August 2, 2013
Wisdom From Beyond the 23rd Century

A voice from the future gives a motivational speech on the importance of dance, veggies, and cereal.

11:35pm
(Notes: 34)
  
August 2, 2013
12 Reasons Pyrosomes Are My New Favorite Terrifying Sea Creatures

Reason number 11: scientists call them “the unicorns of the sea."

9:35pm
(Notes: 125)
  
Filed under: Science Pyrosomes The ocean Sea creatures 
August 2, 2013
The GOP’s Totally Reactive Reaction to the War on Women Five different Republican committees this morning released a joint memo pushing back on the “Democrats’ War on Women" messaging to highlight the sex scandals of a group of Democratic men and argue that Democrats are hypocrites who only care about women when it is politically convenient. It’s a fine message as far as it goes, which is as a kind of a summer doldrums GOP base-riling play, reminding Republican women that there are a bunch of Democratic men out there who they — and others! — think are creeps. But the memo did not lay out a message the GOP can build a 2014 campaign around, because it’s not a real prescription to reach women, and it doesn’t involve anyone who’s even going to be on a ballot that fall. Read more.

The GOP’s Totally Reactive Reaction to the War on Women

Five different Republican committees this morning released a joint memo pushing back on the “Democrats’ War on Women" messaging to highlight the sex scandals of a group of Democratic men and argue that Democrats are hypocrites who only care about women when it is politically convenient.

It’s a fine message as far as it goes, which is as a kind of a summer doldrums GOP base-riling play, reminding Republican women that there are a bunch of Democratic men out there who they — and others! — think are creeps. But the memo did not lay out a message the GOP can build a 2014 campaign around, because it’s not a real prescription to reach women, and it doesn’t involve anyone who’s even going to be on a ballot that fall.

Read more.

8:30pm
(Notes: 50)
  
Filed under: Politics GOP Republicans Women War on Women 
August 2, 2013
Study: Feeling Left Out Makes People Take Financial Risks

When excluded from social groups, people turn to money to fill the holes in their hearts.

7:25pm
(Notes: 139)
  
Filed under: Health The fear of missing out FOMO Exclusion Sociology Money 
August 2, 2013
Folk Music Isn’t What It Used To Be—and That’s More Than Okay In The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer’s best-selling portrait of a post-’60s generation, folk music exists as a symbol of nostalgia. Susannah Bay, a long-haired former folk icon, is left behind as the times go a-changing, abandoning the peace and love themes of her heyday to try to keep up with the changing trends of the next decades. On a steady decline from her days playing with Dylan and Baez and bringing First Lady Rosalynn Carter to tears, Bay releases an ill-advised “disco folk" album, then more or less fades into obscurity. Like the aging Bay, who scarcely resembles “the winsome hippie girl in the poncho" in her later years, little of the legendary Newport Folk Festival any longer looks like those early days of folk. Appreciation for the type of music it champions hasn’t diminished, but it has changed. The bands and singer-songwriters who took to the festival’s three stages last weekend in Newport, Rhode Island, were “folk," though they rarely played anything the fictional Bay would recognize from her own time. German audio-electronics company Sennheiser hosts additional sets that can only be listened to using its wireless headphones; NPR meticulously documents the entire weekend for live-streaming online. Still, the festival has remained true to the genre’s spirit in the ways that count: I caught the occasional whiff of pot in the air, and booths hawked beaded jewelry, vegan purses, and peasant skirts. In other words, Newport was a music festival hip enough for its mostly young crowd, but also a good place to bring my mom. Read more. [Image: AP/Joe Giblin]

Folk Music Isn’t What It Used To Be—and That’s More Than Okay

In The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer’s best-selling portrait of a post-’60s generation, folk music exists as a symbol of nostalgia. Susannah Bay, a long-haired former folk icon, is left behind as the times go a-changing, abandoning the peace and love themes of her heyday to try to keep up with the changing trends of the next decades. On a steady decline from her days playing with Dylan and Baez and bringing First Lady Rosalynn Carter to tears, Bay releases an ill-advised “disco folk" album, then more or less fades into obscurity.

