Winnie’s breed does not have royal roots, but her lineage is fierce. It dates to what some consider the finest feat in dog-and-human history, a 1925 race to deliver lifesaving diphtheria serum to icebound Nome, Alaska. The event gripped the nation and later became an inspiration for the Iditarod race.

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War of 1812 important because it kept out U.S. politics – and Snooki

Americans see it as a war that produced their national anthem. Canadians see it as a war which saved them from American assimilation and preserved them from American politics, gun laws and shared citizenship with Snooki of the Jersey Shore

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The Mysteries of the Suicide Tourist

The glamour of New York can play a role. Just as the city’s glittering, outsize reputation attracts many people for happy reasons, it attracts others for tragic ones. People who are suicidal may want to die in a way that gets them attention they felt they never got when they were alive, says Herbert Hendin, a New York–based psychiatrist and the president of Suicide Prevention International. By this logic, New York can be the perfect stage.

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n+1: Listening to Books

I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears, and three years later I still associate certain spots along the Charles with scenes from the novel’s Dorlcote Mill. I also remember exactly where along the Weeks Footbridge Lucy Deane marveled at how beautiful Maggie Tulliver looks in shabby clothes. I think of it whenever I pass that spot, which means I think of it most days.

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Edward Luttwak reviews ‘The Iliad by Homer’ translated by Stephen Mitchell · LRB 23 February 2012

At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction; and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’

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Picasso’s Guernica in a car showroom

“They didn’t know what the hell else they could do to make people listen and understand, but they thought this might help, and so they did it with great conviction.”

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Contraception’s Con Men by Garry Wills

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden. Catholic authorities themselves say it is a matter of “natural law,” over which natural reason is the arbiter—and natural reason, even for Catholics, has long rejected the idea that contraception is evil. More of that later; what matters here is that contraception is legal, ordinary, and accepted even by most Catholics. To say that others must accept what Catholics themselves do not is bad enough. To say that President Obama is “trying to destroy the Catholic Church” if he does not accept it is much, much worse.

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E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

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A Boy Who Was ‘Like a Flower’ – Anthony Shadid’s Pulitzer Prize reporting

If the Americans are intent on liberation, why are innocent people dying? If they want to attack the government, why do bombs fall on civilians? How can they have such formidable technology and make such tragic mistakes?

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Why libraries matter

We have amazing potential power, but without concerted effort I’m afraid it will be wasted. It will look better to save 10 dollars a year per person in taxes instead of funding community computer workshops, and childhood literacy programs, and community gardens. All the while we play desperate catch-up, trying to get a hold on ebooks, and liscensing out endless sub-quality software for meeting room reservations and computer sign-ups and all this other rentier software capitalism instead of developing free and open source solutions and providing small systems with the expertise to use them. Our amazing power is squandered as we cut our staff, fail to attract skilled and diverse talent, and act as a band aid to the mounting social ills caused by slash and burn governance in the name of low taxes and some nebulous idea of freedom that seems to equate with living in a good society but not paying your share for it.

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Another March to War? | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

We have a similar gentleman’s code, a “Westernized industrial power” code if you will, that operates the same way. In other words, our newspapers and TV stations may blather on a thousand times a day about attacking Iran and bombing its people, but if even one Iranian talks about fighting back, he is being “aggressive” and “threatening”; we can impose sanctions on anyone, but if the sanctioned country embargoes oil shipments to Europe in response, it’s being “belligerent,” and so on.

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Dining After ‘Downton Abbey’: Why British Food Was So Bad For So Long : The Salt : NPR

Plenty of working-class Brits were domestic servants back then. When World War I came, a lot of these skilled servants — and their masters — marched off to the trenches. Many never returned.

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Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred – Marilynne Robinson

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own.

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Cormac McCarthy, Quantum Copy Editor

The novelist’s corrections appear to be more literary than scientific. In addition to suggested some rephrasing, Mr. Krauss, said, Mr. McCarthy “made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.” (A quick digital search through Mr. McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy” and several other novels finds no examples of the offending punctuation.)

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Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain

What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.

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That home, it turns out, was with The Packinghouse Review. You can get a copy of volume 2, #2 here.

This story grew out of two places and some drawings. The first place was the Godschalx Gallery at St. Norbert College, a small space in one of the campus buildings that shows both student and professional works. The second was the Riverview Café, a neighborhood coffee shop that frequently hangs interesting art (a little bit of the Blue Moon slips in, too, another great neighborhood spot). And the drawings were sketches my father sent to me from Vietnam, when I was two and he was flying helicopters. The rest of the darkness in the story–and on reflection, it is rather a dark story–came from somewhere else, probably the same place that delivers up such cheer as Among the Moabites and Ichthyology.

When he died less than a year after the painting’s public unveiling, an obituary in a Reading, Pa., newspaper noted that he “dabbled in oil paintings.” Apparently he dabbled more than anyone at the time realized.

