One who will not allow any occurrence whatever to deprive him of his responsibility for the course of history—because he knows that it has been laid on him by God—will thereafter achieve a more fruitful relation to the events of history than that of barren criticism and equally barren opportunism. To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.
Oh my goodness. Some genius has built Lego versions of things from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you want to do this yourself the instructions are here.
Charles Marsh is speaking at the Wheaton College chapel this morning about one of the great Christian witnesses of the past century, Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi.
I’ve always thought that conservatives should simply bite the bullet and admit that there are racists among self-described conservatives, and moreover, that these conservatives’ racism is an evitable (that is, unwarranted) extension of the mainstream conservative position on race. But this is true in the same way it is true that there are communists among self-described liberals, and that their communism is an evitable (that is, unwarranted) extension of the mainstream liberal position on political economy. To put this even more forcefully, we have to yield that there is something to it when liberal trolls snark about how tough it can be to distinguish a conservative from a racist. The fact is that both conservatives and racists think that considerations about race should play a much smaller part in our political discourse.
As a person with what I believe to be deep conservative sympathies, I read something like this and think, Well, I guess I’m not a conservative at all, then. In what sense, and for what reasons, is it intrinsic to conservatism to believe that “considerations about race should play a much smaller part in out political discourse”? What’s conservative about that view? Notice that Foster is not even saying that conservatives have to hold a particular view about race, only a view about how much race is discussed. Are we not supposed to discuss it very much because racism is not and never has been a big problem in America? Or because racism used to be a big problem but now it has been effectively solved? Or what? Someone please explain to me what makes talking about race in America incompatible with conservatism.
magnolius:one of the many astounding collages by Meg Hitchock made by cutting letters from various books, including the Koran and Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”. Highly recommend checking the rest of the collection on her site, where you can also see the detailed versions of each piece.SPECIAL to the What It Is class—In my text drawings I deconstruct the word of God by cutting letters from sacred writings and rearranging them to form a passage from another holy book. I may cut letters from the Bible and reassemble them as a passage from the Koran, or use letters cut from the Torah to recreate an ancient Tantric text. The individual letters are glued to the paper in a continuous line of type, without spaces or punctuation, in order to discourage a literal reading of the text.What will your book look like on May 8, 2012?
When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepared a true quiche Lorraine, I always want to interrupt. “But did you like it?” I want to shout. “Did it make you happy? Did you clean your plate?” … [Once] I was eating some homemade gazpacho and talking about how it differed from the more authentic gazpacho one got in Seville. The more I talked about the difference the faster I wolfed down the gazpacho - until I realized that one way what I was eating differed from authentic gazpacho was that it tasted better.
ah, for the golden age of comics, when murderous zombies could be the good guys and carry a strip for two years straight.
But who knew that Mr. Clean was a zombie? That puts a whole new spin on generations of commercials.
Oh. Maa. God. Things just got literally (maybe notliterally literally)beyond exciting here at Penguin Books UK, 80 Strand, London, England, with the news that Zadie Smith just delivered THE FINAL DRAFT OF NW, HER FIRST NOVEL FOR 7 YEARS!
If both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had been wearing Google glasses, with their visual fields streaming to the cloud and being recorded there, their awareness of this record might have discouraged aggression. And if not, at least we’d know for sure what happened.On the more worrisome side, Kashmi Hill of Forbes thinks Google glasses will “accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state.” After all, the government will presumably have the same subpoena power over your recorded visual field that it has over other records. And even if you choose not to record your video stream, you’ll still enter lots of other people’s visual fields. Everyone’s glimpse of you will, for all you know, be available to posterity.
One thing that renders all this plausible is what a seamless extension it is of the past 20 years. From email to twitter to EZ Pass to ATM surveillance cams, more and more of our lives is on record–and the records are often out there somewhere, beyond our control.
Maybe, pre-digital modernity, with the vast anonymity it afforded urbanites, will eventually be seen as a temporary aberration. As Brin noted in The Transparent Society, people who live in small villages in traditional societies don’t have much privacy; pretty much everybody knows everybody else’s business–and that’s one thing that keeps people on good behavior. Google glasses, however bizarrely futuristic they seem now, could return us to a state of nature. I’m not sure I want to go.