Other
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dinosaurs and birds together at last (in the distant distant past). On Edward Gorey’s illustrated letters. Some new time wasters for your weekend: biomedical ephemera and ancient maps! Perhaps you have wondered what was going on in space during the…
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Now We’re Talking
It’s not always oil that we spill into the ecosystem. Every now and then a pet cockatoo is let loose or escapes, joins a wild flock, and teaches the natives how to speak. The phenomenon accounts for “numerous” reports by…
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Books Set Free
The Guardian will unleash 15,000 books on the Brits in a Book Swap kicking off their six-week autumn books season. Readers and writers can also give away their favorites with an embedded message for the finder. If you are in…
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Touré Interview
“Post-racial suggests a world where race does not exist and racism does not exist, and it’s a completely ridiculous term…With post-Blackness, what I’m talking about is a conception of Blackness where the identity options are infinite. So, we’re not saying…
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Winning Captions
If you keep getting rejected by the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest week after week, your frustration has company. The article offers some strategies for writing a winning submission. Findings of a quantitative analysis suggest captions should use words uncommon…
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Cartographic Controversy
“Map projections are just different ways of translating the dimensions of a globe onto a two dimensional surface. A sphere (or oblate spheriod, if you want to be fancy) can’t be flattened without causing some kind of distortion, be it…
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Post-Revolt Lit
“The concept of the ‘individual’ has been born during these revolts. At the same time, tribal structures and ethnic traditions will not simply disappear. Tribal culture will have to enter into a modern framework and that is very complicated but…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
We’re going to need a bigger rocket (to get to mars). Department of turnings-things-into-other-things: I bet that aircraft carrier would make a pretty neat diving reef. Thursday fluff: How To Be A Retronaut on 50s and 60s rebel youth and…
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Crosswords, Broken Down By a Professional
Will Shortz, the puzzle mastermind behind the NY Times Crossword Puzzle, is revealing his strategies to the Atlantic. He goes through the whole process—fishing the right crossword from the submission slush pile, and then the major clue editing and revising…
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A Dominatrix in the Country
When writer Melissa Febos’ book came out (which some of you got to hear her read at last month’s monthly Rumpus), she found a reason to shed the long sleeves and expose her tattoos to the college classes she taught.…
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Why We Love Jackie O
The tapes of Jackie O’s interview with Arthur Schlesinger, four months after her husband’s assassination were not supposed to be released until fifty years after her death. Her daughter Caroline Kennedy ended up releasing them early (the result of an…
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School Reform’s Shortcomings
Diane Ravitch walks us through the history of school issues and the failed reform policies in the American educational system. The black-white achievement gap, test scores that diverge along socioeconomic lines and the failures of the No Child Left Behind…