What I've Been Reading: 5/20/13
Since I haven't done a linkdump in a while, I figure I might as well do one now. There's a lot here, so it's all under a cut, with very little commentary of my own unless it helps clarify what the article is about. Enjoy! ^_^;
POLITICS
--The REAL reason the U.S. failed in Afghanistan
--The Ghetto Is Public Policy - on the precise ways racism created the inner city
--Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity
--The Trader Joe's Lesson: How to Pay a Living Wage and Still Make Money in Retail - on how treating employees right actually improves one's business
--U.S. Out of Vermont! - on the movement in Vermont to secede from the United States (unfortunately, the article makes no mention of how the movement allied itself with racists, white supremacists, and neo-Confederate groups a while back)
--Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia
--Mainstream green is still too white - on the lack of racial politics in environmental activism
--The Republican Party is officially broken
--5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns
--A Few Bad Men - on why America doesn't really have a terrorism problem
--Is it wrong to care more about 4 deaths in Boston than 80 in Syria?
--America the skittish - on American overreaction to events like the Boston Marathon bombings
--Weren't Buddhists Supposed to Be Pacifists? - on racial violence in Burma/Myanmar
--Everything Libertarians and Liberals Get Wrong About Drones - an interesting and necessary perspective on the current drone controversy
--Put Your Shirts Back On: Why Femen Is Wrong - on Islamophobia in mainstream feminism
--The Liberal Narrative Is Broken, and Only Populism Can Fix It - on U.S. politics and why you can't simply say "government is good"
--Niall Ferguson, Ted Cruz, and the Politics of Masculinity - on how traditional views of masculinity hinder gun control
--Violence Against Women Can Be Funny - a self-proclaimed feminist's defense of a controversial Onion article
--What Commencement Speeches Leave Out - on the importance of civic duty
--Does Abortion Cause Infanticide?
SCIENCE
--The Immortal, Shattered Cells of Henrietta Lacks - on how HeLa cells aren't as reliable as we first thought
--How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes a Hive Mind?
--We Don't Actually Know Why Plants Are Green
--10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of -- And When You've Experienced Them
--Scientific Explanations for Why Spoilers Are So Horrible
--Evolution via Roadkill
--Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
--What's so bad about extinction, anyway?
--How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies
--The Brains of the Animal Kingdom - on underestimating animal intelligence
--How Ancient Life May Have Come About
--Why Refusing to Apologize Feels Better Than Apologizing
--The Nocebo Effect: How We Worry Ourselves Sick
--Autonomous sensory meridian response: Self-diagnosed neurological condition/superpower that makes you really enjoy whispering
--5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required
--Life on Earth... but not as we know it - on the possible existence of a "shadow biosphere"
--6 Ways Nature Cleans Up Our Messes Better Than We Do
--Why do humans kiss?
--Why Humans Will Survive the Next World-Ending Catastrophe
--Oxford has a bell that's been ringing for 173 years
--The 'glass is a liquid' myth has finally been destroyed
--Why music makes us all verklempt (or angry, or wistful, or...)
--Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
--Antarctica's "bleeding glacier" is kind of terrifying
--How to Explain to Children Why, in Space, No One Can Hear Them Scream
ENVIRONMENT
--Easily the most staggering infographic you'll see today - on the overfishing of sharks
SPACE & ASTRONOMY
--11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox - or, some more creative thoughts on why aliens haven't visited us yet (if they're out there at all)
--Is Earth Rarer Than We Think?
--How Parellel Universes Actually Work, Scientifically
--If Earth 2 Exists, TESS Will Find It
--NASA has discovered the most Earth-like planets yet
--Moore's Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth
--Anthropologists explain how to approach aliens parked in Earth orbit
--Are we screwing ourselves by transmitting radio signals into space?
--The Space City That Could Have Been, If Not for Wernher Von Braun
--How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars - on why barns are painted red
--Space Is Now a Reality TV Show - and how that's a good thing
--Unglamorous Space Catastrophes That You'll Never See in a Movie
--Why would aliens come all this way just to invade Earth?
TECHNOLOGY
--The Touch-Screen Generation - on young children using digital technology and how it affects their development
--The Child, the Tablet, and the Developing Mind - an article on the same topic that comes to a more pessimistic conclusion
--China is building buses so enormous that cars can just drive underneath them
--The 'right to be forgotten' - on whether or not information on the Internet should have an expiration date
--Tremble at the sight of Mantis, a 2-ton walking machine - or, more real-life mecha being made (!)
--One of those rare moments when a small thing gives you hope for the future of the planet - on the invention of carbon-neutral fertilizer
--He Unplugged From the Internet For a Year. This Is What He Learned.
EDUCATION
--Friends Don't Let Friends Say "Althusserian Exegasis" - on academic writing and the importance of clarity and accessibility
--Why do college students love getting wasted?
