I just became acquainted with the fine German word Wehrwirtschaft while simultaneously reading a book article on Sebald that kaiserin is writing and a blog post titled Iraq: Deaths Rise, Pretense We Care Fades (which brought the word into stark relief for me). I looked it up to try and get a fuller sense of [...]
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Kafka-related links from McSweeney’s:
Adjectives Rejected in Favor of “Kafkaesque”
Kafka at Camp: The Lost Diaries
Iris’s Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, Coach
Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim
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“Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named ‘World’s Most Alienating Airport’” (yeah, the embedded video breaks my layout, but this is a post about Kafka after all so fuck it):
The whole point of this post is to make people cry. (I’m pretty sure Casey will do so first.)
The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s story and narrated by the author:
This was the first book I ever read, at age 4 or so, thus giving me an unassailable excuse for [...]
Seen on MetaFilter: Write Your Own Irish Memoir
Oh, wow. Meghan McCain’s column in The Daily Beast is worth reading and rereading. The alchemical experiments that fuse narcissism and incoherence to pure lack of content have finally borne fruit. Fun fact: She went to Columbia.
An amazing confirmation of chimpanzee consciousness: Zoo chimp “planned” attacks
The implication is that chimps (and probably other apes, by extension) have enough consciousness to plan for future needs and solve problems, which hadn’t been observed outside of laboratory conditions before. It’s kind of a “duh” conclusion–it seems pretty obvious–but it’s great to have some scientific [...]
A short history of Daylight Savings Time, from the WaPo.
The Federal Music Project was a short-lived (1935-41) US federal work project under the umbrella of Federal Project Number One. At the program’s height the project employed 16,000 musicians who gave lessons to children in rural and urban areas, transcribed/recorded folk songs for archival purposes, and performed in thousands of concerts (34 new orchestras [...]
An amazing photo gallery: Ninety Years of Bauhaus
The Bauhaus photo pool on Flickr
The Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design in Berlin
Ah, the 80s. Our hair was big, our guitar solos were shredding (and usually played by people with big hair), and our drug war was shiny and new. D.A.R.E. was the hip approach to schoolin’ the kids about the reefer madness; my school participated in it during the program’s inaugural year. Unfortunately, studies have since [...]