"My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Ms. Colvin recalled. “She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.’ "
My place for stuff I don't want to post elsewhere.
November 26, 2009
October 31, 2009
"With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche."
— From French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality, NYTimes.com (log-in / registration may be required)
"To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian."
— Nicolette Hahn Niman in The Carnivore’s Dilemma from NYTimes.com (registration / log in may be required)
“Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.”
From Women at Arms: A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too from NYTimes.com (log-in or registration may be required)
"I think the much bigger worry is that we are going to drive ourselves into a corner where the bond markets will force us to slash benefits to people who have planned their lives around them, making those people worse off than they would have been if the program had never existed. And also, of course, that they will raise taxes by enough to produce serious, painful deadweight loss. But until Ben Bernanke starts looking much more inflation-friendly than I’ve so far seen, any kind of effort to totally inflate away our national debt is pretty low on my list of potential problems."
— Economist Megan McArdle in Seriously, Stop Worrying About Hyperinflation
"Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they’re instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the ’20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. These reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed, but because society has."
— Jacob Weisberg in Gay Marriage & Marijuana: You can’t stop either. Why that’s good. from Newsweek
October 19, 2009
"Our industry is still young. If we want an all-encompassing technology scene, we need to actively work to cultivate an inclusive environment. This means a zero tolerance approach to this kind of entertainment. Booth babes, tequila girls, and scantily clad gyrating women simply set the wrong tone, here or abroad. Heck, this isn’t just about offending women—many guy geeks I know would be mortified by this kind of thing."
— Simon Willison on the Yahoo! Hackday Taiwan debacle.
October 16, 2009
"
It’s true that making art is selfish; I make art, I write, ultimately, for myself. In a recent interview, Lorrie Moore said something that resonated with me:
The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It’s kind of rude, and yet really it’s where art comes from. It’s not the same as courage. It’s closer to bad manners than to courage. […] There’s a certain indefensibility about it. It’s not about loving your community and taking care of it; you’re not attached to the chamber of commerce.
But 1) “selfish” gets a bad rap; what we mean, what I mean, is that writing is my nourishment, my food for life; and 2) parenting strikes me as selfish, sometimes narcissistic, in its own particular way. Both endeavors require great sacrifices.
"— Sonya Chung in The Mommy Problem from The Millions
October 8, 2009
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