--The Legendary Dr. Fox Lecture - on how easily people can confuse academic jargon for legitimate information
--Why is the stuffed corpse of a great philosopher at University College London? - more information here
--Reading, Writing, and Video Games - on the consequences of including video games in the classroom
--The Ivy League Was Another Planet - on what happens when elite colleges don't go after the rural poor
--Live First, Write Later: The Case for Less Creative-Writing Schooling
--5 Things It Turns Out You Were Right to Hate About School
--6 Beneficial Things They Made You Stop Doing in School
--Prep School: Talking Trash - on bad lessons learned from prep schools
HISTORY
--When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
--The Brilliant Scientist Who Was Destroyed By America
--Humanism and Holocaust History
--How an Ancient Kingdom Explains Today's China-Korea Relations
--Linguists identify 15,000 'ultraconserved words'
--What if people told European history like they told Native American history?
SOCIETY
--What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity
--The Secret World of 'Garbagemen'
--Don't Blame 'Hookup Culture': Romance Always Involves Failure and Despair
--Are Mean Coaches Effective?
--Rick Ross, Don Draper, and the fantasy world of masculinity
--Seeing and believing - on science, religion, and the decline of ghost and UFO sightings
--Every language needs its, like, filler words
--Usually, "Francis" Makes You Laugh. This Time, He Might Make You Cry. - on how you never know where life will take you
--How to Escape the Cult of "Busy"
--5 Basic Facts of Life (That Were Made Up by Marketing Campaigns)
--5 Styles That Defined Entire Eras (That Were Made Up by Movies)
--Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition
--Manhunts Appear to Be the New Car Chases
--'Yo' Said What? - on how poor kids in Baltimore have come up with a working gender-neutral pronoun
--McDonald's Theory - on how to come up with good ideas
--Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why.
--Depression Part Two - Hyperbole and a Half's most recent take on depression
--Do people turn mean because they're helpless? - on the just-world theory
--The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination - on being afraid of feeling pain
--How to Walk Away - on "the psychology of lost causes"
--When to Do Surgery on a Child With 'Both' Genitalia
GEOGRAPHY
--A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map of America
--More than half of the world's population lives inside this circle
--Time-lapse satellite images show how Earth has changed over 28 years
SEX
--My tantric "awakening" turned me off sex - I only include this article because I honestly have no clue what to make of it; I'm a skeptic, so I don't place much value in the experiences the author and the commenters to this article talk about, but there's something about this talking about sex, kink, and spirituality that makes me wonder if there's some truth to all that
--Are men who pay for sex normal, or just weird?
--The Day I Taught How Not to Rape - on what "teach boys not to rape" actually means
--Nearly 1 in 10 Americans would have sex with a robot
--Why Still So Few Use Condoms
MEDIA
--What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?
--Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Part I, I Second That Emoticon - on the history of emoticons like :-) and why they exist
--The Internet Narcissism Epidemic
--When Your Facebook Friend Is Racist
--This Restaurant Is a Nerd Paradise
--How to become Internet famous for $68 -- without ever existing
--You didn't make the Harlem Shake go viral -- corporations did
--Teaser for documentary "Aspie Seeks Love" - on looking for relationships while being on the autism spectrum
--30 things to tell a book snob
--Babylon 5's J. Michael Stracynski explains why most TV scifi is awful
--This Ad Has a Secret Anti-Abuse Message That Only Kids Can See
--Europa Report: At Last, a Space Thriller Worth Taking Seriously
--Drexciya -- the film
--10 Completely Annoying Anime Clichés - a.k.a. part of the reason why I don't care for anime anymore
--An Open Letter to White Male Comedians
--In Defense of Justin Bieber: Why America Turns on Male Child Stars Who Try to Grow Up
--The Gay Bechdel Test: Why Hollywood Needs to Expand Its Representation of LGBT Characters
--The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie
VIDEO GAMES
--Breaking out of a self-centered gamer mentality - on how video games breed fandom entitlement
--The Prisoners May Be Innocent in One of 2013's Most Interesting PC Games - on making a video game about the prison-industrial complex
--5 Ways Video Games Are Saving Mankind
--4 Video Games That Help You Understand and Deal With Your Depression
ART
--A Walking Dream Made Just For You: Odyssey Works Makes Art For and About One Person
--Space Suit of the Week: Dominik Smialowski, The Pilot's Melancholy
--The Magic Cube, by Pixelux Studio
--Epic Superhero Art in a Traditional Native American Style
--Believe It Or Not, This Video Game Poetry Is Beautiful
--Short film: "Abe" is 7 minutes of sheer robot horror
--Hellishly complex, gorgeous assemblage about endless work
--"Expo": A heartbreaking short about a mother's loss, set in a lunar mine
--"Archetype": This no-budget science fiction short looks better than most movies
Originally posted at http://quadruplify.dreamwidth.org/137733.html || Comments on original post:
POLITICS
--The REAL reason the U.S. failed in Afghanistan
--The Ghetto Is Public Policy - on the precise ways racism created the inner city
--Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity
--The Trader Joe's Lesson: How to Pay a Living Wage and Still Make Money in Retail - on how treating employees right actually improves one's business
--U.S. Out of Vermont! - on the movement in Vermont to secede from the United States (unfortunately, the article makes no mention of how the movement allied itself with racists, white supremacists, and neo-Confederate groups a while back)
--Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia
--Mainstream green is still too white - on the lack of racial politics in environmental activism
--The Republican Party is officially broken
--5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns
--A Few Bad Men - on why America doesn't really have a terrorism problem
--Is it wrong to care more about 4 deaths in Boston than 80 in Syria?