Like the aging Bay, who scarcely resembles “the winsome hippie girl in the poncho" in her later years, little of the legendary Newport Folk Festival any longer looks like those early days of folk. Appreciation for the type of music it champions hasn’t diminished, but it has changed. The bands and singer-songwriters who took to the festival’s three stages last weekend in Newport, Rhode Island, were “folk," though they rarely played anything the fictional Bay would recognize from her own time. German audio-electronics company Sennheiser hosts additional sets that can only be listened to using its wireless headphones; NPR meticulously documents the entire weekend for live-streaming online. Still, the festival has remained true to the genre’s spirit in the ways that count: I caught the occasional whiff of pot in the air, and booths hawked beaded jewelry, vegan purses, and peasant skirts. In other words, Newport was a music festival hip enough for its mostly young crowd, but also a good place to bring my mom.

Read more. [Image: AP/Joe Giblin]

6:37pm
(Notes: 78)
  
Filed under: Music Folk Folk Music Newport Folk Festival 
August 2, 2013
James Baldwin on Television and What You Learn Channel Surfing Today, August 2nd, is James Baldwin’s birthday. He was born in 1924 in Harlem.  A giant of 20th century literature, Baldwin is a spring of wisdom on all things. In his writing, you don’t find much about technology, per se, but in a 1983 essay “Nothing Personal" for Contributions in Black Studies, he held forth on television. Or really, more on the experience of channel surfing, the way the images glide past you, one into another, as you enter the machine zone, while somewhere out there, important things are happening ("News — news? from where? — dropping into this sea with the alertness and irrelevancy of pebbles"). So, yes, this is about television, but it’s also about pre-computing American business and advertising, “teeth gleaming like the grillwork of automobiles," and the implicit message that the meaning of life was to increase convenience while decreasing the variability of our bodies. Baldwin died four years after it came out. Read more. [Image: National Portrait Gallery]

James Baldwin on Television and What You Learn Channel Surfing

Today, August 2nd, is James Baldwin’s birthday. He was born in 1924 in Harlem. 

A giant of 20th century literature, Baldwin is a spring of wisdom on all things. In his writing, you don’t find much about technology, per se, but in a 1983 essay “Nothing Personal" for Contributions in Black Studies, he held forth on television. Or really, more on the experience of channel surfing, the way the images glide past you, one into another, as you enter the machine zone, while somewhere out there, important things are happening ("News — news? from where? — dropping into this sea with the alertness and irrelevancy of pebbles").

So, yes, this is about television, but it’s also about pre-computing American business and advertising, “teeth gleaming like the grillwork of automobiles," and the implicit message that the meaning of life was to increase convenience while decreasing the variability of our bodies. Baldwin died four years after it came out.

Read more. [Image: National Portrait Gallery]

5:56pm
(Notes: 297)
  
Filed under: Technology James Baldwin Advertising TV 
August 2, 2013
Whataboutism: The Soviet-Era Strategy That Partly Explains Why Russia Took Snowden When William Averell Harriman, who served as Secretary of Commerce under President Truman, mentioned “Soviet imperialism" in a speech in Seattle, writer Ilya Ehrenburg wasted no time airing his disgust on the pages of the Soviet publication Pravda. American warmongers want to drop bombs on the Soviet Union because they don’t like its social order, Ehrenburg wrote, but the Soviet people, though they consider U.S. laws on race to be insulting to human dignity, “do not intend on that account to turn modern weapons against Mississippi or Georgia," the Christian Science Monitor described in a 1947 story. The exchange is indicative of a rhetorical strategy known as whataboutism, which occurs when officials implicated in wrongdoing whip out a counter-example of a similar abuse from the accusing country, with the goal of undermining the legitimacy of the criticism itself. (In Latin, this rhetorical defense is called tu quoque, or “you, too.")  More than a month after NSA leaker Edward Snowden landed in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, Russia has finally granted him yearlong asylum, and it seems these kinds of cold-war-era swipes are back — but in a subtler way. Read more. [Image: AP]

Whataboutism: The Soviet-Era Strategy That Partly Explains Why Russia Took Snowden

When William Averell Harriman, who served as Secretary of Commerce under President Truman, mentioned “Soviet imperialism" in a speech in Seattle, writer Ilya Ehrenburg wasted no time airing his disgust on the pages of the Soviet publication Pravda.

