“The Family Christian Edifi tablet, which came out last month, comes with earphones, a wall charger, a removable stand, a protective cover, a stylus and a tablet pouch. Honorable declined to specify sales figures, other than to note they were ‘strong’ so far. The world’s tablet can be purchased through the Family Christian website or from one of the company’s 300 stores across the U.S.
“But the Christian tablet is more than just an e-reader. It also comes with movie-watching capabilities, Christian radio stations, and even a web browser with built-in ‘safe search,’ so the tablet is safe for the whole family. ‘We put that on there just in case it was given as a gift to a child, so they wouldn’t have access to things they shouldn’t have access to,’ said Honorable. ‘We definitely had to tailor it to our customers.’”
By the way, “Honorable” is company spokesman Brian Honorable. That’s Brian Honorable. Here
This is Wes a few years later, but I don’t have a date. He was maybe six? I’m not sure. Love this photo, though.
Sebastiano Cantalupo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues may have become the first people ever to spot “dark galaxies”, the antediluvian ancestors of the bright islands that contain almost all of the stars in the modern universe, and of which Earth’s own Milky Way is one. Despite their name, dark galaxies are not as tenebrous as other “dark” astronomical phenomena. Unlike dark energy or exotic dark matter—so called because, since they do not interact with photons of electromagnetism, their presence can only be discerned through their gravitational effects—they are made up of humdrum hydrogen and helium gas. But they are relatively small, and their weak gravity means their gas is so dispersed that stars condense out of it only very slowly. Some characteristics of bigger, brighter, modern galaxies—for example, the relationship between a galaxy’s mass and its star-formation rate—could be explained if there are sources of gas feeding them. Dark galaxies could fit the bill.
In 1988, the U.N. cultural organization UNESCO named three mosques and 16 mausoleums in Timbuktu to its World Heritage list, making the city the rock of Mali’s tourism industry. Universities, international organizations, and philanthropists began pumping in millions of dollars to protect and catalog the artifacts and libraries of Timbuktu, including tombs of Muslim saints and warriors dating to the 15th century. There are, according to UNESCO, some 60 privately held libraries in Timbuktu and more than 700,000 ancient manuscripts, most of them connected to the Muslim heritage of much of West and North Africa, as well as Southern Europe. During the last 21 years, according to Cherif Keita, professor of African culture and literature at Carleton College in the United States, “Timbuktu has been undergoing something of a renaissance, really.”All of this, we now know, is being swept away by the Islamist rebel groups that have hijacked the Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali and taken its most important population centers, including Timbuktu, in a bid to impose sharia law on all of Mali. In the last few weeks, fighters from the group Ansar Dine, which is Arabic for “Defenders of the Faith,” have begun methodically destroying ancient tombs and mosques in Timbuktu, which is said to have been the home at one time or another of 333 Muslim saints. Using rifle butts, picks, and shovels, they bashed in the entrance to the Sidi Yahia mosque, named for one of the first imams of Timbuktu. The long-sealed doorway, legend claimed, would not be opened until the last day of the world. In Gao, the city north of Timbuktu that was the former capital of the Songhai Empire, they have reportedly damaged the Tomb of Askia Muhammad, the most powerful of the Songhai emperors and a devout Muslim.
Since I don’t “use the internet,” according to my dial-up definition, I’m frequently longing for my friends to “disconnect” from it and spend more time with me throwing frisbees — because what could possibly as important on this ephemeral internet that has them so wrapt? But if they “disconnected,” what would we talk about? Probably about someone who just friended them on Facebook, or this great new idea for a website they had, or this well-reviewed restaurant — “wait a minute, let me look it up” — that we should hit up later. And at that restaurant we’d eat food that a chef probably emailed to another chef, and then pay with internet-verified credit cards, and then take cabs home with embedded screens flush with internet-obtained or distributed information. Or go see a movie in theaters that was delivered in digital form over the internet. And then we’d go home and listen to music we bought on iTunes at some point, or that was originated by band members who met on Craigslist.