--America the skittish - on American overreaction to events like the Boston Marathon bombings
--Weren't Buddhists Supposed to Be Pacifists? - on racial violence in Burma/Myanmar
--Everything Libertarians and Liberals Get Wrong About Drones - an interesting and necessary perspective on the current drone controversy
--Put Your Shirts Back On: Why Femen Is Wrong - on Islamophobia in mainstream feminism
--The Liberal Narrative Is Broken, and Only Populism Can Fix It - on U.S. politics and why you can't simply say "government is good"
--Niall Ferguson, Ted Cruz, and the Politics of Masculinity - on how traditional views of masculinity hinder gun control
--Violence Against Women Can Be Funny - a self-proclaimed feminist's defense of a controversial Onion article
--What Commencement Speeches Leave Out - on the importance of civic duty
--Does Abortion Cause Infanticide?
SCIENCE
--The Immortal, Shattered Cells of Henrietta Lacks - on how HeLa cells aren't as reliable as we first thought
--How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes a Hive Mind?
--We Don't Actually Know Why Plants Are Green
--10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of -- And When You've Experienced Them
--Scientific Explanations for Why Spoilers Are So Horrible
--Evolution via Roadkill
--Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
--What's so bad about extinction, anyway?
--How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies
--The Brains of the Animal Kingdom - on underestimating animal intelligence
--How Ancient Life May Have Come About
--Why Refusing to Apologize Feels Better Than Apologizing
--The Nocebo Effect: How We Worry Ourselves Sick
--Autonomous sensory meridian response: Self-diagnosed neurological condition/superpower that makes you really enjoy whispering
--5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required
--Life on Earth... but not as we know it - on the possible existence of a "shadow biosphere"
--6 Ways Nature Cleans Up Our Messes Better Than We Do
--Why do humans kiss?
--Why Humans Will Survive the Next World-Ending Catastrophe
--Oxford has a bell that's been ringing for 173 years
--The 'glass is a liquid' myth has finally been destroyed
--Why music makes us all verklempt (or angry, or wistful, or...)
--Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
--Antarctica's "bleeding glacier" is kind of terrifying
--How to Explain to Children Why, in Space, No One Can Hear Them Scream
ENVIRONMENT
--Easily the most staggering infographic you'll see today - on the overfishing of sharks
SPACE & ASTRONOMY
--11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox - or, some more creative thoughts on why aliens haven't visited us yet (if they're out there at all)
--Is Earth Rarer Than We Think?
--How Parellel Universes Actually Work, Scientifically
--If Earth 2 Exists, TESS Will Find It
--NASA has discovered the most Earth-like planets yet
--Moore's Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth
--Anthropologists explain how to approach aliens parked in Earth orbit
--Are we screwing ourselves by transmitting radio signals into space?
--The Space City That Could Have Been, If Not for Wernher Von Braun
--How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars - on why barns are painted red
--Space Is Now a Reality TV Show - and how that's a good thing
--Unglamorous Space Catastrophes That You'll Never See in a Movie
--Why would aliens come all this way just to invade Earth?
TECHNOLOGY
--The Touch-Screen Generation - on young children using digital technology and how it affects their development
--The Child, the Tablet, and the Developing Mind - an article on the same topic that comes to a more pessimistic conclusion
--China is building buses so enormous that cars can just drive underneath them
--The 'right to be forgotten' - on whether or not information on the Internet should have an expiration date
--Tremble at the sight of Mantis, a 2-ton walking machine - or, more real-life mecha being made (!)
--One of those rare moments when a small thing gives you hope for the future of the planet - on the invention of carbon-neutral fertilizer
--He Unplugged From the Internet For a Year. This Is What He Learned.
EDUCATION
--Friends Don't Let Friends Say "Althusserian Exegasis" - on academic writing and the importance of clarity and accessibility
--Why do college students love getting wasted?
