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Hacked together a $5 light box from a cardboard box and some tissue paper. Stuck a lemon in there, then some miniatures.
The Spreading of 'The Aspen Idea' - The Atlantic
My first post at The Atlantic.
via bustrofedon.net
THE ATLANTIC
I’ve got a new gig at The Atlantic. I’ll be running the tech coverage on this here website, and helping out with the magazine. The people are smart and wonderful — and the writing is unparalleled. I can’t wait to start.
"The city seethed with excitement,” Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan wrote in their 1943 book, Lords of the Levee. “Aldermen received letters threatening the kidnapping of their children and wives and the dynamiting of their homes.” This was an early round of a debate that Chicago has never settled for good: When does it make sense for City Hall to let a private company handle a public service, and when should the city do the job itself? Today the argument’s focused on the parking meters Mayor Daley leased to a private company. But at the turn of the last century the issue was public transportation that private capital built, owned, and wanted to keep."
"There is also the problem that ‘culture’ names a rather amorphous entity. Human beings produce culture in the same sense that they produce carbon dioxide: they can’t help it, bu the stuff has absolutely no value in itself. It’s just there. It is one thing to attribute a group’s characteristics to its culture, as Boas did; it is another thing to elevate that culture into a discrete set of traditions and practices in which the members of the group can take pride simply because they are, willy-nilly, theirs. Culture is only a response to the conditions of life; when those conditions—and in modern societies they change continuously—cultures change as well. “Frenchness” is as variable as “finchness,” and no more worthy of respect as a thing in itself. It’s all a question of what people make of it."
Louis Menand in The Metaphysical Club, page 407
"Hanging out with Vlad the Impaler. He says he’s “pretty excited Pavement got back together."
