Alan Jacobs

thingsmagazine:

Marian Stachurski -The Bad Omen

I feel most of the time like Kevin Durant is a birthday present from the god of basketball to me personally, so please don’t take this as criticism. But he’s a really, really weird sort of superstar. He is self-evidently lethal, intimidated by nothing, and cooler under pressure than most of us are asleep. At the same time, you don’t get the same sense of compulsive ultra-competitiveness from him that you do from the average NBA alpha dog. Guys like Kobe and Michael survey the court like they’re looking for rebellions to subdue. They invent slights to give themselves motives to crush people. Durant seems infinitely more self-contained — like he’s not even thinking that much about the other players or who’s the best or who defers to whom, he’s just doing his own thing, only his own thing happens to be absolutely brilliant. There’s a basic insecurity that drives the need to be recognized as dominant, but Durant somehow has the ability to dominate without being driven by it. His signature move isn’t blowing to the basket and leaving humiliated defenders in his wake, it’s curling off a screen, jab-stepping, then going up for some bewilderingly slightly off-balance jump shot that somehow reconfigures your sense of angles. He’s just a dude taking part in space. He’s not deficient as a leader — he’s actually a pretty good one — but for all his natural gregariousness, something about his game seems to point toward an ideal in which leadership doesn’t have to exist.

Stanley Spencer, The Scorpion (1939). My more-or-less official Lenten image. Offered for your contemplation.

thingsmagazine:

Cover deisgn by Carlo Vivarelli

brain-food:

Star Wars Yoga by Rob Osborne

This is the only Yoga I ever want to do in my life. 

bookshelfporn:

LiteraTrain by HerrDrayer

A brilliant and fun new way to transport books to shelves.

I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him. We are noting his death because of the impact he had on our politics and our conversation. It must be said that that impact was for the worse. Any talk of his private life, is an attempt to change the subject and avoid discomfiting truths.

It is wholly appropriate to be sorry that Andrew Breitbart died. But in the relevant business, it is right to be sorry for how he lived.

If all this seems the act of a nouveau royal family desperate to create an impression, this is precisely what it was. The “Lancastrian” red rose was an emblem that barely existed before Henry VII. Lancastrian kings used the rose sporadically, but when they did it was often gold rather than red; Henry VI, the king who presided over the country’s descent into civil war, preferred his badge of the antelope. Contemporaries certainly did not refer to the traumatic civil conflict of the 15th century as the “wars of the roses”. For the best part of a quarter-century, from 1461 to 1485, there was only one royal rose, and it was white: the badge of Edward IV. Edward’s rose was ubiquitous, blooming on royal seals, on coins and in the bulky manuscripts that he began to acquire consistently from the 1470s onwards. But Edward’s death, and the usurpation of his teenage sons by their uncle Richard III, presented an opportunity to the man who would become Henry VII: the exiled Henry, Earl of Richmond, a focus for disaffected Yorkists and Lancastrians alike.

In the year before his invasion of England, Henry’s image underwent a thorough makeover. He and his advisers realised that his claim, flimsy as it was, had to be made with the greatest conviction. His letters into England seeking military backing bore the regal monogram “H”, while – a play to his Welsh ancestry – he adopted the red dragon of the mythical British king Cadwalladr. And, searching for an appropriate royal emblem, he dusted off the red rose.

Horizon Houses (2000) by Lebbeus Woods, via BLDGBLOG.

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.