Emily Colette Wilkinson | Posted on 06/14/10

To read the Meditations, you would not imagine them to be the writings of a man encamped in barbarian lands in the midst of war, nor of a man commanding the largest army ever assembled on the frontier of the Roman empire, nor of a man whose empire and army were in the grip of a deadly plague. The Meditations’ lack of political or worldly anguish and anxiety is a mark of the philosophy they profess: Stoicism.

Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn, Da Capo $30.00, 720 pages

Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism. As Frank McLynn explains in his new biography of Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome’s “five good emperors,” commander of Rome’s prolonged campaigns against the invasions of barbarian German tribes, and the last important Stoic philosopher of ancient days, our philosophers (academics) no longer profess to help the average person answer life’s great metaphysical questions. Contemporary philosophers might contemplate such abstruse problems as whether mental properties can be said to emerge from the physical processes of the universe; what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for self-interest; where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins-not, perhaps, the pressing existential questions presented by the normal course of a human life.

Beyond the realm of professional philosophy, an ever-expanding tribe of self-appointed lay philosophers profess practical strategies for worldly success: how to win friends and influence, how not to sweat the small stuff, how to free ourselves from shyness, anxiety, phobias, poverty, extra pounds, how to ensnare the perfect mate, how to care for and feed a husband or be a domestic goddess. But, again, these regimes, while they might indeed make you thinner, more confident, or more productive, do not answer life’s great metaphysical questions.

Between the hyper-intellectual abstractions of university philosophers and the calculating, materialistic schemes of self-help gurus, lies another philosophy. This is the philosophy of the ancients, of Marcus Aurelius. It is a practice that intends to help individuals answer life’s great metaphysical questions in both material and spiritual terms: What is my place is the world, the cosmos? What is the purpose of existence? How do I live a good life? What is happiness and how do I achieve it?

Marcus Aurelius’ contribution to this philosophy has come to be known simply as the Meditations, though the title Marcus gave the work-more a private collection of self-examinations and moral exercises than a systematic philosophy or spiritual autobiography intended for publication-was “The matters addressed to himself.” And it is as much a model of moral self-examination as a demonstration of Stoic principles. The work’s subtitles suggest that Marcus wrote some portion of the text during Rome’s Marcommanic wars, a long, brutal series of military campaigns prompted by the invasions of barbarian German tribes on the northern boarders of the Roman Empire during the 160’s.

These wars occupied most of the last two decades of Marcus’ reign as emperor (160’s and 170’s), but to read the Meditations, you would not imagine them to be the writings of a man encamped in barbarian lands in the midst of war, nor of a man commanding the largest army ever assembled on the frontier of the Roman empire, nor of a man whose empire and army were in the grip of the Antonine plague (believed now to have been smallpox or measles, possibly both), that lasted from 165-180 and killed, by some estimates as many as 18 million people, including, in 180, Marcus himself (notwithstanding Ridley Scott’s fanciful version of Marcus Aurelius’ death in Gladiator-smothered by his son, the psychotic future emperor Commodus). The Meditations’ lack of political or worldly anguish and anxiety is a mark of the philosophy they profess: Stoicism.

As McLynn explains, our modern conception of Stoicism consists mainly in colloquial expressions such as “be a man,” “take what’s coming to you,” “roll with the punches,” and “make the best of it.” Such expressions communicate the Stoic insistence on acceptance and steadfastness in the face of whatever life presents, no matter how calamitous. One of the most famous lines from the Meditations is, “Remain ever the same, in the throes of pain, on the loss of a child, during a lingering illness” and many modern readers, including McLynn, find the Stoic creed-that virtue is the only good and the source of happiness and that we should train ourselves to rise above emotional, physical, and material concerns-inhuman, even monstrous.

