Concentration camps. For World War II camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, do not use phrases like Polish death camps that confuse the location and the perpetrators. Use instead, for example, death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“A character who needs the accoutrements of worldly success will never be seen by the audience as heroic. Heroes are invariably ascetic, denying themselves pleasures and comforts that ordinary people take for granted.… In war films, the hero often declines invitations to partake of food or sex…. The hero can’t relax, can’t have fun. In westerns … all he owns in this world is in that tiny bundle behind the saddle we see when he first appears. We don’t know if he ever changes his shirt or if he even has a shirt to change into, so minimal are his earthly possessions. In detective, police, mystery, and spy films, the central character usually lives in a one-room apartment … but it’s hard to say the hero lives there – it’s where he flops when he’s overcome with exhaustion.… Like religious and mythical heroes of earlier years, the hero is in this world, but not of it. He denies himself the pleasures ordinary mortals yearn for precisely because he isn’t an ordinary mortal.”

—Howard Suber, The Power of Film

Escape began in the 1960s. It was tentative & difficult at first. But later under neoliberalism & identity politics everyone escaped, even the people who were being escaped from. As a result there was nowhere left to go. Escape in that sense was finished as a paradigm & thereafter could only be attached to adverts for hair care product. Escape turned out to be an end, not a beginning. It was a brand; a version of “they lived happily ever after” tenable only as long as you didn’t try to live the other side of it.

tl;dr: flip blooms so you're doing creating first. They'll figure out the knowledge when they need it.

lily painting anecdote

It is said that Diogenes, the principal philosopher of this kind, chose as his home a great earthenware tub near the Temple of Ceres. He wore a rough woolen cloak, summer and winter, as his only garment, and ate all his food raw. His only utensil was a wooden bowl, out of which he drank.
One day, however, he saw a child drinking out of its hollow palm. Diogenes immediately threw away the bowl, saying he could do without luxury as well as the child; and he drank henceforth from his hand.

“Mythologies” is often an angry book, and what angered Barthes more than anything was “common sense,” which he identified as the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, a mode of thought that systematically pretends that complex things are simple, that puzzling things are obvious, that local things are universal — in short, that cultural fantasies shaped by all the dirty contingencies of power and money and history are in fact just the natural order of the universe. The critic’s job, in Barthes’s view, was not to revel in these common-sensical myths but to expose them as fraudulent. The critic had to side with history, not with culture. And history, Barthes insisted, “is not a good bourgeois.”

Ingredients
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, sliced
8 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon thyme, chopped
1/4 cup white wine or broth
salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon parsley, chopped
1/2 teaspoon truffle oil (optional)
1 cup fontina or gruyere, shredded
1/4 cup parmigiano reggiano, grated
4 slices bread
2 tablespoon butter
Directions
Melt the butter and heat the oil in a pan over medium heat.
Add the onion and saute until tender, about 5-7 minutes.
Add the garlic and thyme and saute until fragrant, about a minutes.
Add the cremini mushrooms and saute until the start to caramelized and turn golden brown, about 10-15 minutes.
Add the wine, deglaze the pan and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated.
Season with salt and pepper and remove from heat and let cool a bit.
Mix the cheese into the mushrooms.
Butter one side of each slice of bread and place 2 in the pan buttered side down.
Top each with 1/2 of the mushroom mixture and finally the remaining slices of bread with the buttered side up.
Grill until the cheese has melted and the bread is golden brown, about 2-4 minutes per side.

What I've learned grilling steaks: - buy best cut you can afford - season liberally - coals hot as you can get - tent w/ foil 5 mins
Tonight I grilled a gigantic $16 @CentralMarket cowboy steak w/ kosher salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic salt & ground cumin rub. Amazing.

So when I think about the future of research in a thoroughly connected age, what I see, primarily, is opportunity. If scholars are encouraged to write more clearly, to find better stories to tell, to stop showing off, to dig deeper into unpublished material, then readers and writers alike have some good times ahead.

Another Merlin manifesto

Tweaking your GTD system is easier than deciding what the hell you want to do with your life

I have become painfully aware that my own presentations are often taken as demonstrations of method and technique, and in this regard I find myself with a similar problem that psychologist Carl Rogers faced when he first started exploring the role of empathy in the therapeutic encounter. As a young therapist he discovered that simply listening to his clients and empathizing with them seemed to help them. He obtained some recording equipment and studied therapy interactions carefully. This process allowed him and his students to identify specific techniques that seemed to work. However, when these techniques were turned loose on the world and used by other therapists, these techniques became mere caricatures of what they were in the artful practice of Rogers himself. His complex empathic method became caricatured as a simple technique of “repeat the last words the client has said.” He was so dismayed by these results that he abandoned the study of empathy for some time before finally returning to it later.

