randomWalks

Since Carter, the man he shot dead on 34th Street and 5th Avenue, was a negro, Plitt was at first not held. But he is now in custody.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) April 3, 2012

That’s from April 2 1912. History’s laughing so hard at us, its sides hurt.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) April 3, 2012

The disastrous thing about advertising on the internet is that you know which ads work and how well, and you know what content gets the most hits. This creates a race to the bottom which is inimical to creativity and cool.

Often times, a writer uses tricks and exaggerations to convey to a reader the spirit — if not the precise truth — of what occurred. I just want to make clear that when I say that one of my friends was actually on the verge of tears, you understand that this is not such a trick. She was horrified to the point of crying.

I ate the vomlet!" he yelled. "I made other pledges eat it! That’s brotherhood!

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"What you’re looking at is the simplest thing in the world: an oyster shell filled with olive oil and balanced in a small dish of sand. Three pieces of cotton string are lying in the oil with their ends poking just a little way off the side of the shell. Those are the wicks. This is a shell lamp. This is perhaps what the first lamp ever looked like. At the very least, this is a fundamental human technology." (via Root Simple: The World’s First Lamp)

Now you’re talking. I think a lot about Serena. I do. I collect photos of Serena. She’s just a total, super-Amazon. What more can you say? Of course, she’s also a Jehovah’s Witness. Yeah, people have said to me, ‘Hey, I can arrange for you to meet Serena.’ But I have nothing to say to her. I’m not interested in tennis, and I can’t really abide that Jehovah’s Witness nonsense. You know, there’d be no grounds for anything to talk about. So I just have to admire her from a distance. But God, what a butt, as you well know.

These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along.

He didn’t just retweet content without comment but vetted it, asking for confirmation, sourcing, more details, playing his followers against each other as if he were an assigning editor of an incorporeal newsroom. He became a dogged beat reporter, far removed from the scene but covering it at all hours, exposing his messy and complicated process for all to see.

All this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns. In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US.

Publishing for mobile demands new tools and processes. As with zines and blogs, lowering the barrier to entry will encourage new authors and forms to flourish without losing the open ethos that is central to the spirit of the Web.

It really is true that the American government and its media jointly terrorize the American people far more than the actual so-called “Terrorists” could even dream of achieving.

I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives.

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(via All Major News Outlets Cover Trayvon Martin Tragedy, Except Fox News | ThinkProgress)

www.youtube.com/watch

monkeyajb:

If you love hip-hop, or even are interested in music history, find some time to watch this great documentary. This is the Life - How The West Was Won is about The Good Life which was the legendary cafe where so many LA rappers got their start in the 90’s. Most folks know about Freestyle Fellowship and Project Blowed and some of the folks who went on to mass commercial success, but you can see so much more of what was happening in this documentary.

Medusa and SIN. Fat Joe getting booed off the stage. Ganja K. Cut Chemist. 2Mex. Charli 2Na. Amazing, magical stuff happening in a tiny little grocery store in South Central.

(Aceyalone is in my top 5 best emcees of all time, and he isn’t in this very much, but there are some scenes of him freestyling in the parking lot that are pretty amazing.)

Most of the conversation that once took place daily on blogs now takes place on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. To try and fight that trend is a losing proposition. Almost all prominent blogs are now corporatized with actual budgets, so continuing to play in that shrinking sandbox doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, ‘social isn’t a product,’ she told me after I gave her a demo, ‘social is people and the people are on Facebook.’

Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history as shown in The Black Vernacular, is still unseen and unexplored.

Most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better.

The results speak for themselves. My students not only understand Hamlet, they love it. They talk about it in the hall, and other teachers ask me about what’s happening on Twitter. My quiz grades have been higher than any in the past twelve years of teaching this piece.

Seeds that might not even be marketable now, 100 years from now might be the ace in the hole we need to figure out some kind of climatic conditions we can’t even perceive right now.

In case you missed it, the Attorney General of the United States spent a little time yesterday discussing the circumstances under which the President could order your death without having a trial or even having charged you with any crime.