ALEXIS MADRIGAL

"Later, at 3:30 am, I heard tires squealing loudly on the road in front of the hotel. Were pro- and anti-Qaddafi forces chasing each other? Was someone fleeing an attack? I opened my window again — and saw a line of 20 cars full of raucous guys in their teens and twenties, waving the revolution’s black-red-green tricolor, dancing with their heads sticking out of their car windows and sunroofs, chanting off-color slogans about Qaddafi and his hair, and drag racing across a highway bridge. Drag racing for the revolution, you could say. The world over, from Oakland to Benghazi to the Tokyo Drift, shabab will be shabab."

revolutionology

"23 January 1812:
What are we gonna do? You cannot fight it cause you do not know how. It is not something that you can see. In a storm you can see the sky and it shows dark clouds and you know that you might get strong winds but this you can not see anything but a house that just lays in a pile on the ground - not scattered around and trees that just falls over with the roots still on it. The earth quake or what ever it is come again today. It was as bad or worse than the one in December. We lost our Amandy Jane in this one - a log fell on her. We will bury her upon the hill under a clump of trees where Besys Ma and Pa is buried. A lot of people thinks that the devil has come here. Some thinks that this is the beginning of the world coming to a end."

New Madrid Earthquake, account 2

"When I went to get my coat the coat check girl said it was in the other place and it would just be a moment, and in the meantime I checked my email on my phone and there was nothing really of consequence on there."

The Doree Chronicles Party Report

"But listen: What is going on with that high hat? It almost sounds like… LCD Soundsystem? Then, under it (but rising), there are these Bee Gees strings and doo wop vocal harmonies asking, “Who loves you, pretty baby? Who loves you, pretty mama?” Huh. Just as I’m really starting to listen in, completely ignoring the restaurant’s “bold flavored Mediterranean cuisine,” the song completely changes. Straight disco! Except it’s got a Vegas sideshow’s sense of the epic and Three’s Company’s drive for repetitive and erratic schmaltz. This keeps on for two minutes until the bridge, which thumps into a lean Italian disco/Giorgio Moroder bass riff that gets surrounded by a bunch of ghostly doo-doo-doos before bursting through them and back into the song’s main motif via a tense piano interlude: Baby. Baby. Doo, doo, doo, doo. Come to meeeee! Baby, you’ll see! Who loves you pretty baby? Whose gonna help you through the night?"

Track of the Day: ‘Who Loves You’ - Alexis Madrigal - Culture - The Atlantic

"Defenders of traditional authority will object to the relativism of all this, but relativism is all we’ve got — the rise of the scientific method has taken away certainty and replaced it with nothing but process and probability. An authority isn’t a person or institution who is always right — ain’t no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. And over the last ten years, Wikipedia has been passing that test in an increasing number of circumstances. And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its 10th decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years — peer review — and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changes the way authority is configured. So Happy Birthday, Wikipedia, and thanks for giving us so much to think about."

Clay Shirky on Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversar (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)