Archive for June, 2008
The New York Times reports a wave of Albino killings in Tanzania, because of superstitions about the luckiness of their body parts. Madness.
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because [...]
William Nordhaus, from his book A Question of Balance, quoted in the New York Review of Books:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global [...]
Patrick House won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, and wrote an article for Slate about how you can do it too! It helped me understand why I’ve never gotten anywhere when I’ve entered it before. Link. Excerpt:
Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously [...]
I want to read Now The Hell Will Start, a new book about the true story of Herman Perry, a black American soldier who “shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he joined a tribe of headhunters and eluded capture for months”. Slate has a slideshow with [...]
The Boston Globe has an article about property law and outer space that I found both fascinating and exciting. Link. Excerpt:
And while the question of property on the moon remains, for the time being, an abstract one, for space property proponents it’s far from frivolous. Whether it’s 16th-century English privateer-explorers or the Dutch East India [...]
George Packer writes in the New Yorker about the dire state of the Republican party in the USA. There are parallels with the current situation of the Liberals here; they’re excellent at winning elections by dividing their critics, but not by actually getting people behind their vision of where the country should go. In [...]
