The War on Homosexuality in Ethiopia →

Katie J.M. Baker, writing for Newsweek:

Seventy-six countries criminalize sexual activity by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and 38 of them, including Ethiopia, are in Africa. According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project, 97 percent of Ethiopians think homosexuality should be outlawed. Unlike Mauritania, Sudan, and Northern Nigeria, Ethiopia doesn’t mandate the death penalty for same-sex sexual acts, but thanks to draconian laws that forbid activism while allowing Western evangelicals to promote homophobia, Ethiopia is on track to join their ranks.

In many countries, it’s getting better for the LGBT community. In Ethiopia, it’s getting worse.

I’m not a fan of the you think you have it bad? Imagine what it’s like to be a [insert state of personhood] in [insert African country] line of logic, but this is one instance where I think it’s incredibly important to take a second to walk a mile in shoes worn somewhere else on the globe. And to keep in mind who the pushers are of this movement—Western religious fundamentalists who are also gaining traction in Russia.

On Newtown: Poet Yusef Komunyakaa →

Rock Me, Mercy

The river stones are listening because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods has gone down.
It looks like rain, because it is too warm to snow.
Guardian angels,
Wherever you’re hiding, we know you can’t be everywhere at once.
Have you corralled all the pretty wild horses?
The memory of ants asleep and day lilies, roses, holly and larkspur?
The magpies gaze at us, still waiting.
River stones are listening.
But all we can say now is mercy, please rock me.

-Written in Mourning by Yusef Komunyakaa

/via All Things Considered

/poem transcription via Pearls and Revolution

The Tragedy of Bataan →

Alec Baldwin narrates a special five part series produced by SIUC Associate Professor and local filmmaker Jan Thompson. The Tragedy of Bataan chronicles the fall of the Philippines and the beginning of the Bataan Death March as told through firsthand accounts of Bataan survivors.

I came across this five-part podcast series by way of the PRX Remix app. All five parts can be found here. Just a really fascinating look (in about a half hour total) at a little nugget of history. Great storytelling. It made me wonder how effective this would be as a teaching method.

And as I've said before, but if you dig radio/podcasts/storytelling, the PRX Remix app is the way to go.

"I needed to answer the question, 'Why?'" →

Matthew Lysiak, writing for Newsweek:

It was about 3 p.m. when I pulled up to the coffee shop, which was in the middle of a small shopping complex. I saw a crowd of young adults and teenagers standing outside in small circles with their hands in their pockets. It was well below freezing. Few words were being exchanged. Not a lot of tears. People just wanted to be together. At St. Rose of Lima a crowd had gathered. Two miles down the road another crowd had huddled in the parking lot of the Colony Diner. No one wanted to be alone.

I began working the crowd, asking the same question again and again, for hours: Do you know Adam Lanza?

When you become a parent, you (or at least I) force yourself to consider how you would respond to something horrible happening to your child or your spouse. Almost a year later and I still don't know how I would have dealt with what happened in Newtown.

I would never link to something that just recounted the horror; I think this piece raises an interesting notion—what happened to the people who responded?

Two Visions of Mandela →

Jon Lee Anderson, writing for The New Yorker:

When Mandela went into prison on November 7, 1962, J.F.K. was still alive and Krushchev was in power; the Cuba Missile Crisis had not yet occurred. In much of the southern United States, official racial segregation and forms of institutionalized bigotry not so unlike those of apartheid endured. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I have a dream speech” was still a year away.

One of my favorite New Yorker voices writes a short but powerful remembrance.

Ted Cruz Posts Nelson Mandela Remembrance On Facebook →

Senator Ted Cruz, writing on his Facebook timeline:

Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe. He stood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself, declaring in his autobiography, 'Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.' Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free. 

We mourn his loss and offer our condolences to his family and the people of South Africa.

And then came the comments.

Now, in the interest of the facts (a concept Senator Cruz doesn't tend to traffic in), the post has over 5,000 "likes" as opposed to 512 mostly hateful, vitriolic comments. And a portion of those 512 comments are responses along the lines of "are you nuts aware that we can all read this?"

But still.