It is one of the curious features of McLynn’s biography that he is openly hostile his subject’s philosophy: “A more priggish, inhuman, killjoy and generally repulsive doctrine would be hard to imagine,” he writes at the beginning of a caricatured exposition of the precepts of Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic predecessor Epictetus. And in an appendix on Stoicism, McLynn contends that “one could just as well derive this cracker-barrel philosophy from the maxims of old-fashioned tea chests.”

This authorial frankness certainly makes for entertaining reading. Many a scholarly pose of objectivity belies an unprofessed agenda and it’s to McLynn’s credit that he lets his readers know exactly what he thinks about Stoicism (little of it good) and everything else that makes its way into his sweeping, highly readable account of Marcus and his age (though the lay reader might find herself nodding a bit at the book’s extensive accounts of military campaigns and other extra-biographical digressions, while readers familiar with classical scholarship may be annoyed with McLynn for not offering his conclusions with a bit more circumspection. Classical scholarship deals in fragmentary, uncertain evidence but McLynn never lets on that much of what he presents as foregone can only be tentative).

Putting aside the charm of this curmudgeonly bombast, though, McLynn’s hostility to the animating intellectual ethos of his subject’s life seems something of a failure. Certainly, Stoicism, like most of the world’s other great philosophies and religions, has its logical inconsistencies, and it insists on a grim, difficult worldview. Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains-poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics-i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and my family might die, but none of this hurts me because it does not impair my ability to be good, which consists in working for the good of my fellow human beings.

“Remember that everything is but what we think it,” Marcus writes, and what he urges himself to think is that we are all ears of corn for the reaping, “leaves that the wind scatters earthward”:

But a little while and thou shalt be burnt ashes or a few dried bones, and possibly a name, possibly not a name even….And all that we prize so highly in our lives is empty and corrupt and paltry, and we but as puppies snapping at each other, as quarrelsome children now laughing and anon in tears.

According to the Stoic cosmology, we are each but a tiny part of a greater whole (humankind, and then the universe) and our individual disappointments and triumphs, even our deaths, are not to be mourned in this greater scheme. In fact, we should be contented with whatever happens to us whenever it happens because it serves the purpose of a benevolent, divinely ordered cosmos.

The sternness of this creed is plain, likewise its startling insistence on indifference to the strivings and grief of humankind. It’s not hard to see why McLynn gravitates toward the word “inhuman” to describe Stoicism. But he seems to forget that most of the world’s great religions ask their adherents to master their baser inclinations and to become, in a positive sense of the word, just that-inhuman-different from the man guided by physical desires and emotions, better than that man and less human, partaking more of something metaphysical, something divine. The Stoic also becomes inhuman (more than human) through the philosophy’s holism-the idea that we are all parts of the whole, existing to serve the whole, all instilled with the same spirit of the divine. Even McLynn is willing to concede that this is a compelling doctrine but because he spends more time delineating the logical inconsistencies of Stoicism rather than trying to see the world from its vantage, he doesn’t appreciate the psychological benefits of the belief.

Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate.

Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions. As McLynn points out in his explanation of Marcus Aurelius’ intense popularity in the Victorian era and increasing neglect in our own, ours is a culture more interested in rights and entitlements than in duty, while Stoicism is only interested in duty, and duty understood to be synonymous with virtue and happiness. But it is a duty that liberates-a duty that teaches us to transcend the tyranny of the emotions and the body and that insists that contentment is ours for the having whenever we summon the strength to push away the th

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Naomi Klein on G20 in Globe & Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/opinion/sticking-the-public-with-the-bill-for-the-bankers-crisis/article1620729/

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:38:08 -0400

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/opinion/sticking-the-public-…

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US charter schools started in the late 80s as experiments to help poor and challenged students, but now recreate elitism

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:31:54 -0400

Why I Changed My Mind | The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-i-changed-my-mind

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Colossal World Cup Foul | The Progressive

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:44:57 -0400

“To see a country already dotted with perfectly usable stadiums spend approximately $6 billion on new facilities is to notice a squandering of resources that is unconscionable.”

