randomWalks

They were never included in the Parker Brothers version, but, in all the early boxes, you were given an address to send to [Monopoly creator Lizzie] Magie for her advanced rules. If you did, under the heading of “For Advanced and Scientific Players”, Magie suggested a way to play where, rather than one person owning everything, all the players could share in the wealth.

When the USPS announced that it was planning to stop Saturday delivery, how many of your white friends made snarky comments about being pleased to get junk mail less frequently and how many expressed concern about job cutbacks at an institution that has for decades provided a path to middle class life particularly for black Americans?

My wife roasts a whole chicken in a 90 year old Lisk roasting pan in our 1927 Chambers stove. She then takes it apart and stores the meat in the fridge while making stock from the bones. Want chicken for a sandwich, or a nibble?, or maybe some bites sized pieces in Frank’s hot sauce? It’s all in the fridge, no breading, (unless you want mom to make that, and she will), and very healthy. Come on folks, this is easy stuff to do.

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new-aesthetic:

Sony wants a future of interactive advertising, patents transformation of ads into games | Digital Trends

This is a legit illustration from an advertising patent. The juxtaposition of the viewer exercising control over the experience of watching the ad by debasing themself in a dramatic gesture of surrender to the brand is simply sublime. The bullet hanging in the air, suspended both by the magic of the freeze-frame and by an invitation to participate in the globalized corporate-efficient murder of the planet, is just the cherry on top.

Most of you who are reading this assume that Harvard provides some end-of-the-line safety net for poor students in such calamitous circumstances and that Harvard would never let a student fail, drop out, or not receive medical care for lack of money. I write to assure you that there is no end in sight to the falling.

Coke was Dunn’s concern, and on one trip, as he walked through one of the favelas, he had an epiphany. “A voice in my head says, ‘These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I almost threw up.”

It is the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones.”

Now your inbox is empty. You’re welcome. You still have a to-do list, and it is not empty.

As I settled into a state of calm, the thin man in the white robes told me his story. Vijaya was a former leader of the American Hare Krishna cult. He had left the group because they had started to behave — as do pretty much all cults — like gangsters, with all the corruption and violence that implies. He still believed in Hare Krishna’s brand of Hinduism, but he was part of a renegade group of psychedelic Hare Krishnas. And the Hare Krishna cultists had tried to kill him… and he was hiding out.

As a document in literary-critical and literary-theoretical taste in the late twentieth century, Random Walks will prove central.

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"In contrast to his famously hyperbolic statements about his generation, these photographs seem like a secret visual diary filled with more complex realizations about his life and times." Tim Keane: “I Noticed My Friends”: Allen Ginsberg’s Photography (Hyperallergic)

A recent study of Google searches by Professor Latanya Sweeney has found “significant discrimination” in ad results depending on whether the name you’re Googling is, statistically speaking, more likely to belong to a white person or a black person. So while Googling an Emma will probably trigger nothing more sinister than an invitation to look up Emma’s phone number and address, searching for a Jermaine could generate an ad for a criminal record search. In fact, Sweeney’s research suggests that it’s 25% more likely you’ll get ads for criminal record searches from “black-identifying” names than white-sounding ones.

In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure.

I find it all too easy to forget my corporeality, to forget that my life is contingent upon the health of my body. My body is millions of years older than I am; it is skilled and experienced in ways beyond mine or anyone’s comprehension, yet day after day I use it to sit in front of a computer. I look at a screen; I punch keys. I sit down to read; I hold a book. This isn’t using my body - I’m just a mind. As Marwood says in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, ‘We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell, making an enemy of our own future. What we need is harmony, fresh air, stuff like that.’ For me, that is the pull of running.

Tips on how to deal with economic hard times, by Gabe Soria and @josephremnant from unpub’d ish of Arthur Dec 08 * twitter.com/arthurmagazine…

— Arthur Magazine (@arthurmagazine) February 11, 2013

The goal of the North Dakota Man Camp Project was to document the social and material conditions present in the growing number of “man camps” in the Bakken Oil Patch. … The project brings archaeological and historical methods to the study the ephemeral phenomenon of contemporary labor housing.

Meritocracy has been criticized as a myth which only serves to justify the status quo; merit can always be defined as whatever results in success. Thus whoever is successful can be portrayed as deserving success, rather than success being in fact predicted by criteria for merit.

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Top: Title Unknown: "From over his shoulder, we see Bush looking at himself in the bathtub"—Jerry Saltz

Bottom: Title Unknown: "Justin Quinnell’s bath, as seen by his tongue?"—Adam Rice

Every modern life is lived in the teeth of massive evolutionary mismatch. … Nearly all of us receive unconscious biochemical rewards from our pain and emotional distress, and nearly all of us consequently develop literal biochemical addictions to at least some of our painful, distressing, out-of-balance, survival-mode states.

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‘Jane Says’ by Jane’s Addiction is my new jam.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close to that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions.

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Justseeds: Mary Tremonte: Queer Scouts Patch and Poster Set

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.

People who like to share what they’re reading are looking at this material in a very different way from the publisher. They’re looking to cut it and paste it.