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Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate’s Income Inequality Hearing

A major source of inequality in the tax code comes from how it treats investment income. Just ask Mitt Romney, who paid 13.9 percent of his income in taxes in 2010. Most of his earnings came from capital gains, which only get taxed at 15 percent. Proponents of the loophole argue that it helps spur investment, but it also disproportionately helps the rich.

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A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit

Not only was Eliot at the bank, but as the letter above demonstrates, he was happy to be there. A certain pride creeps in to his accounting of his accounting: the salary, the hours, the filing cabinet which is “my province.” To read Eliot’s letters is to get a full picture of the routine demands of this job, which he clung to despite rigorous efforts from his friends and supporters to free him from the shackles of international finance.

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Time for the Tumbrils! by Alexander Cockburn

Also, “conversation” — used as a way of taming all debate and doctrinal struggle into demure prattle. And let us note and deplore the meteoric rise of “existential,” which appears to be “going viral.”

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How a review that pointed out the creepiness of Shirley Temple movies led to “The Power and the Glory”

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Cindy Sherman talks to Simon Schama

Sherman is often mistakenly thought of as a one-note impresario of the grotesque, working in a range from neurosis to horror. For sure, the eloquent, impish person I’ve been talking to has always had a yen for the weird and the wondrous, but I tell her how struck I am by the sheer range of human types she manages to print on her face.

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Shadow and Smoke by Charles Wright

Live your life as though you were already dead

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American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem.

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How to Officially Forget

Look: The same junk from Nanchang has washed up here in Wal-Mart. It’s the end of 2011, and we are wondering what to make of a bunch of people who decided occupy a space. Is it meaningful, important, ridiculous, futile, or some combination of these?

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‘Rasputin Was My Neighbor’ And Other True Tales Of Time Travel

There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him…” long ago jumps closer.

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The Great Illusion of Gettysburg

Hundreds of black veterans made the journey to Gettysburg to mark the 50th anniversary. They greeted the reenacted rebel yells with cold silence. And, like many of their white comrades in the Grand Army of the Republic, they distinguished between forgiving and forgetting.

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The Storytellers of Empire

I don’t mean Americans looked at America uncritically. I mean they looked at it merely in domestic terms.

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“It seems,” she remarked to The Independent last year, on the occasion of her 110th birthday, “like such a long time ago now.”

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“Throughout history the Jewish community has faced discrimination, and therefore we will not stand by while others are targeted.”

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The Downward Mobility of the American Middle Class

But Romney and other Republicans have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in benefits is Americans got clobbered in 2008 and many are still sinking. They and their families need whatever help they can get.

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How Modern Life Is Like a Zombie Onslaught

Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche.

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Coelacanths are not living fossils. Like the rest of us, they evolve

But the truth is that evolution leaves no fish behind. Coelacanths are as much affected by evolution as finches, ferns and flying lemurs. They have their own evolutionary history – we only need to look for it.

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She’d wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper’s hop, an infant’s fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, a vividness.

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Why publishers should give away ebooks

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right – in tune with the universe, somehow.

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William Burroughs Birthday

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Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus

Wulf’s findings fit well with the idea that flow – and better learning – comes when you turn off conscious thought. “When you have an external focus, you achieve a more automatic type of control,” she says. “You don’t think about what you are doing, you just focus on the outcome.”

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Bill Moyers Makes Newt Gingrich Look Like an Idiot

By explaining who Alinsky was and even how Gingrich himself has adopted at least one of Alinsky’s talking points, Moyers shows that the candidate, who claims to be a historian, is either ignorant of Saul Alinsky, or is deliberately misleading people.

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Cartographies of Time

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‘Stay Awake’: Stories On Grief And Everything After

Although each story contains different characters, there’s an unsettling thematic commonality among them. People are lost — to car accidents, suicides or diseases — and their loved ones do their best to get by. Often unsuccessfully.

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The Lads in Their Hundreds: the Music of World War I

In his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell insists that the ironies of the war — the deep discrepancies between the heroic ideals of fighting the war and its ultimate realities — marked the beginning of habits and expressions that still resonate with us today. The Great War, he says, introduced irony as a pervasive mode of thinking. For many, it reversed the idea of Progress. Words like heroism, courage, honor and authority became tarnished, and would have to be shined up again for later conflicts and later generations.

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7th Grader Suspended for Saying I Love You in Native Language -NativeNewsNetwork

The alleged ‘attitude problem’ turned out to be that Miranda said the Menominee word

“posoh”
that means
“hello”

and said

“Ketapanen”

in Menominee that means “I love you.”

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It’s tempting to look back no further than the origins of the word “blurb,” coined in 1906 by children’s book author and civil disobedient Gelett Burgess. But blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them (“bullshit,” in case you were wondering, appeared in 1915)

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Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death

Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality.

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Social networks 10,000 years before Facebook

When the researchers put this information together, they found that Hadza who contributed more to the common good were more likely to be friends with other cooperative people. These connections formed clusters that were often near the center of the social networks.

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Maybe in the future you’ll be able to sip some juice, and eat the package.

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Major undertakings.

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No More E-Books Vs. Print Books Arguments, OK?

We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

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