December 2010
27 posts
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Allo Darlin’ - “Will You Please Spend...
Question for Our Generation?
SPENCER TWEEDY or JUSTIN BIEBER
For more context, I will direct you to an entirely unbiased link on Spencer’s blog.
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“One had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre...”
– Flaubert, Madame Bovary (trans. Lydia Davis)
Polish'd Off
The first time I put on nail polish, it was clear, it was only on my pinky, and it was in daycare. Someone had instructed me to be very careful not to touch and to blow on it to dry faster. When my mother picked me up, I was still holding out my pinky, blowing on it every few seconds. She told me to stop; my behavior was unsightly.
My last night in Chicago, I sat on the roof and painted my...
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Arcade Fire - “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
And if...
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PsychoBabble
A good way to get to know someone real well real fast:
Get babbling drunk and do the Sunday Times Crossword together. Essentially, it’s a giant free association test, and you’ll find out lots of things about how the other person’s mind works.
So I was doing the crossword with my brother when these things happened. (My point is that alcohol brings out the babbling...
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The spectre of the unanswered letter
If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen...
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The Semicolon Wars » American Scientist →
Are there too many programming languages?
In 1726 Jonathan Swift told of a dispute between the Little-Endians of Lilliput and the Big-Endians of Blefuscu; 41,000 perished in a war fought to decide which end of a boiled egg to crack. This famous tempest in an egg cup was replayed 250 years later by designers of computer hardware and communications protocols. When a block of data is stored or...
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西双版纳之行 →
When I was 11, I wrote an essay about my summer vacation for Chinese school. (This was actually a pretty exciting vacation. We lived in a treehouse.)
This essay has recently resurfaced on the Internet. The story goes like this: a college classmate of my mom was looking to contact her and for some reason ended up Googling my name — my Chinese name. “So how did this end up on the...
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HALCYON DIGEST
The CVS in Central Square has an “ethnic foods” shelf of Goya products. I had stopped there for a respite from the wind chill on my walk home. Not sure why I decided to walk in the first place, though perhaps I had felt invincible insulated by earbuds and earmuffs. In moments of muffled hearing or blurry vision, I always think that just because I can no longer perceive the world, I can...
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“You must write as if your reader needed you desperately, because he does. If, as...”
– The Book Bench: An Inspirational Letter to My Students : The New Yorker
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The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not... →
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s food/science columns at Serious Eats are, without mincing words, awesome.
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So if you get your MFA in NYC, are you MFA or NYC?...
In reference to Chad Harbach’s Slate/n+1 piece and also sort of Elif Butman’s essay in LRB, both of which contend with Mark McGurls’ argument in The Program Era that the rise of MFAs has enriched American fiction.
A few months ago, I went to a reading that featured two young, female South Asian-American writers. They both read stories about young women of South Asian descent....
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““I can conceive of no greater handicap for the writer between the ages of...”
– Vanishing Act - Lapham’s Quarterly (h/t uglyofwalruses)
This wonderful essay in the latest “Celebrity” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is about child prodigy Barbara Follett, who published her first novel to critical acclaim at age 12, only to disappear into obscurity, and then a few...
“There is a habit I will to admit to, a weakness really, for replacing the tiny...”
– Affinity Konar - A Factual History of Fictional Natures (via 3quarksdaily)
Rereading my old Google Reader shares and finding things I once found and still find beautiful.
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Pulsate
Click to make music. Space to clear. (source)
Perfect personalized studying soundtrack — this has kept me from going crazy.
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Does Julian Assange Have a Profile On OKCupid? →
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Wilco - “She’s a Jar”
Are there...
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Cake - “I Will Survive”
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How to make yourself feel better when life feels...
The thing to remember is that emotions are relative. Just as the human eye cannot perceive absolute color, neither can the human mind make a rational calculus of how we should feel. This is why rich people huff along on hedonistic treadmill, no happier than the rest of us.
Instead of letting that work against us, we should exploit it.
1. Take some cheap, crappy OJ — the kind served at...
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It also makes me sad when my code doesn't work....
.edit-button {
display: inline;
-webkit-appearance: none;
background: none;
border: 0;
color: blue; /* -webkit-link makes it purple :'( */
cursor: pointer;
text-decoration: underline;
padding:0px 9px;
display:inline-block;
font:inherit;
}
From the CSS stylesheet for Chrome’s history page.
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Knee Jerk
Your horrifying video of the day. Watch a sawed-off cadaver leg get wretched until its anterior cruciate ligament snaps! Cadaver, I feel your pain — this is what happened to me. (Minus the sawed-off leg part.)
Actually, tearing my ACL was not all that painful, which is why I didn’t realize it was torn for a few years and then messed up other stuff in my knee. That was a fun...
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