March 2011
2 tags
Backbone by David Foster Wallace →
The New Yorker By David Foster Wallace March 7, 2011
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a...
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
February 2011
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
3 tags
"Companies should be very scared, as throwaway...
larssss:
Sitting on a bale of denim in an idled factory, 24-year-old Wei Xiaofeng has a message for the West - the era of Chinese factories churning out dirt-cheap goods is over.
For years, her company, along with thousands of others in China, has helped British high street stores to offer cheaper and cheaper fashion - jeans that cost less than £10 or t-shirts for £3 - and turned...
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
2 tags
Speaking at Arm’s Length With Music →
As in many classic love stories, a romance would be foiled by poverty. In my despair, I fantasized: I could max out a few credit cards to buy 100 music boxes and then give her just one. I would keep the other 99 in my closet and she would never know what that one music box had cost.
Of course, I compromised. I recorded myself performing music box interpretations of her songs on my glockenspiel....
1 tag
1 tag
3 tags
Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy →
There was a Hardtalk once, I believe, between some BBC guy obviously, and a Palestinian activist. He was asking questions like this—“Do you believe in killing children?”—and any question he asked, the Palestinian just said, “Ariel Sharon is a war criminal.” Once, I was on The Charlie Rose Show. Well, I was invited to be on The Charlie Rose Show. He said, “Tell me, Arundhati Roy, do you believe...
3 tags
Great American Writers and Their Cocktails
...
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
The Loneliest Whale in the World →
On their most recent episode of their always-enjoyable Dinner Party Download podcast, American Public Media’s Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam featured the story of “a lonely whale with vocal problems whose love song supposedly chases lady whales away.”
According to a 2004 New York Times article on the subject, this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA...
1 tag
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
What's Inside: Street Heroin →
Diacetylmorphine Pharmaceutical-grade heroin. Marketed by Bayer as an over-the-counter cough suppressant in 1898, it’s fairly easy to make with raw opium, some chemicals, and basic lab equipment. The percentage of diacetylmorphine in street heroin can vary based on geographic source; South American wholesale has been falling from a high of 88 percent in 2003. Street purity in the US has been...
2 tags
1 tag
3 tags
Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People →
By Philip Ball
We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on unexamined myth.
At one time ranked among Britain’s most influential scientists, the crystallographer J D Bernal (1901-71) recognised no limits to the power of science. A lifelong Marxist and recipient of...
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the...”
– Unknown
1 tag
3 tags
The Stutterer →
It’s hard to describe the feeling of stuttering to anyone who has always spoken smoothly. It is not a nervous impulse. It is not, despite appearances, a spastic feeling. Stuttering starts in the voice box and the upper lungs with something like a pressure clench, the sensation of some valves closing against a flow, a trap tripping its release at the wrong moment. (John Updike described it as...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
3 tags
Who Buys These Clothes? They Do →
A Peek Inside the Closets of Shoppers Who Pay Full Price for Designers’ Latest Runway Looks
After Ana Pettus, a 42-year-old mother who lives in Dallas, watched a gold minidress with a plunging, fringed V-neck go down the runway at the Balmain show in Paris last year, she knew she had to have it.
She bought the piece—she wears it as a tunic instead of a dress—along with three others from...
2 tags
What Do We Learn When We Diagnose Genius? →
In her Histoire de Ma Vie, the author George Sand describes an encounter with Frédéric Chopin upon returning one night from a trip to Palma. Chopin was playing a melody on the piano, in the grip of a strange delirium. “He saw himself drowned in a lake,” she wrote: heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water...
2 tags