Colossal World Cup Foul | The Progressive
http://progressive.org/zirinmay10.html

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Cottonland | NFB Films : an excellent film about OxyContin abuse in Cape Breton

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:29:37 -0400

Cottonland In this feature-length documentary, photographer Nance
Ackerman describes the havoc prescription painkiller OxyContin,
wreaked in the already weakened Cape Breton town of Glace Bay. The
film guides us through a culture of economic and social depression
where we encounter a number of men and women at different stages of
dependency. Demystifying the world of the addict while showing us the
complex social nexus that led to such despair, Cottonland emphasizes
the importance of a collective approach to tackling addiction.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/cottonland

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"undergraduates who like to stay on top of things, who won’t...rearrange the keyboard to spell [F][U][C][K] [ ] [T][H][I][S]..."

Sat, 29 May 2010 12:50:20 -0400

They Get to Me: an article by Jessica Love | The American Scholar
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/they-get-to-me/

the sort of undergraduates who like to stay on top of things, who won’t try to fit all seven research hours in on the last possible day, who aren’t likely to rearrange the keyboard to spell [F][U][C][K] [ ] [T][H][I][S] or to accidentally “lock” themselves in the testing rooms by pulling at the doors instead of pushing

(via Instapaper)

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The ethics of placebo use, and conceptualizing medicine as meaning & ritual

Sat, 29 May 2010 12:38:10 -0400

The magic cure - The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/09/the_magic_cure/?page=full

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Sarah Silverman: Animal Magnetism

Sat, 29 May 2010 12:04:57 -0400

Animal Magnetism
http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Animal+Magnetism&expire=&urlID=424542983&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Farts%2Fbooks%2Ffeatures%2F65351%2F&partnerID=73272

Sarah Silverman on her TED talk: “The bit was tied into the theme of the conference, which was ‘What the World Needs Now.’ So I say I’d like to adopt a retarded baby because I don’t have this urge to have a little version of myself to get right this time.’ She stops to explain her feelings about the word retard. ‘I don’t like it. I think it’s a negative bummer word. Retarded, however, technically means [mentally challenged].’ She continues: ‘So I say I’m adopting a retarded baby and I’ll be worried about who will take care of my child when I’m gone. So, solution! I’m going to adopt one with a terminal illness. Now, you’re probably thinking, what kind of person looks to adopt a terminally ill retarded child? An amazing person! I don’t see those 9/11 firefighters adopting retarded children with terminal illnesses. I’m just saying. Of course, there’s going to be the uncomfortable, inevitable question in the adoption process: Are you sure there are absolutely no cures on the horizon?’”

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Librarians Do Gaga

Fri, 28 May 2010 20:39:36 -0400

Check out this video on YouTube:

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Travis Powell to Stuart Franklin Pratt, 1862, Washington, DC

Sun, 02 May 2010 12:02:20 -0400

“I came to do everything I was bid, I drowned my scruples in my
washbowl, clutched my soap manfully, and assuming a businesslike air,
made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw, bent on performing my
task vi et armis if necessary. I chanced to light on a withered old
Irishman wounded in the head, which caused that portion of his frame
to be tastefully laid out like a garden, the bandages being the walks,
his hair the shrubbery.”

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The real cost of the US bailout?

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:42:23 -0400

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An ode to Earth Hour, excerpted from Lewis Lapham, Winter 2010 LQ

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:03:57 -0400

“A religion still hidden, like the yeast in the measures of meal, in
the secular disguise of environmentalism. The foundational metaphysics
already have been incorporated into rituls of devout observance. The
worshipful recyclings of eggshells; the eating of free-range chickens
and organic heirloom tomatoes signifies the partaking in a feast of
communion. Like the Councils of Nicaea and Trent, international
conferences addressed to the problem of climate change seek to clarify
the existence of the Holy Ghost. The miracle is the rabbit, not the
pulling of the rabbit out of a hat.”

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