- Rachel Maddow takes on the “Scare White People” tactics of the right. That this is a tried and tested method for securing votes is only slightly less disheartening than the fact that it seems to be working even today. [via]
- Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose story “Mouse and I” appears in the April 2010 issue of Kaleidotrope, writes about finding her voice as a Filipino science fiction writer:
I found myself thinking, yet again, on what kind of science fiction a Filipino would write, and how a writer can break free from being someone who emulates the works of writers he or she has admired to become a person who writes with a voice and with a story that comes from the writer’s own soul.
What things influence the Filipino writer then? What’s our backstory? How can I as a writer coming from a country that has been so colonialized and that is still trapped in a colonial mindset free myself so I can write the fictions that only I can write?
- She also shares a really terrific talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
- Apparently there is no gravity [via] and time is disappearing from the universe. [via] Or at least, those are some theories.
- And finally, I don’t know if this story, about a Bosnian man who claims to have been hit by meteorites six times, is made more or less strange by the possibility that it’s all a hoax.
news
I would gladly pay you Вторник for a hamburger today.
First of all, I just want to start by saying to all my readers that I am not, nor have I ever knowingly been, a Russian spy. I just wanted to make that known.
In other news…it was pretty much just your average Tuesday around these parts. No televisions on the lawn this morning, and nothing much more exciting than a quick birthday celebration for a co-worker — seriously, just a card and some cookies at his cubicle — at the office.
I did finish reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America this evening, the first full book I’ve actually read on my iPad. I liked it, although I think it works best as the story of one woman’s individual experience, with some interesting economic facts, than as an in-depth examination of what it means to be working poor in this country. There’s plenty of food for thought in the book — even if it does hover on the edge of feeling dated, now that it’s almost a decade old — but I found it interesting more as a narrative of a social experiment than anything else.
I did like her closing thoughts:
But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s — well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?
Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”
Someday, of course — and I will make no predictions as to exactly when — they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better for it in the end.
Wednesday various
- I have to say, Todd VanDerWerff does make the death throes of ‘Til Death sound much more interesting than it probably was:
This was television made by consummate professionals who were pretty sure no one was ever going to see it, and it was somehow gloriously awful and compellingly watchable all at once.
He does, of course, stop short of saying the sitcom ever got good.
- Susan Orlean’s tale of editorial alphabet soup sounds perfectly believable to me. [via]
- Jon Stewart: “We’ve redefined success…and still failed.“
- It’s not particularly reassuring to realize that BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is more than rule than the exception: More oil spilled in Nigeria “every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico” [via
- And finally, two Doctor Who links: Oscar the Grouch: Time Lord [via] and wanna buy a TARDIS?
Monday various
- Two from Roger Ebert: on racial intolerance and on why he tweets.
- On the set of David Lynch’s Dune with Sean Young. Weirdly fascinating. I wonder if it’s at all worth revisiting that movie. I keep thinking I’ll re-read the book, but I think I’m worried it will just encourage me to read them all. [via]
- Charlie Stross on the iPad [via]:
The iPad doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels like a magic book — like the ancestor of the Young Lady’s Primer in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It’s a book with hypertext everywhere, moving pictures and music and an infinity of content visible through its single morphing page. The sum is much weirder than the aggregate of its parts. Criticizing the iPad for not doing Netbook-or laptop-like things is like criticising an early Benz automobile for not having reins and a bale of hay for the horses: it’s a category error.
- The Sea of Galilee is out of fish. [via]
- And finally,inside the Vatican’s private library. [via]
Thursday various
- Yesterday, when I was posting links to stories about babies, I neglected to mention Ardi Rizal a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. I think, mostly, because I wanted to pretend he doesn’t. [via]
- Meanwhile, this is just heartbreaking [via]:
A German biologist says that efforts to clean oil-drenched birds in the Gulf of Mexico are in vain. For the birds’ sake, it would be faster and less painful if animal-rescue workers put them under, she says. Studies and other experts back her up.
- Whereas this is just…fingerprinting to take out a library book? Seriously? The huge privacy issues aside, how does this improve the system for the library or the patron? [via]
- A couple of periodic tables:
- The Periodic Table of Superpowers — I shall henceforth refer to Superman always as OAFSISpVxVhSn. [via]
- And Periodic Table of Women in SF — There is, of course, a meme going around for this, where you bold the names you’ve read and star the ones you’ve never heard of, but if I were to do it, I think it would just reflect how unread I am. If nothing else, this is a good place to start a reading list. [via]
- But finally, speaking of women I don’t want to spend any more time with, A.O. Scott’s review of Sex and the City 2:
Yes, it’s supposed to be fun. And over the years audiences have had the kind of fun that comes from easy immersion in someone else’s career, someone else’s sex life, someone else’s clothes. But “Sex and the City 2†is about someone else’s boredom, someone else’s vacation and ultimately someone else’s desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn’t much fun at all.