From the first EP to the soon-released LP, how it all happened.

As of this writing, “6 on the International Space Station and 6 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.”

“The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.”

A elegy to hipsters, complete with obnoxious photography, sort of just picks and chooses various elements of youth culture and NYC hipster party culture and starts dividing them into subspecies. I have read this through three times and still don’t get it. That may be my fault or this may just be total bullshit.

An empathetic profile.

“Almost overnight, Barack Obama overhauled his White House and rewrote much of the script. Now all he needs is a happy ending.” On the self-examination and cabinet shuffling over the last two months, and what it could mean for the next two years. If anything it’s incredibly promising that Obama is willing and able to rethink everything and actually take the hard steps to implement a change of operations.

“Apparently people in their 20s are a bunch of entitled whiners. I also hear we’re afraid of hard work. I’m rather sick of hearing it. Of course we have a sense of entitlement—we had an understanding with the older generation. We followed through with our half of the deal. What happened? Let’s talk a bit about generational justice.” As a commenter puts it: “I’m a tired of hearing a generation that got everything handed to them (I’m looking at you baby-boomers) bungle everything up so badly and then badmouth the generation that has to clean up their mess (e.g. the national debt, the planet, the educational system, and so on).” See also my notes on that NYTimes article: http://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:a83c50952510

“1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, drank himself to death with carrot juice.”

Dozens of violent, fearful, hateful incidents from just the last three years, leading up to the recent shooting of Representative Giffords. “On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the National Rifle Association’s contention that the Second Amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against our government should it become ‘tyrannical.’ The following timeline catalogues incidents of insurrectionist violence (or the promotion of such violence) that have occurred since that decision was issued.”

“It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”

“Bianca Jagger last week launched a fierce attack on the Guardian for carrying my story about the evidence collected by Swedish police who have been investigating the claims of sexual assault by the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. At the heart of her attack is a repeated claim that we failed to publish exculpatory evidence contained in the police file. Those who have read her piece will have noticed that she does not cite one single example of this missing information. There are two reasons for this. First, she does not know what is in that police file, because she has not read it. Second, if she had, she would know that her claim is simply not true.”

“…the human world is indisputably in better shape overall in 2010 than it was in 2000.”

“Both albums are like brainwashing, insular symphonies to a painfully reactive public awareness. The music doesn’t drive outward but, instead, falls inward, bouncing along the various fractured feelings of its singer and his mates. While ‘The National Anthem’ may suggest that ‘everyone is so near/everyone has got the fear’, the reality is that Yorke feels like a misidentified Pied Piper, the ‘rats and kids follow me out of town’ tenets of the Kid A title track pleading his case to be set free. This could be the main reason why the reaction to its release was so incredibly strong. Newness and novelty can help, but there is more to it than a differing direction. Kid A sounds like the start of a surreal psychological dissertation. Amnesiac occasionally comes across as whining.”

A good interview, and explains Obama's long-game strategy explicitly. His indignation at progressives and Democrats complaining about the state of things when much has actually been accomplished is reasonable, but his final statement bothers me. "We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." OK, but what does that mean? What's going to make a difference with ten-to-one odds and enormous corporations and special-interest groups lined up on the other side? Your base gave you a lot of money to help you get elected, but is that what you're asking them to do again, deep in a recession? They need direction, advice, some instruction or insight. What exactly do you want us to 'try harder' at?

In Afghanistan there is a history of parents dressing their daughters up as boys (until they reach their teens) in order to avoid embarrassment and scrutiny of a culture that values sons and treats women like shit. Fascinating, unfortunate, and like one of the article's interviewees says, just a small part of a huge web of human rights issues plaguing the nation.

Finally got around to reading this. I still can't reconcile the problem, but this is a very thorough analysis. My hunch is that it isn't exactly an undiscovered life stage or nothing but spoiled kids, but rather a confluence of factors stemming from stuff like 'extended adolescence' (and the provision thereof by parents, college atmospheres, and the entertainment industry), the recession, the internet, and an increasingly ineffectual educational system.

The history of AA and some insight on why some of its most important characteristics — no central organization, a focus on group therapy, the replacement of meetings as an obsession — are why it works so well for so many.

"As the TSA feels you up and dresses you down, terrorists are tearing a hole in a new target: The U.S. economy."

"So why not look for constructive things to use the military for? Why not get some use out of our military resources—particularly if that use makes it less likely that we’ll need to use the military for more violent purposes?"

"If somebody you care about is bleeding profusely, it’s not loving to insist that she’s flawless and has nothing to worry about. The loving thing is to stop the bleeding then get her to a doctor. If a guy is clearly suffering from blood poisoning, ignoring the problem isn’t loving. Instead, say, 'Dude. You need to get that looked at immediately.' Or, better yet, go with him. Do what you can to make things better."

On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"

"He was condemned to death for telling the ancient Greeks things they didn't want to hear, but his views on consumerism and trial by media are just as relevant today."

The Roma story.

"A day in the life of the President." "Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."

They don't carry disease, they disappeared for forty years, and everyone is freaked out about them. And that's actually all we know.

From the guy who wrote it.

"These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch. And we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing, watching us, sipping on a Slurpee."

This isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

"A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population."