Archive for the ‘Link Banana’ category
Why We Stopped Spanking
A very interesting consideration of a topic I’d never given much thought:
My grandmother literally never worked outside the home a day in her life. But she would have been bewildered by the intensive parenting of today’s “stay at home Moms”. When my mother got home from school, my grandmother gave her a cookie and told her to go outside and play. She was not supposed to come back until dinner — rain or shine, sleet or snow.
(vía More of What I Like)
You Don’t Know Iowa
A two-minute diversion that just may teach you something you don’t know about the state that’s currently all over American news.
(via r/videos)
Did I Ever Tell You How Rich You Are?
Did I Ever Tell You How Rich You Are?
I have, but it’s a thing that merits constant reiterating, as so few us spend any time being aware of it. David Cain turns in a great post on the topic:
What would [anyone in the Iron Age] pay to be able to:
- speak to someone across the sea
- have the knowledge of thousand encyclopedias in their pocket
- watch segments of the past (or someone else’s past) unfold in moving pictures, in real time
- see the face or hear the voice of a dead loved one
- heat the house without stoking a fire
- cook food in thirty seconds
- clean and dry their family’s clothing with ten minutes of actual work
- suck the dirt out of a rug
- get all their water from inside the house at whatever temperature they wish
- access instructions on how to do almost anything that can be done by humans
The old post this most reminded me of was this video of Stephen Fry (LB), and the point he makes about being richer than Louis XIV (which I’ve thought about regularly ever since I watched it).
Feminism and Male Disposability
Feminism and Male Disposability
This essay, delivered as a video, is an uncommon idea explained with great clarity. I implore you to look past the from — someone monologuing to the camera for 15 minutes makes me very likely to turn away — and give her amazingly rare points a hearing.
(vía /r/videos)
Midlife Crisis Economics
Have I ever told you how much I love David Brooks? (Yes, yes I have.) It’s because he says sensible things like this:
In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.
2011 Sidney Awards
David Brooks does a thing most years I like: he saves a bunch of long magazine pieces and puts them together in a few columns. The ones four years ago were one of the reasons I started this site. The first part of this is the title link, the here’s the second. The few piece I’d not read before but did like:
Egypt at the end of 2011
Egypt’s changed a lot this year, but as Adam Shatz’s reporting makes clear, not as much as most optimists hoped it would.
The young people who launched the revolution are still protesting, but they have been outflanked by the hard men, the soldiers and Islamist politicians now calling the shots. The Mubarak regime was replaced by a military junta, the 20-member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), headed by Field Marshal Muhammed Hussein Tantawi.The Scaf has all but declared war on Tahrir, assailing protesters calling for civilian rule as ‘enemies’ of the revolution which it perversely claims to embody.
I link to this in part because it so accurately supports a point I made recently: revolutions don’t really work.
How Ideas Spread in 16th Century Europe
How Ideas Spread in 16th Century Europe
The story of how Martin Luther’s ideas went from a small bulletin-board post at a university to a religion-changing, war-causing force.
Tetzel, the indulgence-seller, was one of the first to respond to him in print, firing back with his own collection of theses. Others embraced the new pamphlet format to weigh in on the merits of Luther’s arguments, both for and against, like argumentative bloggers. Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his “Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”. He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal infallibility.
(via kottke)
The Real Russian Story
Fascinating review from Stephen Holmes of Luke Harding’s book on Russia. To the extent that this portrait has been painted elsewhere, I’ve never seen it. A minor example:
Because ‘never show weakness’ is the most pressing imperative of any chronically insecure regime, the Putin government decided to do what took minimal effort: seize control of the principal platform on which the government’s many shortcomings could be displayed. The Kremlin has monopolised nationwide television news not in order to impose a party line or because it hopes to persuade a cynical and disillusioned public to swallow the official version of events, but because it fears what might follow if the regime’s critics are seen to get away with disclosing the criminality and ridiculing the folly of the country’s ruling circles on national TV.
The View from Nowhere
Jay Rosen asked himself some questions (over a year ago) about an idea he’s trying to spread about the American journalistic style:
In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.”
The initial idea is good, but the fleshing-out is worth sticking around for.
(via Chairman Gruber)