How to Parallel Park Perfectly Every Single Time →

Yishan Wong, writing on Quora:

Here are the directions, with extra "do it exactly this way"-style bolding and prompting:

1. Drive around until you find a spot that looks big enough.
2. Pull up even to the front car. If your cars are different lengths, line up the back of your car with the back of the front car as best you can. You don't have to be exact here.
3. Stop.
4. While stopped, turn your wheel all the way to the right. ALL THE WAY. Don't move forward or back while doing this!
5. Turn around and look out the back of your car.
6. Begin backing up. Your car should start turning into the spot. Don't turn your wheel away from the all-the-way-right position!
7. Stop backing up when the right-front corner of the rear car is in the exact middle of your rear windshield. If you imagine a line extending backwards from your car along its centerline, you stop when the right-front corner of the rear car reaches that line.
8. I said STOP.
9. While stopped, turn your wheel back to the middle position.
10. Back up slowly until your car just barely clears the front car, then stop again.
11. STOP.
12. Turn your wheel all the way to the left. All the way! Stay stopped while you do this.
13. Now keep backing in. Don't turn your wheel away from the all-the-way-left position!
14. Once your car is parallel, STOP and then turn your wheel to face forwards again.

Now you have no excuse.

/via Lifehacker

When It Comes to Fighting Stereotypes, I Want My Kids to Dare to Be Impolite →

Ama Yawson, writing for The Atlantic: 

Many would argue that the incidents that I describe are trivial; people were just making harmless jokes. But racism, especially the internalized racism reflected by the barber and Sheryl Underwood, is not always as obvious as a hooded Ku Klux Clansman burning a cross on a black family's lawn. It can be more subtle, but just as pernicious, when it manifests as the unacknowledged racial assumptions that underpin jokes. 

I really related to the situations depicted in this piece. I have a feeling that this will be the next frontier of the the race conversation in this country. See also: the mounting public pressure to finally convince the Washington, D.C. professional football team to change their name. Is that name racist in the burning-cross-on-the-front-lawn sense? No, probably not. But just because we've moved far enough away from the history that at one point made it that kind of racist, doesn't mean that it isn't racist anymore.

This Was Not Supposed To Be a Haunted Hay Ride →

Django Gold, writing for McSweeney's Internet Tendency: 

Attention, passengers! I need you all to listen to me right now! Put down your souvenir Smallwood Farms cider mugs and pay attention. There can’t be any uncertainty surrounding what I’m about to say to you: This is not a haunted hayride, and the horrific events of the last 15 minutes were not planned or scripted in any way.
 
Truly, none of the madness that you have witnessed today was intended as part of our Fall Fun Time Hayride. Not the strands of animal entrails decorating this remote stretch of forest, not the sinister laughter echoing around us, and most crucially, not the berserk individuals who have been raiding our hayride wagon. Actually, it would in fact appear that these maniacs wish us very real harm.
 
This isn’t a joke. We are all in terrible danger.

Happy Halloween! 

(Especially to my wife and daughter, the two cutest Mario World characters that I know.)

Now We Are Five →

David Sedaris, writing for The New Yorker: 

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn’t sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.

An especially poignant piece of writing from a man most known for his humor (and there is plenty of humor in the piece). What's especially interesting is how you can almost see him working his way through the stages of grief as he writes. 

'… the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head.' →

Rafe Bartholomew interviewing Don DeLillo for Grantland: 

In your 1993 interview for The Paris Review, you described language this way: "… the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head." This reminds me of sports, the feeling we get when we're absorbed in the game and really playing well. Do you think sports and writing have some common, creative core?
 
 When the work is going well, it can reach a level of spontaneity and unpredictability that is exhilarating — but it doesn't make the writer (not this writer anyway) pound the tabletop. It's an interior sense of satisfaction that's often so fleeting it can't be relived (or even remembered) when the writer revisits the page in a more critical mood the next day or six months later.

Since I've somewhat decided to sneak bits and pieces about my next book into my comings and goings in this space, well—let's just say this interview (originally published in 2011) helped me a lot.

And also—Don DeLillo.

air and light and time and space →

Gavin Aung Than, of Zen Pencils, does it again, this time giving his brilliant illustration treatment to the Charles Bukowski poem "air and light and time and space."

/via Brain Pickings , who had this to say:

His 1992 poem “air and light and time and space,” found in the altogether fantastic anthology The Last Night of the Earth Poems, is a poignant and soulful reminder that “inspiration is for amateurs” and grit is the real key to creativity — or, as Tchaikovsky famously put it, “a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood..”

In other words? Fuck your muse. 

David Bowie's 100 Must-Read Books →

Christopher Shultz, writing for LitReactor: 

The list shows an amazing depth and breadth of interest, taste and genre from the icon, who has himself been the subject of more than sixty books. There was never any doubt that Bowie is a genius, but if there had been, this list whould more than quiet any critics.

Am I the only one who finds this list just a bit too—evenly spaced? 

Mexican Fireworks Fight →

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Amazing images from Thomas Prior of a fireworks fight in Tultepec, Mexico. 

/via The Fox is Black

99% Invisible: Season 4 →

There are two types of people in this world: 

1. People who listen to 99% Invisible. 
2. People who aren't my friend.

So how can you make sure you wind up on the right side of history? The Kickstarter for Season 4 has almost reached its goal and it's only been running for 48 hours. Listen to a couple of old episodes (here are two of my favorites), realize that the money you pledge will only allow for Season 4 to be even better, and then go ahead and give Roman Mars and the crew some of your money. 

Full disclosure: I am a backer of the project.

An Open Letter to the President and CEO of Costco →

Chris Horst, writing regarding her brother Matthew, a Costco employee, someone who, for his entire life, "has been classified and known by his “special needs”:

When a Costco opened up in our neighborhood (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) in the late 90s; its reputation for treating its employees with dignity preceded it. Matthew applied immediately in hopes of joining the Costco team. A few short months later, Costco took a chance on him. Today, 11 years later, after several promotions, consistent pay increases and with a supportive team around him, Matthew has found his career. The very generous salary and benefits package allow him to enjoy life in a debt-free home in a great neighborhood, within walking distance of Costco.

I don't want to spoil the rest. Just know that it only gets better (and mistier) from there.

/via kottke.org