January 2011
16 posts
“Shadowed by the landmarks of a government that turned promises of secular...”
– Anthony Shadid, doing some lovely deadline writing from Cairo, in the Times.
How Facebook Makes Us Sad →
This is one of those stories that explains something you already knew, but didn’t know you knew. The thesis can be told in a sentence: Facebook makes us feel sadder and lonelier because it’s a running compendium of all the great fun and wonderful things everyone else is doing, though, in truth, those people aren’t nearly as happy as their updates make them out to be.
This...
Damn, the president looks good tonight
“A story will only ever say one big thing. If (for example, and you are feeling...”
– Rule No. 10, among the 25 simple rules for journalists drawn up by a Guardian editor. This one, I think, applies to all kinds of writing.
Robert F. Kennedy's speech the day after Dr.... →
kateoplis:
“This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. …
Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the...
WatchThe National, playing (a somewhat flat) “Bloodbuzz Ohio” on Austin City Limits, tonight on PBS. Check your local listings!
Number of times that new Spider-Man photo came up...
Not that I’m complaining.
“In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, ‘Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!’ Radical Right...
Her [Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords] father wept...
brooklynmutt:
@benpolitico - NYPost
A Pattern
In 2009, when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was holding a “Congress on Your Corner” event in a supermarket, a protestor was removed by police when his pistol fell on the store floor.
In 2010, Rep. Giffords was one of 10 Congressmen — all Democrats — who were harassed for their vote in favor of health care reform. The front door of her Tucson office was shattered in an...
WatchAnother weekend in the library with Justice Scalia, the Second Amendment, and First Aid Kit.
“You are not supposed to worship your constitution. You are supposed to govern...”
– Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the outgoing chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, who called Republicans’ scheduled “ritualistic reading” of the document on the House floor “total nonsense” and “propaganda.” (via washingtonpoststyle)