--The Legendary Dr. Fox Lecture - on how easily people can confuse academic jargon for legitimate information
--Why is the stuffed corpse of a great philosopher at University College London? - more information here
--Reading, Writing, and Video Games - on the consequences of including video games in the classroom
--The Ivy League Was Another Planet - on what happens when elite colleges don't go after the rural poor
--Live First, Write Later: The Case for Less Creative-Writing Schooling
--5 Things It Turns Out You Were Right to Hate About School
--6 Beneficial Things They Made You Stop Doing in School
--Prep School: Talking Trash - on bad lessons learned from prep schools
HISTORY
--When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
--The Brilliant Scientist Who Was Destroyed By America
--Humanism and Holocaust History
--How an Ancient Kingdom Explains Today's China-Korea Relations
--Linguists identify 15,000 'ultraconserved words'
--What if people told European history like they told Native American history?
SOCIETY
--What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity
--The Secret World of 'Garbagemen'
--Don't Blame 'Hookup Culture': Romance Always Involves Failure and Despair
--Are Mean Coaches Effective?
--Rick Ross, Don Draper, and the fantasy world of masculinity
--Seeing and believing - on science, religion, and the decline of ghost and UFO sightings
--Every language needs its, like, filler words
--Usually, "Francis" Makes You Laugh. This Time, He Might Make You Cry. - on how you never know where life will take you
--How to Escape the Cult of "Busy"
--5 Basic Facts of Life (That Were Made Up by Marketing Campaigns)
--5 Styles That Defined Entire Eras (That Were Made Up by Movies)
--Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition
--Manhunts Appear to Be the New Car Chases
--'Yo' Said What? - on how poor kids in Baltimore have come up with a working gender-neutral pronoun
--McDonald's Theory - on how to come up with good ideas
--Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why.
--Depression Part Two - Hyperbole and a Half's most recent take on depression
--Do people turn mean because they're helpless? - on the just-world theory
--The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination - on being afraid of feeling pain
--How to Walk Away - on "the psychology of lost causes"
--When to Do Surgery on a Child With 'Both' Genitalia
GEOGRAPHY
--A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map of America
--More than half of the world's population lives inside this circle
--Time-lapse satellite images show how Earth has changed over 28 years
SEX
--My tantric "awakening" turned me off sex - I only include this article because I honestly have no clue what to make of it; I'm a skeptic, so I don't place much value in the experiences the author and the commenters to this article talk about, but there's something about this talking about sex, kink, and spirituality that makes me wonder if there's some truth to all that
--Are men who pay for sex normal, or just weird?
--The Day I Taught How Not to Rape - on what "teach boys not to rape" actually means
--Nearly 1 in 10 Americans would have sex with a robot
--Why Still So Few Use Condoms
MEDIA
--What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?
--Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Part I, I Second That Emoticon - on the history of emoticons like :-) and why they exist
--The Internet Narcissism Epidemic
--When Your Facebook Friend Is Racist
--This Restaurant Is a Nerd Paradise
--How to become Internet famous for $68 -- without ever existing
--You didn't make the Harlem Shake go viral -- corporations did
--Teaser for documentary "Aspie Seeks Love" - on looking for relationships while being on the autism spectrum
--30 things to tell a book snob
--Babylon 5's J. Michael Stracynski explains why most TV scifi is awful
--This Ad Has a Secret Anti-Abuse Message That Only Kids Can See
--Europa Report: At Last, a Space Thriller Worth Taking Seriously
--Drexciya -- the film
--10 Completely Annoying Anime Clichés - a.k.a. part of the reason why I don't care for anime anymore
--An Open Letter to White Male Comedians
--In Defense of Justin Bieber: Why America Turns on Male Child Stars Who Try to Grow Up
--The Gay Bechdel Test: Why Hollywood Needs to Expand Its Representation of LGBT Characters
--The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie
VIDEO GAMES
--Breaking out of a self-centered gamer mentality - on how video games breed fandom entitlement
--The Prisoners May Be Innocent in One of 2013's Most Interesting PC Games - on making a video game about the prison-industrial complex
--5 Ways Video Games Are Saving Mankind
--4 Video Games That Help You Understand and Deal With Your Depression
ART
--A Walking Dream Made Just For You: Odyssey Works Makes Art For and About One Person
--Space Suit of the Week: Dominik Smialowski, The Pilot's Melancholy
--The Magic Cube, by Pixelux Studio
--Epic Superhero Art in a Traditional Native American Style
--Believe It Or Not, This Video Game Poetry Is Beautiful
--Short film: "Abe" is 7 minutes of sheer robot horror
--Hellishly complex, gorgeous assemblage about endless work
--"Expo": A heartbreaking short about a mother's loss, set in a lunar mine
--"Archetype": This no-budget science fiction short looks better than most movies
Originally posted at http://quadruplify.dreamwidth.org/137733.html || Comments on original post: