July 2011
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June 2011
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“Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis. He...”
– David Brooks in his column about the contrasting management styles of Chris Christie, Rahm Emmanuel, and Señor Obama.
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Sorry Michael Bay, the original animated... →
FUCK. YES.
Only in our wildest dreams [as pre-adolescent boys] did we think that the show might celebrate its liberation from network television by letting loose with a curse word. And only in our scariest nightmares would we have imagined that a mere 20 minutes into the movie, Optimus Prime, the most beloved of Autobots, would be killed by Megatron.
(Oh, and Orson Wells’ AND Scatman...
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Gut Bacteria Know Secrets About Your Future →
This is totally fascinating to me.
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by ROBERT KRULWICH
You have a hundred trillion of these guys in you right now. Before you were born, you had hardly any.
Barcroft/Fame Pictures
Back then, you were floating in amniotic fluid, protected, sanitized. Bacteria kept their distance. Until you slipped down that birth canal, you were pretty much spic-and-span.
Then...
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another disease is vanquished. HOORAY FOR SCIENCE! →
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Night Bike Rides
(A great little musing on riding your bike home after going out. Bike-riders take note.)
I don’t think I could ever live somewhere you can’t bike wildly home after bar hours, in the summertime, with a low probability of harm. Sorry, Manhattan. It’s just the thing that makes me feel most alone in the universe and in the best possible way. It’s a thing that makes my heart beat control-free. Like...
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WatchMastodon “Deathbound” - the Adult Swim guys made this amazingly over-the-top video for Mastodon with plenty of puppet on puppet violence. Whoa.
(via Adult Swim)
Mastodon and Adult Swim have been working together for a long time. We asked them for a song for our Adult Swim Singles Program (fun fact: not a dating service). When they sent us this incredible jam, we knew we had to make...
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Awkward Family Photos: Hall of Fame →
Man, this does not. get. old. Here are a few of them… more where these came from at the link above.
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Watch[audio]
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The Zagat History of My Last Relationship (by Noah...
I have no idea what reminded me of this but I went back and found it (from the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs in 2002). It still makes me smile when I think of it.
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Bring a “first date” to this “postage stamp”-size bistro. Tables are so close you’re practically “sitting in the laps” of the couple next to you, but the lush décor is “the color of...
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So long and thanks for all the fish →
Marine life facing mass extinction ‘within one human generation’ / State of seas ‘much worse than we thought’, says global panel of scientists
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Twixcuse →
A Twitter web app that, collects, generates, and tweets excuses.
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Victorian England Has Steampunk, American... →
Some of the stuff is actually pretty cool.
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We’ve seen plenty of companies that build furniture from reclaimed materials, but creative collective Unite Two Design caught my eye not only for the quality of their stuff, but for their ethos:
Sticking to our roots, UTD now recovers material from local farms, industrial sites and residential projects. Our raw, homegrown designs...
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“Christian rock is like the Special Olympics of music.”
– one of the guys from You Look Nice Today (I’m not sure which)
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Consumers Getting Clothes Mended Instead Of... →
Here’s to the death of the everything-is-disposable culture.
Now that the economic downturn has well set in and there’s no booming recovery around the corner, it’s a good moment to take stock of the little things that have changed. Ed, a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, says, “I’m seeing a lot more repairs, a lot more patches.”
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The Liberty Scam →
This is a long read for the weekend on how “big L”-Libertarianism has strayed from it’s founding ideas. I’m looking forward to digging into it.
Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired.
Recently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on politics. “You know, it’s because I’m...
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File under: be careful what you wish for
Step 1: Pass some of the toughest anti-illegal immigrant legislation in the country.
Step 2: End up over 10,000 field workers short of what you need to harvest crops before they go bad because the immigrant workers afraid of being arrested in the ensuing immigration crackdown.
Step 3: Realize that the immigrant workers were way better and less whiney than the unemployed on-probation ex-cons that...
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Defending Roger Ebert
John Dickerson defending Roger Ebert over on the Brow Beat blog… I think he’s spot on.
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I’m glad Roger Ebert spoke up. Jackass performer Ryan Dunn killed himself and Zachary Hartwell Monday night in a car accident after leaving from a bar. Afterward, Ebert tweeted, “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” He was immediately set upon. How...
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WatchThe title card for Hulu right now is a video from 1991, and I’m feeling a twinge of nostalgia. Check out the shows, the computer-y sound effects. I appreciate whomever had this idea.
I’m just talking about the first six seconds or so.
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Podcast Rollcall: You Look Nice Today →
I just grabbed the earliest episode of You Look Nice Today that I could get. Hilariously. It”s not necessarily the kind of funny where you laugh out loud constantly, but I was smirking like a total fool the whole way through it. If you like your humor smart and wildly digressive (al la Paul F. Tompkins) you should check it out.
On a side note, I now know that callipygian means having...
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In Praise of Not Knowing →
