The hip bone, removed by doctors, has gone on display as part of an exhibition. The operation to remove the bone was filmed and forms part of the exhibition also....He had some kind of physical problem that required the surgery, so it's not as if a body part were needlessly excised and repurposed for food.
A walk around any art gallery will reveal that the image of the open smile has, for a very long time, been deeply unfashionable....
Smiling... has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment....
I feel that she has no idea how to maintain herself in that high position. She just hides from accountability. I find her arrogant. I find her cold.There's more and Paglia has to fight off the accusation of sexism (mostly for daring to judge the expression on Hillary's face). Ah, here's the transcript (minus 2 pages, Google Books style).
The plant colonizes in an interesting process known as myrmecochory.The link goes to Wikipedia:
Myrmecochory... is seed dispersal by ants, an ecologically significant ant-plant interaction with worldwide distribution. Myrmecochorous plants produce seeds with elaiosomes, a term encompassing various external appendages or "food bodies" rich in lipids, amino acid, or other nutrients that are attractive to ants. The seed with its attached elaiosome is collectively known as a diaspore. Seed dispersal by ants is typically accomplished when foraging workers carry diaspores back to the ant colony after which the elaiosome is removed or fed directly to ant larvae. Once the elaiosome is consumed the seed is usually discarded in underground middens or ejected from the nest....Myrmecochory, elaiosomes, diaspores....
All modern presidents of both parties have been too much with us. Talking incessantly, they have put politics unhealthily at the center of America’s consciousness. Promising promiscuously, they have exaggerated government’s proper scope and actual competence, making the public perpetually disappointed and surly. Inflating executive power, they have severed it from constitutional constraints. So, sensible voters might embrace someone who announced his 2016 candidacy this way....The rest of the column is the candidate's announcement. See if it sounds like anyone who exists.
A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."
I relayed these thoughts to [Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing], along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.”
“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college....Every reliable figure?! That sentence really undercut Kang's credibility for me. I note that he says "sexually assaulted" and not "rape" (a word that appears 7 times in his article), and depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed? — the number is up for grabs. But we're seeing that notoriously spurious statistic in a paragraph that's in the middle of Kang's essay. It's a sop to the feminists, a place on his narrative arc before he ultimately delivers us back where he started and agrees with his own original orientation against trigger warnings.
I am not sure whether this will make you smile, cringe, roll your eyes, or simply click delete . . . .Here's her photo:
I have worn my affection for Flannery O'Connor on my sleeve, so to speak, for about 13 years. This version of the quote comes from Walker Percy who lovingly purloined it from Flannery for use in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome.
Politically Incorrect was cancelled by ABC in 2002, thanks to an incident that happened six days after 9/11. Maher and political conservative Dinesh D'Souza had this conversation on the show:
A “politics of empathy” doesn’t provide much clarity in the public sphere, either. Typically, political disputes involve a disagreement over whom we should empathize with....
It let all kinds of new players have room to breathe. Imagine if Tony had been on the same tribe as Russell or some previous alpha dog. It would have dominated the story line. Same [thing] with Kass, Spencer and Tasha. All of them were better because they were all new to the situation.That made me comment:
Good point, but at the same time, I had the feeling that a lot of them were playing not just to win -- which is always a long shot -- but to get invited back as a return player.Maybe another "Heroes and Villains" season is in the offing.
I'd certainly like to see Spencer again, and Kass was auditioning for the female villain role that always seems to need to be filled.
When Abramson became executive editor of the New York Times in August 2011, just one of the eight newsroom masthead editor jobs was held by a woman. I reported in January that four of the then-nine jobs were held by women.More here.
By the time Abramson was fired last week, that number had increased to five, and Abramson had been trying to hire another woman, Janine Gibson, as co-managing editor for digital.
