Not enough
“This is a political choice that we make — to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”
Recently updated
Lands’ End, angling for (so-called) millennials.
Lands’ End: The White Album
The Lands’ End catalogue may never have been a great document of the variousness of Americans, but its recent incarnations appear to have taken a sharp turn for the white.
Life at Gravity Payments
In April, Dan Price announced that he would be raising his company’s minimum salary to $70,000. But things aren’t working out well.
Why one should watch the fifty-two-minute dashcam video
Consider: he has stopped a driver for speeding, a driver who turns out to have no proof of insurance. And yet Encinia is a model of tact. He’s even chatty. He lets the driver off with a warning. He repeats, no fine, no penalty — for speeding and no proof of insurance. Why Encinia takes such a different approach in his encounter with Sandra Bland has to remain a matter for speculation.
A word from the Danish
Hygge.
Tea cakes and lemonade
From a New York Times article about publicity for the new, not-new Harper Lee novel Go Set a Watchman.
A paragraph about marriage
The next-to-last paragraph of the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges might prompt any number of already-married people to take their marriages a little more seriously.
Doing the right thing
“No union is more profound than marriage.”
NYT on Charleston
“The horrific church shooting in Charleston, S.C., leaves the nation at an all too familiar juncture.”
Equal marriage in Ireland
62% to 38%.
The honorific Mx
The gender-neutral title Mx may be joining the honorifics Miss , Mr , Mrs and Ms in the Oxford English Dictionary.
A hashtag of possible interest
BaltimoreCoverageYouMayNotSee
Baltimore questions
Is live television coverage in Baltimore meant to help bring about the violence that we now see on CNN? Is it too cynical to acknowledge that broadcasting such stuff serves broadcasters’ interests? And is it too cynical to suspect that broadcasting such stuff serves to strengthen a larger narrative about color and criminality?
The gender-neutral hen
A new word in Swedish.
Pantone 347
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
Debbie Chachra on makers
Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system.
The Real Housewives of NPR
“Public radio ought not to serve as an organ of publicity for junk-pop-culture. NPR’s willingness to do so makes me less and less interested in kicking in to support NPR.”
The Beloit Mindset List, 2018 edition
This year’s list looks to my eyes like a particularly tasteless and clueless array of hastily selected cultural fragments.
From Invisible Man
“There may be no exact parallel between what happens in Ellison’s novel and what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. But across sixty-two years, the general resemblance is clear and appalling.”
Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit
“What Riemen seeks is a culture that reverences and preserves all that is good in the human endeavor, that promulgates the dignity of the individual, that eschews the merely entertaining and expedient, that renounces any dream of human perfectibility.”
Liveright Bookshop, Hotel Dressler
A 1925 ad promising sanctuary and speed, relaxed browsing and instant gratification. Reminiscent of what goes in his Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day Weekend
Poor Saint Patrick. Poor his Day.
Inequality v. disparity
The problem is not income inequality: it is income disparity.
Sixteen stars and counting
The Flag of Equal Marriage.
A deportee memorial
Sixty-five years later, there is a memorial for those who died in the 1948 plane crash that inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and whose names are now, all, known.
Nine questions about Syria
From The Washington Post: Nine questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask.
In-house shoeshines
At New York investment firms.
The Beloit Mindset List, 2017 edition
Better scotch those Stapleton Airport analogies, Professor Higginbotham! The kids today won’t “dig” them.
Albert Murray (1916–2013)
An excerpt from The Omni-Americans.