October 2011
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I recently had the opportunity to post some of my all-time favorite pieces of nonfiction on longform.org. Thought I’d share them here.
Host David Foster Wallace // The Atlantic // April 2005
On conservative radio host John Ziegler and “the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient.”
Up in the old hotel Joseph Mitchell // The New Yorker // June 1952
The author...
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September 2011
1 post
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August 2011
3 posts
This Week's Must-Read: What Happened to Obama? →
kateoplis:
[…] Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done...
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July 2011
10 posts
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Salon: The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.
DFW: It’s hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. “One Day...
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Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
“In the safest, most boring country, the worst lone gunman shooting happens. The...”
– Ola (via youmightfindyourself)
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11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That... →
pantslessprogressive:
liquornspice:
The 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. aren’t just filthy rich, they are downright dirty. Collectively, these households own $1.37 trillion dollars; a number so high that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. Here are 11 shocking things $1.37 trillion can buy that you can’t.
The richest 400 households can pay off every student loan for every single student...
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June 2011
23 posts
Watchsoupsoup:
Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor at the Atlantic, and Felix Salmon discuss the changing landscape of blogs.
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What's the real minimum wage? →
cheatsheet:
With unemployment in the U.S. sticking at a stubborn 9 percent, we wondered how desperate people might be to get paid. So we decided to conduct an experiment to figure out the real minimum wage, not only in the U.S., but around the world. Here’s how we did it:
Over several weeks, we used Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for freelance work operated by Amazon.com, to post...
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No, Jon Stewart, You're Not Just a Comedian →
”[…] outside of “The Daily Show,” in interviews like the one he gave to Chris Wallace and even his famous 2004 confrontation that may or may not have killed CNN’s “Crossfire,” I find that Stewart (and it pains me to say this, as such a fan) can come across as kind of lame, his “media criticism” beyond trite. In interviews, his complaints against the media tend to be an unsophisticated “pox on...
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Finally settled on a blog title, inspired by a...
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[…] mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could find out what the agent was in a sick patient and ...
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“Everytime I think I have Kanye West’s...
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Trying out a new blog title. This one might stick.
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Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to...
“I have long admired your publication” becomes “I love the stuff you guys are...”
– “Personality Seepage”, a very modern problem that I diagnose on The Awl today. (via bethlehemshoals)
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Video games can do a lot of things other storytelling mediums cannot. Their penance, however, is to have to deal with things foreign to other storytelling mediums, one of which is a uniquely damaging form of audience disruption. Just about every storytelling game employs various masking systems that attempt to anticipate internally disruptive player behavior. Say you have an in-game friend —...
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“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers…. Each one owes infinitely...”
– François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, French archbishop and author (1651 - 1715) in Dialogue des Morts, “Socrate et Alcibiade” (via mohandasgandhi)
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Hoops, I Did It Again →
Collaborative blog about sports fandom and life.
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To understand why, we should start with President Obama. It may seem mystifying in one so intelligent and insightful, but when, at the beginning of his administration, Obama set about to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute once and for all, he really had no idea what he was getting into. To this most logical, detached, and rational of men, the solution to the dispute must have seemed obvious. The...
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Longform.org →
Best discovery since Longreads!
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LeBron’s failures on the court and in the television studio will prevent him from supplanting Michael Jordan in basketball fans’ hearts and minds. Nevertheless, James will continue to be haunted by Jordan’s rise from a callow ball hog to an infallible veteran. It’s because of Michael Jordan that we believe LeBron’s next series, next game, and next shot will set him...
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