Just as the ancients looked to animal bones and cloud shapes for clues to the gods’ intentions, news executives and the journalists who work for them parse every utterance out of Menlo Park for insight into the company’s thinking.That's Jeff Bercovici at Forbes, talking about some rant put up by a Facebook guy named Mike Hudack. Bercovici quotes a lot of the rant, including this, about Ezra Klein and Vox:
So when a high-ranking product manager takes to his Facebook page to condemn the efforts of the most successful digital publishers, you better believe they’re going to pay attention.
Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy.And Ezra Klein himself deigned to drop a comment chez Hudack:
And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.
It’s funny: last night, we were having a conversation around the mix of content on Vox. And we were saying that if you just looked at what worked well on FB it was a lot lighter than if you looked at what was on the site. We actually try pretty hard not to be swallowed up by those incentives. But it’s a bit baffling to read a post by Facebook’s product director that just ignores the fact that those incentives exist.What?! Facebook doesn't purport to be a news site transforming the news. Why should Hudack's critique of news media need to include an acknowledgment of such a mundane, banal reality? If Klein actually finds it "baffling" that Hudack didn't cut him some slack for plying readers with candy, he's utterly stupid. I don't think he is stupid. He's just not capable of delivering the website he promises and lacks any good excuses.
Mothers who work full time and steadily across their twenties and thirties report better mental and physical health at age 45 than mothers who work part-time, who stay at home, or who experience repeated bouts of unemployment.
Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home. In fact, women may get more renewal from work than men, because unlike men, they report themselves happier at work than at home. It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work.
There are ascetics, like Henry James’s Miss Birdseye (from “The Bostonians”), “who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after 50 years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.”
There are narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that constrain ordinary mortal...
Then there are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager....
And Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it....
The great restaurateur promises a “soothing” experience, modeled on the “contemplative” spirit of a tea room.At some point the taking of offense itself becomes offensive.
Whew!
But the brains behind the museum apparently regard their cathartic masterpiece as just another cultural venue like MoMA or the Whitney, where [Danny] Meyer also runs restaurants.
I can go for tomato soup and grilled cheese after staring at Picassos for a few hours. My appetite isn’t the same after a tour through hell.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.And here's Isaac Chotiner in "Get Ready for a National Debate About Slavery Reparations."
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
The best argument against Coates's proposals is simply that they will prove to be more trouble than they are worth, i.e. that their practical effect will be a negative one... But... [i]f we can't even have the conversation he wants because people are so defensive or unwilling (or plain racist), it's just more evidence for what his essay rightfully bemoans.ADDED: Look at the fluid interchangeability of "reparations" and "the conversation." Are we talking about "the conversation about race" that we've been talking about (not) having for the last 2 decades? This almost feels like a negotiation about the conversation, where the demand for "reparations" is designed to get your attention and to prepare you to feel relieved that all you really need to submit to is the conversation.
This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor... Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?... It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.The very entertaining Hitchcock movie "Rope" is based on this incident, and Jimmy Stewart plays the role of the professor who finds out where the philosophy he taught has led.
Smith, the “godmother of punk,” told an audience in 2010 to “find a new city” as New York had “closed itself off to the young and the struggling.” Byrne, co-founder of the new wave rock band Talking Heads, wrote last year that too many neighborhoods had become “pleasure domes for the rich” with “no room for fresh creative types,” in contrast with when he arrived in the 1970s....
The announcement came on what amounts to the first day of the general election for governor, a race where Mr. Corbett, a Republican, is seen as vulnerable. On Tuesday, businessman Tom Wolf, who supports gay-marriage rights, won the Democratic primary.
Mr. Corbett's announcement was a fresh sign that the politics of gay marriage are rapidly changing. A string of Republican governors have now declined to either appeal or criticize similar rulings in their own states, including Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico.
Many Twitter users had used the hashtag #freehappyiranians to put pressure on the Iranian authorities to release the dancers.Yeah, I know, hashtags. But the kids have been freed — on bail, at least.
