January 2010
36 posts
goodbye howard zinn.
i posted his MIT lecture a few weeks back. a profound man and a profoundly heartbreaking loss. let us all hope to be as foolishly romantic as zinn was.
tammychiang:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this...
dandicat answers nerdbliss post
I tried my best to screen shot of Edwidge Dandicat’s answer to my question during the New Yorker chat. She was very polite to everyone who had questions for her and super insightful on what she sees for Haiti’s future after the quake. She is a wonderful writer and person. I wish her and her family the best as they deal their losses and try to move forward in the moments ahead.
remembering j.d. salinger, the boys i loved &the...
There was just something about Holden. He was the original bad boy. Reading “Catcher in the Rye” in 8th grade, I couldn’t really get him. Luckily, I didn’t have to. We were only reading for a quiz and so I took the notes I needed to and said i’d worry about understanding the character more fully later.
Later came about 5 years later, in my senior year, I found an...
this today from one of my fav design...
edwidge dandicate on what she lost in haiti →
Heartbreaking post by Haitian author, Edwidge Dandicate about her cousin Maxo, who was killed in the earthquake. Powerful excerpt from when Dandicate finally was able to get in touch with his family and hears of Maxo’s death:
Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming,...
baubles, bobby pins and papa doc: pulling haiti's...
With the latest causality estimate standing at over 200,000 people, Haiti is mourning, struggling to cope with the unimaginable loss of life. And while the last week has put the nation through one of the most tenuous trials, it now faces a daunting task of protecting not only its people but their legacy as well. In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Marc Lacey covered Haiti’s arts...
sneak peak of corinne bailey rae's new album, "the... →
she’s back. and as phenomenal as I had hoped. Listening to this girl sing about her lost love should give you a glimpse of what resilience is.
my fav tacks (a misnomer since im in love with all of them): “are you here?” “love is on its way” and “paris nights, new york mornings.”
junot diaz to POTUS: tell us a story.
I read this this morning in the New Yorker and had to share it with you guys. In his short essay, One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief, Junot Diaz says that Barack has not given us a good story and that the lack of a narrative has been the reason why the following he attracted during the campaign has started to fray apart. I love that Diaz is able to apply literary tools to political capital. And it...
Best part of Common’s Finding Forever...
telling haiti's story: why won't black mags write...
And in that moment- Haiti was shattered.
I first saw the story while running on the treadmill at the gym. Slowing the speed from 5.3 to 3.4, then 3.0, I looked up as all of the television screens in the gym started to carry the story. And since Tuesday evening, it seems the entire world has stopped to look at the devastation the earthquake brought to the concrete buildings of Port au Prince, to...
UPDATE: our partners in Haiti.
charitywater:
Here’s what’s going on with our partners in Haiti: Amanda Schwartz of Partners in Health has been relaying emails coming to her from PIH’s health facility in Cange, which is treating an influx of patients from Port-au-Prince around the clock: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP [United Nations Development Program] needs...
what we will leave behind. →
The legacy of the 7 year war in Iraq may be the humanitarian crisis in the waiting. This article from FP online gives an depth look into refugee life in the region and what the US will leave behind.
Sadly, the humanitarian consideration is one that American voters have seemed largely uninterested with since the coverage of the war has dwindled. I can only hope that as NGOs begin to operate...
HELP NEEDED: Haiti hit with massive quake.
charitywater:
Haiti was hit yesterday by what could be considered the worst natural disaster for the region in the last 200 years. An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.0, shocked the country just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, collapsing buildings and cutting water and electricity services in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. Aftershocks of 4.5 magnitude or higher continued through...
4 tags
and pose click: Kim Kardashian, a chihuahua and...
Like many banks, Goldman Sachs has had it fair share of PR problems in the past couple of years. So to assuage public outrage about their corporate bonuses, this year Sachs is considering implementing a “charity requirement”. Uhmm. I mean, clearly the money would be going to help the work of non-profits, but shouldn’t the corporate giving model be more than a publicity...
obama- the musical! no seriously.
I saw this and nearly lost my mind. Not only have the Germans fallen head over heels with our president, they have also put there love to song and dance. Apparently the production features hits like, Sasha and Malia crooning, “You’ll Always Be Daddy To Us.”
If you ask me, Reverend Wright’s appearance is bound to be the show stealer. Check the robe. As the Germans would...
Podcast: Interview with Dan Pink! →
Jeff De Cagna from Principled Innovation interviewed Dan Pink, author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”
On his blog, De Cagna writes:
Dan is a good friend of the association community, and in Drive he has given association leaders a powerful framework for rethinking how our organizations can be successful…The argument is simplicity itself. In an age of...
how to screw up. gracefully.
great WIRED section HOW TO FAIL shows how screw ups can be set ups and how losing is sometimes the best strategy for winning. Take actor Alec Baldwin, for example. He says, “The fail: my entire film career. The save: 30 rock.”
It’s easy to get caught up chasing ‘the big time’ and not realize the place where you could be your best. If there’s one lesson to...
Shashi Tharoor fuels Indian political debate- in... →
Interesting NYTimes articles on Shashi Tharoor, member of Indian Parliament and a junior minister of foreign affairs. With his nearly half a million followers, @ShashiTharoor is ruffling feathers among India’s political elite. Tharoor’s tweets have “landed him on the front page of most of India’s English-language newspapers, which accused him of a very big mistake in Indian...
Jhumpa Lahiri reads “A Day” by William...
recession happy pills. drink up and swallow.
this, from Bobby Pierce over at Foreign Policy online:
Is a bad economy good for you? Recent studies by José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux of the University of Michigan tracked the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth during the Great Depression in the United States, Japan’s postwar slump, and recent downturns in Europe. Across gender, race, and nationality, the...
couldn’t resist giving this guy a plug...
WatchThe oddest name I have ever seen on the twitter Trending Topics? Howard Zinn.
The 87 year old historian has always been a public figure in the academic community but never really a hot topic in the world of social media. But with his 1980 landmark book, “A People’s History of the United States” being adapted to into a History Channel Special, Zinn has found himself again in...
somewhere in between →
In his January 1, NYTimes article “Fragile Calm Holds in Dafur After Years of Death,” Jeffrey Gettleman speaks on the current climate in the war-torn region of Sudan. For the first time since 2003, many farmers have been able to return to their land and the widespread violence has seemingly tapered. Though there has still been terrorfying flashes of violence in the country against...