US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins | The Guardian

peterwknox:

The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. Their median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation’s top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that’s before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.

The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it’s systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can’t have because times are hard.

via The Awl

rachelfershleiser:

Hemingway Look-alike Contest

(via Flavorwire)

(via oh-theplacesyoullgo)

The Caging of America

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

Recommended reading. Fascinating (and depressing and overwhelming) stuff.

(via givemesomethingtoread)

SK8 & Cre8 - S.C. school offers skateboarding for P.E. class

Our friends at Fuzzco are decorating some skate decks as part of a fundraiser for the Charleston Charter School for Math and Science. They are the first school in South Carolina to offer skateboarding for P.E. Which sounds awesome to me. Why not offer some sports that the kids are into? I think parkour will follow soon after. The biggest problem for most schools is probably finding someone willing to teach skateboarding (or parkour). Also, the facilities (and insurance). Fortunately, it sounds like the school will be near the new skatepark being built on Meeting Street.

If you are an artist and want in on the fundraiser, check out the website, fill out a form, and pick up a free skateboard if you’re in Charleston. The art opening and auction are in March.

Some quotes from the page:

Skateboarding is a goal-oriented activity, rewarding only those willing to put in hours of work. The feeling of landing a trick after thousands of tries is one of pure elation, though most skateboarders never let it show.

I hadn’t thought about this, but this is something that is really important to foster with students. So many of my kids will just give up as soon as something appears difficult. Maybe the persistence and attitude of try-try-again first discovered through skateboarding and challenging video games will eventually translate into their real lives (working, living with a spouse, parenting, etc.). Let’s hope.

Charleston bred, internationally acclaimed artist, Kevin Earl Taylor attributes his roots in art as well as his artistic inspiration to skateboarding. Taylor writes, “our creative life was nurtured through skateboarding. Little did we know, but the act of improvising hours of fun from society’s detritus would train our minds to explore the potentiality of our surroundings. Skateboarding was a self-expressive mode, in which we developed individualities and preferences. Through it and the surrounding atmosphere of counter culture, we learned the mechanics of introspection. It was something we did together, but by ourselves. We all had our distinctive styles then, just as we do now. I remember building a ramp using found scraps of wood. For a couple of hours, we’d scoured the ground at the junkyard on Sullivan’s Island, each of us collecting an artillery of rusty, bent and nearly broken nails. With half of a broken brick, we took those and hammered them back into shape. We had learned how to design, conceptualize and construct what we saw in our heads. In 1987, we called them ramps, but now we know, they were indeed our earliest original works.”

Really great interview with Bill Clinton over on Esquire.com. A long-read, but definitely worth reading during our heated political times.

futurejournalismproject:

Foxconn Employees Threaten Mass Suicide

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic component maker (think: Apple, Amazon, Nintendo, Dell, Panasonic… well, you get the point) is not a nice place to work. So rampant have the suicides been that last year the company made workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.

Via The Atlantic Wire:

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times.  It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. 

As The Atlantic Wire points out, this week’s This American Life features a trip to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China where approximately 350,000 to 450,000 people are employed.

You can listen to the episode here.

Image: Workers at Foxconn via China Southern Weekly

(via lionza)

"If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled."

- The Technium (via azspot)

(via azspot)

"

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

"

-

John Steinbeck’s 1958 response to his eldest son’s proclamation of falling in love.

I have found about 15 solid and timely reminders in here and a great fat affection for the closing line.

via the Rumpus and Letters of Note

(via beenthinking)

Awesome new song by The Shins

Generosity is GOOD

Good magazine always lives up to its name. Their mailing list is one of the few worth subscribing to. They have an ongoing section called “People are Awesome” which details positive/smart/noble/kind/etc things that people do. It serves to offset the obvious evidence to the contrary that we are barraged with all day every day.

South Carolina got a shout-out today: The Coffee Shop Where Everyone Pays for Everyone Else’s Coffee

And a similar link to something that I saw on the news over the holidays: The Anonymous Movement to Pay Off Layaway Accounts

Must read: Colbert article in NYTimes

We don’t get Comedy Central and I don’t have time to watch it online anymore, but I’ve always thought that what Stephen Colbert does on The Colbert Report is absolute genius. 

In Charleston, we lived across from the medical building named after his father, so I walked over to hear him give the graduating class their commencement address a couple of years ago. Hilarious (as always) and also poignant.

So I was glad to read this great New York Times Magazine article about him. It’s good to see that he still has it. His latest shenanigans with the Super PAC that he created and his 501(c)(4) are absolutely perfect - that sweet spot of hilarious AND eye-opening.

If you’re one of the uninitiated or just never “got” what Colbert was about, I recommend reading the article. It tells what he’s been up to recently, but is also revealing about his past and the kind of guy he is. Oh, and it shows how what he does is so genius.

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

Nerd moment:I was finishing reading the article in class while my students were working. The next-to-last paragraph has an allusion to Walter Mitty, from the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which we had just read the day before.

So I could ask them what it meant that because Colbert is the producer of the show, it means he gets to play Walter Mitty each night. They got it!

Then I could explain that an allusion is like an inside joke and that no one likes to be left out of an inside joke, so that’s one reason why it’s cool to read and know Shakespeare, the Bible, and all those literary works that get alluded to so often.

I love it when things come together like that. 

Jason Segel and Paul Rudd in the best interview ever.

Add this to my Christmas list.