Khamenei was probably sick of hearing this annoying song on the radio so many times and ordered them arrested for making him listen to it again. I don't blame him. The long, hipster beard and skinny jeans doesn't help their case either. I wish being a hipster was illegal all over the world.Free speech. Know it. Live it. Use it.
[S]tudying dog play is so important, [cognitive ethologist Marc] Bekoff says.... It could ultimately shed light on the evolution of human emotions and how we came to build a civilization based on laws and cooperation, empathy and altruism.Well, in one sense, when we study anything, we study ourselves. When we gaze into crystal balls and tea leaves, we see ourselves. Anything that focuses and facilitates human reflection is likely to cause a human being to see human beings.
Play may seem a frivolous activity, but because it is not simply a survival reflex, it provides the best opportunity to explore who the animal really is, to peer perhaps into her soul. “When we study play in dogs,” Bekoff says, “we study ourselves.”
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics, 3D computer animation, and in medical fields such as burn reconstruction, infectious diseases, neurological conditions, and plastic surgery. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as subjects move toward a healthy, natural human likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability.I think that some human observers feel this kind of revulsion about work-related social events. Isn't this what the TV show "The Office" was often about? I have to ask because I've barely ever watched the show, which I can't enjoy because of how awful these events do feel to me. It's the uncanny valley between work and your personal life. There are people who feel good in that place, and they are not only revolting, like a too-realistic robot, but they are often in a position to compel you to participate in these events, and they are powered on by their belief that they are making the workplace better and taking on the task of staging these horrors.
For the writer, besides the fun of getting things off his chest, the pleasure must be in his own ingenuity, the inner consistency of the world he’s worked out, forecasting the logical evolutions of present conditions, making up the new names (B-Mor for Baltimore), finding the clever equivalences. A pitfall of dystopian novels is that their writers can become too absorbed in the details of their invented worlds, and in the inner consistency of their visions, which can produce long, perhaps, to some, uninteresting descriptions....Long, uninteresting description omitted.
There’s an inherent difficulty in sharing someone else’s imaginary land: the farther it departs from what the reader knows, no matter how vividly described, the less telling it is....
If the wellsprings of novel-writing are mysterious, there’s surely a hint of admonition, and an admonitory project is especially clear in dystopia. A question is: Why write in an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone?
Overshadowing the whole night was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decisive triumph over Matt Bevin, a conservative Louisville investor whose bid drew support from outside groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks. Bevin proved entirely unequal to the task of fighting McConnell and saw his public image shredded as McConnell’s campaign picked apart his record on issues from bank bailouts to cockfighting.AND: Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law fails in her effort to get back to Congress, despite help from Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The emails were so vulgar that most of their content could not be printed here. But if you can imagine how a 14-year-old, puberty-driven boy might discuss girls to his 14-year-old, puberty-driven friends, you pretty much have an idea of what Scudamore — a 54-year-old father of five, including two daughters — considered appropriate banter in his work email.
Jace's 2 kids witnessed him allegedly shooting and killing their mom. The kids — both under 10 — were extremely upset and taken to the police station. We're told cops are angry it took Children's Services 4 hours to get to the station and take the kids to the home of a family member where they could be comforted.
In reality, legal arguments typically have two sides and dismissing one as specious (or frivolous) is almost always unwarranted and undermines the credibility of the critic, in this case the editorial writer of the Times. The editorial gets off on the wrong foot here.There is an old argumentative tactic of characterizing the opponent's argument as frivolous, not passing the "laugh test," etc. Sometimes that should work, but it's overused, notably in the NYT.
I hate reading media news so I actively sort of — I'm not interested in someone getting fired. No disrespect to people that are, but I literally had no idea who she was, or that she got fired until this moment.
Sure, losing a job you love hurts, but the work I revere, journalism that holds powerful institutions and people accountable, is what makes our democracy so resilient. This is the work I will remain very much a part of.... What's next for me? I don't know!Well, I kind of think I know. You're going to continue the work you love — the work you revere — by holding the powerful institution that is the New York Times and the powerful person who is Arthur Sulzberger Jr. accountable. That is the work that makes our democracy so resilient, the work you're obviously already very much a part of.
