April 2009
123 posts
"Poem for Hannah" by Matthew Zapruder →
You were born to feel a way
you don’t have a word for.
"The Poem that Can’t Be Written" by Lawrence Raab →
March 2009
56 posts
“When I watch Osawa-san making games, I get a sense of the mystery, the depth,...”
– Satoru Iwata
I have a long term project to promote the use of the word “wembly” as a translation of “fuwa-fuwa.” Also, to make it an actual English word.
Daruma, Smallpox and RED →
Why did the patriarch Bodhidharma come from the West?
[…] If the Bodhidharma worshiped as the first patriarch of Chan in China as little to do with the Indian monk of the same name […], the distance between the Japanese Daruma and his Chinese prototype seems even greater.
The State of Chrome for OS X →
There are a number of things that make me feel good, but if I were to enumerate but one of them I think that I would have to list “busting.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the human cost of the... →
I have a weird way of dealing with big, emotional events. My brain moves slow, and I tend to experience things in waves—it took weeks for me to understand, emotionally, what Obama’s election meant. Ditto for 9/11, except longer. And then one night I woke up yelling and bawling like a four-year old. I’d had this dream where I saw Prince [Jones, a friend who was killed by the...
“A great day. Sort of: when they went through the treasure, Muller says, “it was...”
– G.P.S. Marks the Spot
Scrabble and Other Games Have Overvalued Points:... →
An interesting look at some of the issues involved in changing the rules of a game.
Ideals and Methods
This month’s debate at Cato Unbound, which I linked to before, is pretty interesting. Perhaps the most interesting part is how Loury and his opponents are completely talking past each other. Loury is asking about our ideals: Is the current prison situation tolerable? Can we be happy if something like the current situation were to persist into the indefinite future? His opponents are focused...
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“The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning,...”
– “The Way” by Albert Goldbarth
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There are some ways that the wind blows that do matter to me, but for a majority of them, my feeling is that it more or less doesn’t really.
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“The Vikings, of course, are really Americans—invading a tiny country for no...”
– Review of Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” by Juliet Lapidos
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“For what seemed an infinite time there were nights
that were too long. We knew...”
– “The Age” a poem by Gail Mazur
the new cult canon: The Way Of The Gun →
The Onion A.V. Club takes a second look at The Way of the Gun, one of my favorite movies of all time.
Hampton on Cloud Computing and Ruby →
So far, spring break involves a lot of just sitting around the apartment and reading. … In case it’s not clear, to me, that’s a good thing.
Hellhole: The United States holds tens of... →
Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control. …
...
“I doubt that any coherent and non-circular definition of a distinctively “black”...”
– Glenn Loury on Mass Incarceration in the United States
“In the end, perhaps the focus of the US military and American foreign policy,...”
– Michael Cohen with additional commentary by Matt Yglesias
WatchI’m probably not going to buy Punch-Out Wii, but I dig the music. Also the ethnic stereotyping.
“How could I ever repay such deep love? Well, as a first step, I used my hands to...”
– From No-sword, which is excellent as always.
Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon... →
Seems true to me.
From Slate.
98% Of Babies Manic-Depressive →
For some Onion stories, all you need is the headline. This is one of them.
Unexplored: What’s wrong with 2% of babies?