Michael Wesch has been doing some awesome, inspiring and innovative stuff in his digital ethnography courses. He talks about the stuff he and his students do, and people dutifully write it down as a recipe for them to do the same. But that doesn’t work. People are different. Dr. Wesch nails it – the most important thing we have is empathy. The ability to recognize others’ feelings. To be aware that people are different.

In many ways, the average toddler using an iPad is a guinea pig.

Future of Books & Publishing

Retell the history of the world from the perspective of water. Rivers, lakes, oceans. Both as life-giving force, allowing the earliest civilizations to survive, and as the quickest transportation route for generations, water has continued to be an essential, driving force behind the advancement of history. Tell the history of the planet from the perspective of water.

For Aloys Winterling, the Emperor Caligula offers another case of the Canute problem. He has generally gone down in history as a mad megalomaniac: so mad that he gave his favourite horse a palace, lavish purple clothing, a retinue of servants, and even had plans to appoint it to the consulship, the highest political office below the emperor himself. In fact (so Winterling argues) his extravagant treatment of the animal was a pointed joke. Caligula was satirising the aims and ambitions of the Roman aristocracy: in their pursuit of luxury and empty honours, they appeared no less silly than the horse.

Matt Thomas ‏@mattthomas
What I really want is a Great Gatsby prequel about the life of James Gatz.

Word Total Count Top Speaker Top Speaker Count
compromise 1820 Sen. Harry Reid 142
prosperity 923 Sen. Jeff Sessions 47
integrity 883 Sen. Jeff Sessions 30
exemplary 582 Rep. Ed Perlmutter 112
enhance 542 Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Chuck Grassley 11
compassion 429 Rep. Hank Johnson 16
congregation 339 Rep. Gary Peters 40
reconciliation 197 Rep. Steve King 23
prudent 157 Rep. Marcy Kaptur 10
diligent 144 Sen. Marco Rubio 29
renovation 130 Sen. Sherrod Brown 14
inevitable 100 Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Sen. John McCain 6
adversity 95 Rep. Laura Richardson 5
lobbyist 93 Rep. Frank Wolf 17
suppress 83 Sen. John McCain 5
anonymous 80 Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse 8
tenacious 75 Rep. Hank Johnson 24
resilient 71 (tie, more than 2) 3
collaborate 68 Sen. Lindsey Graham 10
asylum 67 Sen. Patrick Leahy 21

Today's Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from a high of 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Flesch-Kincaid test was used to conduct the analysis, which equates higher-grade levels with longer words and longer sentences.

THE WORLD'S MOST popular game is also its most corrupt, with investigations into match fixing ongoing in more than 25 countries. Here's a mere sampling of events since the beginning of last year: Operation Last Bet rocked the Italian Football Federation, with 22 clubs and 52 players awaiting trial for fixing matches; the Zimbabwe Football Association banned 80 players from its national-team selection due to similar accusations; Lu Jun, the first Chinese referee of a World Cup match, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for taking more than $128,000 in bribes to fix outcomes in the Chinese Super League; prosecutors charged 57 people with match fixing in the South Korean K-League, four of whom later died in suspected suicides; the team director of second-division Hungarian club REAC Budapest jumped off a building after six of his players were arrested for fixing games; and in an under-21 friendly, Turkmenistan reportedly beat Maldives 3-2 in a "ghost match" -- neither country knew about the contest because it never actually happened, yet bookmakers still took action and fixers still profited.

But the key to successful cursing is restraint: saving the most powerful words for the occasion when they are needed. As Stegner comments elsewhere in the essay, if you “say shit before a lady,” what do you say when your car breaks down at rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway? Presumably, in those days, you would take that opportunity to drop the f-bomb, but to judge by my Twitter feed, many people now use that word fifty times a day, which leaves them with absolutely nothing in reserve when something genuinely bad happens. Not only is it not the f-bomb any more, it’s not even the f-sparkler. The word has been eviscerated. I am not speaking in moral terms here, just linguistic ones: the spread of cursing into more and more situations where it once would have been forbidden has been one more form of linguistic inflation, like calling everything that’s even mildly pleasant “awesome.” It betokens a lack of judgment, a failure of assessment, and it leaves us with limited or no linguistic resources in the hour of need. We need to clean up our language, if for no other reason than to have room to make it dirty when dirty is really called for.

