fishingboatproceeds:

The first episode of Crash Course: World History is about the Agricultural Revolution (and double cheeseburgers). I hope you like it and share it with your friends and/or teachers and/or students. I AM VERY NERVOUS AND EXCITED.

I am going to try and enumerate the many ways in which this video (series) is great (sure I debated whether I should go with the rhyme and I went with it).

1.  Anything, anything, anything to get people to pay attention to history.  Today my Social History and Literary Works in Modern (ie. golden centuries (XV-XVIII) not like, now) spent the last half hour of our semester bemoaning (it’s great when the spanish bemoan) the fact that there is not enough emphasis on the humanities because the humanities teach us to be human.  Not machines.  Humans who can do such things as dominate the planet, although with some very negative consequences. 

2.  Hey, do you know that I’m going to write my honors thesis on the history of junk food?  I only tell everyone all the time.  Basically, it’s undeniable how important our food source is to our history.  I think, in the same way that the agricultural revolution allowed us to, you know, have cities (and let’s be honest, everything happens in cities because things happen when you put people together, woohoo cities), the development of processed food as the basis of our food source (with the TV dinner being exemplarary) really changed the formation of our society.  There are gender roles to talk about and the entire formation of families and it’s super interesting.

3.  How cute are those graphics?  Win for vector graphics.  Always.

4.  Don’t you want to be John Green’s friend?  I do.

5.  How do I join the team of “semi-professional quasi-historians?”  

newyorker:

Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock

Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question.

If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. “Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard,” he said. “Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it.”

- In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza provides an in-depth look at the first three years of Obama’s Presidency, and through dozens of interviews with White House insiders and hundreds of pages of internal White House memos—which have never been released to the public—with Obama’s handwritten notes, reveals how the President struggles with important decisions:  http://nyr.kr/wXU5Ha

curiositycounts:

How are you educating yourself? There’s a flowchart for that, one of 344 illustrated flowcharts to find answers to life’s big questions.

cheatsheet:

newyorker:

The Summers Memo

 In a piece this week on Barack Obama’s shift from idealism to pragmatism, Ryan Lizza describes an important fifty-seven-page document from Lawrence Summers to President-elect Barack Obama dated December 15, 2008:

Marked “Sensitive and Confidential,” the document, which has never been made public, presents Obama with the scale of the crisis. “The economic outlook is grim and deteriorating rapidly,” it said. The U.S. economy had lost two million jobs that year; without a government response, it would lose four million more in the next year. Unemployment would rise above nine per cent unless a significant stimulus plan was passed. The estimates were getting worse by the day.

- Above, the first page of the document. The full document is available on our website: http://nyr.kr/xtOEQl

Please read the piece in the New Yorker

I’m listening to Regina Spector.

God it reminds me of high school.  Good high school.  Do you know how few good memories of high school I have?

Well, it’s reminding me of sitting backstage of our drama theater when I still liked drama and not even with that putrid smell of something that was once good and went sour.

Below is a poem by my very talented friend.

And I’m posting this note separately for a reason.  

I had an english teacher from high school who once went on this rant about how the phrase “I love you” is really about “I” and not about “you.”  

The poem (first draft though it might be) doens’t need me to write “this wonderful poem is by my friend.”  God no.  But you know, I really wanted to say it.  I want to take credit, not for the work, but for having friends who produce work like this.  Is that incredibly selfish of me?  Probably. Self afirmation, “look these cool people are my friends, doesn’t that make me cool/talented as well?”  Talent doesn’t transfer by osmosis—or maybe it does.  How do you get good at something?  You surround yourself with it.  So no I’m not going to be a good writer just because my friends are talented writers, but maybe a better writer (if I bothered to write).

The desire to connect myself to the poem isn’t just the quality.  It was the funny feeling of recognition from the title.  The admitted tinge of jealousy that one friend was sharing the “I love chopping wood” experience of the other.  

And then this feeling that just came.  The that age is over feeling.  The feeling that the future reunions will be the “remember when we used to…” reunions. A feeling which lately I’ve been having too much.  

cfbwe:

The whole affair is straightforward: no

 

Read More

Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious … in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. […] Modern party-dance is an evil thing.

— David Foster Wallace, from The Broom of the System. (via thismansaballoon)

alexlaika:

whattheshea:

fuckyeahrdj:

guardian:

Websites black out in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Follow the latest developments and reaction to the great internet blackout. Wondering what SOPA is? Here’s an explainer.

Unlike most things I post/reblog, this really matters.

Quite important, quite relevant. 

As I currently reside outside the US I’m not getting any of the SOPA protests from websites*.  I’m a little bumbed out.  It’s really cool and important.

*Ok, I can look them up.

(Source: )

alexlaika:

whattheshea:

fuckyeahrdj:

guardian:

Websites black out in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Follow the latest developments and reaction to the great internet blackout. Wondering what SOPA is? Here’s an explainer.

Unlike most things I post/reblog, this really matters.

Quite important, quite relevant. 

As I currently reside outside the US I’m not getting any of the SOPA protests from websites*.  I’m a little bumbed out.  It’s really cool and important.

*Ok, I can look them up.

(Source: )

It’s 12:08 on January 17th and I really miss my friends.

Maybe this is because it’s finals time and I’m looking for distractions, even when they make me sad.

Maybe it’s because I just returned from a trip where I stayed with a friend who I hadn’t seen in 4 years and still managed to really be friends.  Managed to talk to one another as if the time we hadn’t talked to one another didn’t make us farther apart, it just gave us more things to talk about, more to catch up on.  Maybe it’s because on this same trip I traveled with someone who I realized really isn’t my friend.  Not because she’s bitchy or a backstabber but just because I felt like I was tiptoeing around her for over a week.

Maybe it’s knowing that most of my friends are going back to college where they will get to be physically close friends again and while I could stand that exclusion feeling once it’s really difficult the second time around.  Maybe it’s because when I come back to that feeling next year so many of them won’t be there.

Whatever it is, it’s making me send an abundance of whiny “please talk to me” messages to my friends back home.  And it’s not that I don’t have friends here.  I do, and not just in that “I’m telling myself I have friends to make me feel better” way.  But here, the language barrier (which feels lower every day) still prevents me from the gushing endless rambling that so embodies friendship for me. 

cheatsheet:

brooklynmutt:

@jimmy_wales

Bloggers too!

An entire box of cereal (all the chocolate falls to the bottom so you get there and you’re like “well, might as well!”) and lots of other food and going into a bar to buy cigarettes in my running shorts in the middle of winter (muy mal visto) later, I am almost done with my paper on a fifteenth century spanish artwork!!!!

I mean, I still have to put in all the citations and blargety blarg conclusion, but take that art history in a foreign language!

So…should I go treck into the center of the city to watch a football game?  I mean I have to turn this paper in at 8:30 AM and oh yeah it’s supposed to snow at 5AM, and I appologize to anyone reading this who thinks grammar is important in blogposts*.

*I would blame the 2000** spanish words but really it’s not their fault 

**I know this doesn’t seem like that worthy of self congratulations pero te has equivocado. 

So, first I spent an hour in the (oh my god incredible) giant grocery store near my house.  Like an idiot I left a library book there and have to go pick it up tomorrow.

My big purchase: headphones.  This means I can now listen to music watch youtube clips and television without feeling like I’m bothering my (new!) roommates.  

Take that spanish exams!

Ok, more accurately my housemate has a cat.

And while I’ve been anti-cat for a while now (sorry, I’m just very pro-dog), this one is just so damn cute.

It’s all black and it comes into my room at night and tries to destroy my closet.  

New York TimesCrossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin’

Please read this