January 2008
“Would stating “Outside of the Margin of Error, Bitches!” be...”
– Dude in the SA Obamarama Megathread on the new DMR poll.
New Iowa Poll: Obama widens lead over Clinton →
Des Moines Register polls are awesome-o, and I was all nervous waiting for this one to be posted tonight.
December 2007
Whose Interests Are Special? →
Barack Obama’s calling out the unions and other outside supporters of Edwards and Clinton as special interests, which raises two questions: Do they fit the mold of special interests? (I think so) Will calling them that hurt Barack Obama? (In the very-short-term (aka. Iowa caucuses), I think it’s a win. For the rest of the primary season he’ll be hurt a bit by it, but it’ll...
The Curse of Knowledge: knowing all the answers... →
The whole process of questioning assumptions and rebuilding your mental models as if discovering them anew is remarkably similar to the process of writing (and what bedevils most poor writers). It’s really hard to write for other people, who don’t have access to your inner thoughts and just can rely off what’s written down. So you have to go back through what you know and...
“Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.”
– apophenia: Pew on teen social media practices (with interesting bits on class). I think it’s more than just the coincidental explanation that Danah Boyd gives at the link; I think it also has to do with blogging as an outlet for those who see themselves as marginalized by the existing order.
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids →
The article’s centered around child-rearing, but I’m trying to accomplish the same at the age of 21. It’s working.
Huckabee as an alternative to the Reagan coalition... →
He’s a social conservative, but not a foreign policy hawk or a lower-taxes zealot.
A look inside the head of Matt Webb →
A brilliant, rollicking series of mini-essays. It’s stuff that I could ponder over for weeks, if I had that luxury.
Barack Obama and the post-racial worldview →
Or, how a generational divide means that many black voters that came of age during segregation are backing the other two candidates.
“Since late November, one of [Mitt Romney’s] ads has run every six minutes,...”
– The NY Times on Candidates’ ad spending in Iowa (and other early states. They have a neat word cloud of the language used in those ads too, broken down on a per-candidate basis.
A Butter Bust of Barack Obama →
I couldn’t help but giggle throughout the whole interview. Iowa can be wonderful sometimes.
Watch“The Alphabet” by David Lynch. This is as always weird, beautiful and damn scary. Apparently the first film David recorded - based on a dream by the young sister of his then girlfriend. — juhaliza
“While James [Lipton] was living in Paris during the post-WWII years, penniless...”
– The Wikipedia article on James Lipton (aka. that guy on Inside the Actor’s Studio). The mental image this evokes is fantastic.
“She was in Bill Clinton’s campaign and xp goes to everyone in the group...”
– peenworm on Hillary Clinton’s experience from Something Awful Forums’ Obamarama Megathread
One of my high-school friends, Jill Shesol, tells... →
“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the...”
– Nelson Mandela
Clinton’s Résumé Factor: Those 8 Years as First... →
Posting this at the risk of harping on it, but the “experience vs. change” duality that everyone is trying to impose on the matchup between Clinton and Obama(/Edwards?) matches Clinton’s rhetoric but neither the others’ nor the actual facts of the matter.
India's letter writers are being squeezed out by... →
A fascinating window into a culture with nowhere near the level of universal education that we have here in the US. I love these types of NY Times stories that focus on painting an epic picture more than picking out a point or two of news.
How Obama, Edwards, and Clinton symbolize three... →
The best analysis I’ve read, hands-down, of the Democratic field this primary. It’s not even about their policies or even the merits of liberalism in general, but more of a general survey of how their approaches slot into the various facets of social movement theory.
Can you crack the case of the disappearing wallet?... →
This is a real newspaper front-page, and the juxtaposition was entirely coincidental.
What if Africa was Europe's power plant? →
Reshaping the landscape to serve us isn’t new, nor is the way in which it usually ends up screwing over the worse-off.
Shielding Money Clashes With Elders’ Free Will →
We know elders are more susceptible to scams and other forms of disingenuous salesmanship, but how do we protect them? We already have an excellent model on how to shield irrational or less rational individuals from being taken advantage of: how we treat adolescents. But those protections come with restrictions on choices, which senior citizens bristle at being subjected to. Can we give elders...
The Google Enigma →
Nicholas Carr does the best job I’ve seen of pinning down why Google has such a strong incentive to expand into so many new fields.
A course on becoming "internet famous" →
Of course, this article/coverage means the course itself has become “internet famous” in a sense.
As of 2004, 1 in 10 Kentucky residents were... →
There’s a huge urban-rural and rich-poor divide in dental care availability, and it’s worsened by Medicaid’s insistence on pulling teeth as a remedy and the refusal to allow denturists (a cheaper but not as comprehensive alternative to dentists, in this case) to practice.
Thompson: Immigrants partially responsible for... →
what
Oklahoma is strange, and grandmas don’t have internet.
“Despite a government-mandated efficiency drive, steel will use 11 percent more...”
– A great NY Times piece on how China’s specialized in industries that were originally responsible for high levels of pollution in western nations. It’s part of a larger series on how China’s stunning growth affects the environment, which occasionally throws off statistics like the...
