A big heartfelt, teary-eyed, ecstatic “thank you” to the activists who are criticizing Sotomayor for her ethnicity. The best way to accelerate the development of a pan-Latin Latino identity is to target a few million Americans with vile bigotry. Ace work.
Barack Obama as Batman in response to Dick Cheney as The Penguin, on the rule of law versus the rule of men:
Have you ever gone to the grocery store hungry and without a list? You come home with nothing but frosting and cheese. And the American people have lived on nothing but frosting and [...]
More Berlusconi:
Much of Mr. Berlusconi’s success has stemmed from his uncanny ability to read the national mood. Now many wonder if he has finally miscalculated it and is pushing tolerant Italians too far, and whether his late-career reputation may increasingly resemble the Roman imperial decadence of Fellini’s “Satyricon.”
…And yet, Mr. Berlusconi still governs virtually unopposed. [...]
Jonathan Haidt: “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”
From the same op-ed, Nicholas D. Kristof writes: “Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions.”
In other words, it may be easier for us, on a cognitive level, to understand the “who” rather [...]
Chris Beam:
No doubt the new political appointees can handle the job. Roos, as CEO of a global, technology-focused law firm, understands trade issues likely to arise in Japan. Rivkin has international experience as a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. And Obama’s appointee to Great Britain, Louis Susman, speaks fluent English.
via Blake Hounshell
Hulu releases Hulu Desktop, its own “free, lean-back video-watching experience.” Like Roku and Boxee, Hulu Desktop will exclude the peanut gallery. The navigation, however, looks excellent.
Over the last year, I’ve stopped making music and begun making things like tables.
The web isn’t made of tubes but it is made of people. It may sound corny but it’s worth repeating: the web is people.
Much of what we’ve been enjoying this year:
The Knife – We Share Our Mothers’ Health and Silent Shout
The Field – “A paw in my face,” “The Little Heart Beats So Fast,” “Sun & Ice,” “Over The Ice”
The Whitest Boy Alive – Dreams, Rules
Junior Boys – Work
Hercules And Love Affair – Blind (Feat. Antony Hegarty)
Buraka Som Sistema [...]
Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker:
I was puzzled by how a show that’s such a nothing even got made. It turns out that “Mental” is Fox’s first co-production with international partners in an effort to develop and package series for both the United States and the world market, and shoot them outside the U.S. in [...]
a soundtrack for the summer of 2009: buraka som sistema’s aqui p’ra voces from their album black diamond. video and
Today’s viewer sits at many different angles. Sometimes she leans forward to interact with the action. Other times, she leans back and lets the action take her away. There are many other possible angles in between.
The next generation is likely to enjoy more narratives that invite several angles, just as some of today’s best video games [...]
Twitter has succeeded in large part because it imposes limits on what can be said and what can be done with that utterance. At least one of these limits is based on the pre-existing and similarly arbitrary character limit that defines the SMS or txt message.
Just as boundaries create space and laws create society, filters [...]
“It’s easier to hit someone than outsmart them.” – Ali Soufan, former senior FBI agent involved in the interrogation of al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah.
The future is social engineering. (via Waxy) Previously.
Nazanin Rafsanjani confesses how America saved her parents’ marriage. It’s a beautiful story.
“You can move much faster if you’re healthy first than if you’re wealthy first.” Hans Rosling will blow your mind and recalibrate your political viewpoints.
Here we go:
A technology writer for Time Magazine, after being shown 15 minutes of [the upcoming Avatar by James Cameron], posited the movie’s 3D action had set off actual “memory creation.”
“I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were [...]
John Carpenter’s “They Live” is thrilling despite limited special effects because it exploits our social imagination.
Its scariest scenes consist of seeming strangers secretly communicating with one another. The stuff of paranoia.
We recognize threats to our body visually. Threats to our identity are socially coded.
Carpenter’s movies – including “The Thing”, “Halloween” and “Escape From [...]