2. Troxler the World Bender

What Employers Look for in Entry-Level Job Candidates
Millennial Branding and Experience Inc. surveyed 225 employers to find out what's most important to them when they hire students or others for entry-level jobs. "Soft skills" like communication and teamwork were ranked even higher than education, and almost all employers said students should have at least one internship before they graduate.
An internship can be a great way to get a job, especially if you have no relevant experience. 91% of the employers surveyed said students should have between one and two internships under their belt, and those internships should be at least three months. 82% of the employers said they hire interns for full-time positions, although half of them haven't hired interns in the last six months.

Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island

“I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them.”
— Teju Cole, Open City

The 27-year-old teacher arrives at school each day two hours early. Before the opening bell, she prepares three math lessons and five reading lessons for her 19 students. Some of her readers are still sounding out basic words while others are analyzing themes in chapter books. Eleven are learning English as a second language.

Blue Foam

New and faster ways to evaluate architectural proposals were needed, namely new means of drawing and model making that shortened the time it required to definitively say yes or no. The answer was blue foam.

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Working with foam is a skill that one learns relatively quickly and it allows quick and easy iterations that would be more time consuming to achieve in cardboard. For instance, making a cube from foam can be done with as few as two or three cuts. The same shape out of cardboard would require 24 cuts and the gluing of 6 pieces. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking.

beer is dropping, wine is rising.

I am in heaven. Screenshot of the Google Doc research feature. WILL CITE FOR YOU: #MSUepet #gamechanger #NWP pic.twitter.com/OMEZyoLR

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Nearly two years ago, The Snark Handbook: Insult Edition gave us high-brown verbal sparring lessons with some of literary history’s finest comebacks, taunts, and effronteries. Now, from educator April Gudenrath and the team at TED-Ed comes this primer on Shakespearean insults, which served to unify the audience and to develop relationships between characters in a very short and sharp way.

#3 – Writing Prompts – Luke Neff provides this site with wonderful writing prompts usually accompanied by thought-provoking graphics.

1. Writing Prompts via Tumblr

Luke Neff’s Tumblr blog, the aptly titled Writing Prompts, is an image-rich collection of whimsical prompts that is frequently updated and draws from a panoply of sources (he even includes a “submit a writing prompt” button so you can share your own). Though some prompts will be most useful to those who speak geek (“Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter engage in a duel. Tell the story”) others are more apt to inspire creative thinking by encouraging you to make novel connections between existing concepts (but without light sabers).

The world of orderly decency, harmless ceremonies and modest expectations, i.e., family life, is not the writer’s. One morning at breakfast, when she was in the first or second grade, E. L. Doctorow’s daughter, Caroline, asked her father to write a note explaining her absence from school, due to a cold, the previous day. Doctorow began, “My daughter, Caroline. . . . ” He stopped. “Of course she’s my daughter,” he said to himself. “Who else would be writing a note for her?” He began again. “Please excuse Caroline Doctorow. . . . ” He stopped again. “Why do I have to beg and plead for her?” he said. “She had a virus. She didn’t commit a crime!” On he went, note after failed note, until a pile of crumpled pages lay at his feet. Finally, his wife, Helen, said, “I can’t take this anymore,” penned a perfect note and sent Caroline off to school. Doctorow concluded: “Writing is very difficult, especially in the short form.”

Seattle library hides 1,000 books around town for young people to find
By Cory Doctorow at 4:04 pm Friday, May 11
The Seattle Public Library system's annual Summer Reading Program is called Century 22: Read the Future, and is tied in with the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair. Young people are encouraged to scour the city's landmarks for 1,000 books hidden throughout town, and then to re-hide them for other kids to find. Among the books in this summer's program is my own YA novel Little Brother, which is a source of utter delight for me.

W. H. Auden, “Song of the Master and Boatswain”

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse
The homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

(from The Sea and the Mirror)

Small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people. … The more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens… Reading narrative fiction … fosters empathic growth and prosocial behavior. …

Graphing Jane Austen: Using Science to Extrapolate the Human Condition from Victorian Literature
by Maria Popova

Then he looked at everything Patagonia made, shipped or processed, and resolved to do it all more responsibly. He changed materials, switching in 1996 from conventional to organic cotton-despite the fact that it initially tripled his supply costs-because it was less harmful to the environment. He created fleece jackets made entirely from recycled soda bottles. He vowed to create products durable enough and timeless enough that people could replace them less often, reducing waste. He put "The Footprint Chronicles" up on Patagonia's website, exhaustively cataloging the environmental damage done by his own company. He now takes responsibility for every item Patagonia has ever made -- promising either to replace it if the customer is dissatisfied, repair it (for a reasonable fee), help resell it (Patagonia facilitates exchanges of used clothes on its website), or recycle it when at last it's no longer wearable.