Because I recently went through a week's worth of unread posts in my RSS reader, I now have 20 or so starred items. Starred items mean, I should write about this. Well, instead of writing about them, why don't I just link to them and start to get my diigo (yeah, I didn't know what it was either) skills a-workin'.
Ready, set, go!
Links!
(1) Ta-Nehisi Coates says:
The more I think about this, the more I am faced with the kind of question I feel naive and stupid for asking--What kind of human being writes a 4,000 word article to prove that someone's long-dead relative wasn't lynched because he was beaten to death? Callousness is scary. Stupidity is scary. When you combine the two....I mean seriously, What the fuck? It's the worst of everything.
Intrigued? Go, read.
(2) Via Digby at Hullabaloo, this (from Pew) is great journalism. Awesome job, guys!
Thirty-seven governorships are up for grabs in November, along with all 435 seats in the House and 37 in the Senate. And only a handful of the more hotly contested races will get significant national media coverage from now through Election Day.
So it’s a little surprising that the national press is now lavishing the most attention on a candidate who cable pundits and political analysts expect to lose big in November: Alvin Greene.
The South Carolina Democrat has been the lead newsmaker in 2010 coverage since coming out of nowhere to win the June 8 Senate primary. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism crunched the numbers and provided The Upshot with its internal analysis of media coverage across 52 major news outlets, from South Carolina’s primary day through July 18.
Intrigued? Go, read.
(3) There's a new model of the universe that doesn't include the big bang--or dark energy. Can I have just the latter and not the former? Don't worry; it's still preliminary (via Tyler Cowan)
Intrigued? Go, read.
(4) Sara Mayeux says:
A professor of mine, asked why he teaches history, replied that he wants his students, whatever profession they go into, not to be "prisoners of the present." That is, to understand (not just abstractly to know) that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live, or ever have. That's a lesson you don't have to go very far back in time to learn—in a sense, I wonder if Ta-Nehisi's frustration that America "is too ignorant of itself" doesn't have something to do with the tendency of Americans to imprison themselves in the present. Thus race has always been the subject of mere "conversations," marriage has been a man and a woman in love for time eternal.
Intrigued? Go, read.
(5) But I say to Ben Zimmer of Language Log, "what the hell is an obscenicon, and where can I get one?"
Intrigued? Go, read.
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