Happy Black History Month!
It’s unbelievable to me that people – in the media! in academic settings! – still refer to Parks being a tired old lady in anything other than the existential sense. She trained at the Highlander Folk School with red-blooded communists, my friend, and she was an activist!
Don’t insult her intelligence and don’t, in the words of Cornel West, try to “sanitize, sterilize, and deodorize” the radical roots of civil rights! That ain’t history.
Okay, look, this is a really effing good video and exactly what they need to show his base, which I’m pretty sure is basically me: young progressives who are as discouraged by the President now as we were inspired in 2008.
You watch this and you think, “maybe he didn’t turn out to be such a milquetoast dude after all?”
# The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today (by BarackObamadotcom)
This is a great Tumblr concept.
Charles Sprague Pearce, Lamentation over the Death of the Firstborn of Egypt (detail)
(via cnide)
wnyc:
From the BBC, a satellite picture of the capsized Costa Concordia.
-Jody, BL Show-
Is it okay that it’s beautiful?
How 'Radiolab' Is Changing the Sound of the Radio
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, writing about much more than radio: a whole new media culture that’s grown up in the last few years that prizes thoughtfulness, quality, production, and aesthetics. A neat little argument and even better idea.
This! This.
Introducing our new game called:
“Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.”
The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.
Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.
Rules:
1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.
2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.
3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.
4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.
5) If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.
Variations/house rules:
-Starting the game after everyone is seated.
-In the rare event that multiple people flip their phones simultaneously, the bill is split between said players.
- Feel free to invoke penalties/strikes systems.
Notes:
- No touching or messing with anybody else’s phones.
- You don’t have to stack the phones. This was done for picture taking purposes.
- I realize I should perhaps think of a different name for this awesome game. Because I don’t mean to imply that everyone who checks their phone during meals is a di*k.
- I recommend not being such a stickler or hardass on people about the rules and even initiation of the game. Basic premise is to just get people open to the idea of staying active and attentive to one another. But if someone has to take a call; they have to take a call =).
- Have fun! It’s really more of a fun concept in this new age high tech life of ours. Conversation is the spice of life.
Love this illo by Vivienne Fleisher, from the front of yesterday’s Sunday Review in the Times. The article itself is in my wheelhouse, too —
Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on… But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
# Pico Iyer on The Joy of Quiet
This video of a door-to-door salesman came across Stellar today, and I was dumbstruck: it’s an incredible barrage of race-based humor from start to finish. And, of course, it keeps his white customers “in stitches.”
Twenty-first century minstrelsy, completely unvarnished. For all that’s changed in the last hundred years, this one thing remains exactly the same, almost line for line. I don’t even know what else to say about it, other than to simply let it speak for itself at the moment.
(via ★interesting)
ben franklin’s daily schedule (thank you, yum-and-yuk!)
Makes me think of Murukami, too:
His running balances out the rigor of his writing life, which involves going to bed each night by 10 p.m., then rising between 4 and 5 a.m. and sitting in the quiet, early morning to “wait to catch what’s coming.” His writing process requires “stepping into the darkness,” where he observes, remembers, and writes down what he sees. His early books, he said, originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the darkness found in society and history.