American warmongers want to drop bombs on the Soviet Union because they don’t like its social order, Ehrenburg wrote, but the Soviet people, though they consider U.S. laws on race to be insulting to human dignity, “do not intend on that account to turn modern weapons against Mississippi or Georgia," the Christian Science Monitor described in a 1947 story.

The exchange is indicative of a rhetorical strategy known as whataboutism, which occurs when officials implicated in wrongdoing whip out a counter-example of a similar abuse from the accusing country, with the goal of undermining the legitimacy of the criticism itself. (In Latin, this rhetorical defense is called tu quoque, or “you, too.") 

More than a month after NSA leaker Edward Snowden landed in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, Russia has finally granted him yearlong asylum, and it seems these kinds of cold-war-era swipes are back — but in a subtler way.

Read more. [Image: AP]

5:26pm
(Notes: 93)
  
Filed under: Russia Snowden Edward Snowden Rhetoric Whataboutism History Soviet Union Vladimir Putin Rhetoric Man 
August 2, 2013
Why Wasn’t the NSA Prepared? In the coming weeks, Congress and the civilian defense leadership will have to ask a lot of questions about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, and how to reconcile them with privacy concerns. But they will also have to ask a more basic set of questions: Why on earth wasn’t the NSA prepared for this? Why didn’t the intelligence agency’s leadership have a plan to deal with the global outcry that would follow the leak of classified Internet surveillance programs? Read more. [Image: Steve Marcus/Reuters]

Why Wasn’t the NSA Prepared?

In the coming weeks, Congress and the civilian defense leadership will have to ask a lot of questions about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, and how to reconcile them with privacy concerns. But they will also have to ask a more basic set of questions: Why on earth wasn’t the NSA prepared for this? Why didn’t the intelligence agency’s leadership have a plan to deal with the global outcry that would follow the leak of classified Internet surveillance programs?

Read more. [Image: Steve Marcus/Reuters]

4:55pm
(Notes: 48)
  
Filed under: Politics NSA The NSA Government Surveillance 
August 2, 2013
Ask Alison: How to Break Up

Good advice from someone who is terrible at dating

4:25pm
(Notes: 53)
  
Filed under: Ask Allison Break ups Relationships Dating Advice 
August 2, 2013
Negotiation — Not War — Can Resolve China’s Conflict With Japan Sino-Japanese relations do not look promising at the moment. Obviously, the Diaoyu-Senkaku dispute is not the only factor in play, but it does focus nationalist passions on both sides. Yet both countries are capable of wiser conduct if their leaders can manage to rise above the dangerous temptations to beat military drums. As China and Vietnam showed in settling their land and their Tonkin Gulf disputes, negotiation is the obvious and inevitable way out. Taiwan and Japan demonstrated this in their recent fisheries agreement over the Senkaku area. It did an end run around Beijing’s effort to monopolize “the Chinese side" of the situation, a brilliant move on Ma Ying-Jeou’s part that must have cost him dearly with Beijing even though it has been underappreciated at home and abroad. Island territorial disputes are harder to deal with, however. Read more. [Image: Bobby Yip/Reuters]

Negotiation — Not War — Can Resolve China’s Conflict With Japan

Sino-Japanese relations do not look promising at the moment. Obviously, the Diaoyu-Senkaku dispute is not the only factor in play, but it does focus nationalist passions on both sides. Yet both countries are capable of wiser conduct if their leaders can manage to rise above the dangerous temptations to beat military drums.

As China and Vietnam showed in settling their land and their Tonkin Gulf disputes, negotiation is the obvious and inevitable way out. Taiwan and Japan demonstrated this in their recent fisheries agreement over the Senkaku area. It did an end run around Beijing’s effort to monopolize “the Chinese side" of the situation, a brilliant move on Ma Ying-Jeou’s part that must have cost him dearly with Beijing even though it has been underappreciated at home and abroad. Island territorial disputes are harder to deal with, however.

Read more. [Image: Bobby Yip/Reuters]

3:55pm
(Notes: 50)
  
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