Tunnelling through the mountain was not just an intellectual and creative challenge; Joyce was beset by more earthly troubles – the continuing threat of blindness, the slow descent of his daughter Lucia into madness, increasing bouts of stomach cramps and nervous collapse. At one point, he asked the poet James Stevens to consider finishing the book for him if he was unable to continue. Sections were published separately in various reviews, but from 1927 to 1938 they appeared mainly in the experimental magazine transition, edited by Eugene Jolas, a run interrupted for almost four years by bouts of paralysing depression. Rose and O’Hanlon argue that Joyce’s brilliance lay in the manner in which he was able to string the various passages into a final narrative. Gabler suggests that in the long-withheld title “Finnegans Wake” lay the secret organizing principle of the book which enabled him to draw the various threads into a great secular parable of the Fall: the fall of Tim Finnegan, the hod-carrier, of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the deviant innkeeper, of Humpty Dumpty, the unstable good egg, and of Man himself, the original sinner.
Whatever the reasons behind the collapse of handwriting, college students no longer think it is their responsibility to write legibly. Give a regular blue book exam and a dozen students or so will warn you that their “handwriting is terrible” as if that is something for which the professor now has to take responsibility.Readers: should handwriting be taught? And if students can’t do it, should there be remedial handwriting classes in college?
Lehrer … isn’t an artist or scientist, but a skillful journalist, and while he’s never pretended otherwise, there’s often a secondhand feel to much of his work. Lehrer has always had trouble discussing the process behind specific acts of creativity—as in his rather confused discussion of Bob Dylan in Imagine, which Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic has ruthlessly picked apart—and the fact that he returns so often to the same examples reflects the fact that he doesn’t yet have the deep well of insight that comes only after years of creative endeavor.The real irony is that the sort of career that Lehrer is building for himself makes it especially hard to achieve this kind of knowledge. Creative work tends to be solitary, pursued without an audience or any clear reward, and rarely happens on schedule. It has little to do, in short, with the life of a pundit, blogger, and public intellectual. Lehrer may well be capable of original creative accomplishment, but his rapid rise to prominence has made this way of life increasingly difficult. In order to produce content on a fixed schedule, he’s been obliged to repeat the same handful of words and ideas, which can only estrange a writer from the process of creativity itself.
So what about those of us—especially, but not only, women—who want to dig into contentious topics like Sarkeesian’s, especially when we know damn well that doing so all but guarantees that we’ll be targeted? Besides barricading our comment queue and our hearts against the inevitable attacks, what can we do to try to smooth this rocky passage toward a better, safer world?I am so far from having an answer, but I have a suspicion that counterattacks are not working. It’s worthwhile to cover horrible things like the attacks on Sarkeesian and Penny Red and so many others because doing so can help uncommitted or passive readers understand and defend against this behavior. But as cathartic and entertaining as it might be, skewering trolls and attacking jerks is never going to change their minds. Putting people on the defensive only hardens their positions.
When it comes to actually changing minds, I think we’re stuck with love.
Recognizing the humanity of people who do awful things is one of the core challenges of being human. (We have enough trouble recognizing it even in people who are like us.) But it’s the only way out. Even when the worst trolls are beyond visible redemption, the way we handle them is visible to so many others who are still capable of feeling empathy or recognizing pain or changing their minds.
“There must be a great deal of good in a man who could love a child so much,” is what the Atlanta biddies said, forgivingly, of Rhett Butler when he set out to redeem his reputation by showing off how much he adored Bonnie Blue, his little daughter. Rhett’s sins were many, but no one can resist an alpha male fussing over a small child, and his PR campaign did the trick. JFK’s family photos have done much the same for him over the years. With each new allegation (many of them witheringly well-supported) of risk-taking, womanizing, criminal behavior, overweening self-interest, and/or simple incompetence thrown up against matters of planetary importance, the vast legion of Kennedy fans are rocked backward. But only for a moment. Because by the end of the nightly-news report featuring a heartbroken anchor chewing over the broken glass of the latest bad news, there’s always the same triumphant finish—the montage of photographs of Jack playing with Caroline and John, smiling at his pretty wife, confirming all over again the things that, in our childish and stubborn way, we insist on believing about him.