If you [can't] work with gay people, you’re gonna have a difficult time in Hollywood. There’s plenty of gay people and they’re in positions above you. You’re not going to get your movie directed. I don’t have a problem with it — they’ve just turned into a mafia and demanding everyone apologize for every joke and retract every statement.
You might think that the Constitution would be better if one or more [amendments] were part of it, but you might agree that the general pattern of forbearance is also in the national interest. You might even think that the founding generation was wise to make forbearance more likely, if only because of the importance of constitutional stability and the risk of harmful or ill-considered amendments. There could well be strong national majorities in favor of some amendments that Justice Stevens and civil libertarians would deplore, while national majorities would be exceedingly difficult to muster for some of the amendments that he proposes — a point that might strengthen the case for forbearance. And if you approve of forbearance, you might be inclined to reject most or even all of Stevens’s proposals for constitutional change, even if you think that on most or even all of them, he is right as a matter of public policy.
“After Thompson had been hired for the job but before he’d started, Abramson sent Matthew Purdy, a hard-charging investigative reporter, to London to examine Thompson’s role in the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC,” writes [Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine]. “Abramson’s relationship with the two executives never recovered. ‘Mark Thompson was fucking pissed,’ a source explained. ‘He was really angry with the Purdy stuff.’ So was Sulzberger. ‘He was livid, in a very passive-aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.’”
... The suggestion Abramson should have ignored this story because it embarrassed a powerful Times hire says something troubling about the paper’s priorities.
Extremely well-informed sources at the paper familiar with the reasons for Abramson’s dismissal have also given this account to The New Yorker: they say that Abramson was, essentially, fired for cause, for lying to Sulzberger that she had squared Gibson’s rank and arrival with Baquet when, in fact, she had not. The sources say she misled Sulzberger when she said, in person and by e-mail, that she had consulted with Baquet about the offer to Gibson and had worked it all out in detail with him. Baquet was furious. At a dinner with Sulzberger, Baquet basically described the incident as a humiliation. He could no longer work with Abramson. It was him or her. (Politico reported that, when Sulzberger shared Baquet’s distress with Abramson, she persisted in assuring him that she had told Baquet everything.) According to this account, her breach with Baquet and Sulzberger was irrevocable. Sulzberger decided to fire Abramson and replace her with Baquet, thus making him the first African-American executive editor of the paper—but under the most sour, trying, and confused circumstances.Who are the "extremely well-informed sources"? Baquet? Sulzberger? Abramson? It would have to be at least 2 out of 3 of them for this all to be based on first-hand witnesses. In this version, there is a conflict in the story that was told about the job offer to Gibson, and one could have gone easy on Abramson and Baquet and said that perhaps the two had different understandings of what they were talking about when they talked about Gibson.
There are still wonderful moments when I look at my husband searching in vain for his pants in the morning, or sitting at his laptop trolling goodreads.com, and I think to myself, “OK, he’s going to be absolutely adorable at 85.” There are times when I see him standing in line next to a little girl at our neighborhood bakery, and I imagine him giving a look, not the look, but a loving, awe-inspired gaze toward our future daughter. I honestly cannot imagine what my future would look like without him.Such are the journalings of a woman talking herself into staying with her husband. Amanda Kling ≈ a man to cling.
I suppose I have to decide whether the promise of how things could get better will outweigh what has gone wrong so far. Maybe all of the things I think have gone “wrong” are just the inevitable ups and downs of any long-term relationship. Maybe if I just stop waiting for the perfect look or the perfect moment of sexual intimacy, and start accepting that this longing for more may always be there, I can finally start to enjoy my reality again.
Earlier Sunday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported that the accident occurred at an apartment construction site in the Pyongchon district of Pyongyang on Tuesday, blaming “sloppy building” and “irresponsible supervision and control.” It said there were “human casualties” but did not give figures.
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