/via @palafo

John Roderick Reviews Kelly Clarkson's New Christmas Album →

John Roderick, writing for The Talkhouse:

I can’t really be cynical about Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas album, Wrapped in Red, as much as it’s my instinct to be, because it would be culturally insensitive to suppose I could ever understand it. This Christmas album is not intended for me. It is not written in a language I understand or could ever understand. My America long ago stopped effectively communicating with the America that produced and/or consumes Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas album. The ironic smirking of Williamsburg/Silverlake snob culture may as well be clicks and pops to the Nashville/Dallas axis of earnest insincerity. I have no option but to respect the difference, the “otherness,” and try to inhabit the controversy. Kelly Clarkson, a white country artist from Texas — at first blush a member of the same privileged white uberkultur as I am — is in fact as removed from my world as we both are from the imams of Islamabad or the glowing anemones of the Marianas Trench.

This piece is too weighed down by truth to ever go far, but my goodness—nail; head. Okay, just one more piece of the lovely:

Kelly Clarkson's album is called Wrapped in Red and I am left to conclude that SHE is the present, and I, the listener, am meant to unwrap her and consume her. The humorlessness of my ivory-tower neo-feminist education requires that I point this out.

'We want to make cars that are better than drivers.' →

Burkhard Bilger, writing for The New Yorker:

Much remains to be defined. How should the cars be tested? What’s their proper speed and spacing? How much warning do drivers need before taking the wheel? Who’s responsible when things go wrong? Google wants to leave the specifics to motor-vehicle departments and insurers. (Since premiums are based on statistical risk, they should go down for driverless cars.) But the car companies argue that this leaves them too vulnerable. “Their original position was ‘We shouldn’t rush this. It’s not ready for prime time. It shouldn’t be legalized,’ ” Alex Padilla, the state senator who sponsored the California bill, told me. But their real goal, he believes, was just to buy time to catch up. “It became clear to me that the interest here was a race to the market. And everybody’s in the race.” The question is how fast should they go.

This is a long piece, but worth the effort. I've never been one to try and envision the future as some drastically different time and place, almost unrecognizable from the now. I believe that progress occurs in incremental amounts. But reading this piece, it's hard not to get swept up in what the article promises is, no pun intended, coming down the road.

The Jacoby Ellsbury Era →

Dave Cameron, writing for FanGraphs on November 19th:

Over the weekend, I wrote a piece for ESPN Insider and FanGraphs+ based around the question of how players like Jacoby Ellsbury have aged previously. There’s a belief among some that speed-and-defense players like Ellsbury are bad bets after they turn 30, since a large chunk of their value is tied to what they can do with their legs, and speed peaks earlier than other skills. However, there’s also data that shows that faster players actually age better than most other player types. Instead of just trying to show you what the aging curves say, though, I figured showing how similar players to Ellsbury actually did might be more appealing.

When I saw the tweets last night about the Yankees signing Jacoby Ellsbury to a seven-year, $153 million dollar contract, I got the same nauseous feeling I always get when the Yankees pull a Yankees move. Soon, I'd have to defend against the chorus of too much money, too old of a player—typical Yankees.

And then Jonah Keri tweeted the above piece.

So get ready, Yankees fans, to reference it frequently, as the bullets have already begun to fly. And prepare to have to reference it in the face of those who don't buy into the advanced metrics it uses to make the point. And of course, nothing is certain. You can't predict injury and you can't predict the unknown.

But for the moment, take solace in the fact that three weeks before the signing, Cameron predicted almost the exact salary Ellsbury would garner in free agency. Let's hope that all of his other numbers work out as well.

The Prices on Amazon vs. The Cost of Amazon →

Carole Cadwalladr, writing for The Guardian:

In my second day, the manager tells us that we alone have picked and packed 155,000 items in the past 24 hours. Tomorrow, 2 December – the busiest online shopping day of the year – that figure will be closer to 450,000. And this is just one of eight warehouses across the country. Amazon took 3.5m orders on a single day last year. Christmas is its Vietnam – a test of its corporate mettle and the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet.

Few among us haven't ordered something from Amazon. In fact, many people, myself included, pay them $80/year for the privilege of shipping stuff mind-boggingly fast—and cheap—from them. But as Amazon rises in power and influence, and even in the face of the basic materialist human instinct to pay as little as possible for the things we desire, we need to step back as a culture and makes sure that the means with which we are achieving that goal are sound and maybe even fair.

It isn't as simple as saying Amazon is evil. And how many other industries would stand up to this level of scrutiny? But we owe it to ourselves to make sure that we aren't inadvertently feeding a machine that will one day eat us too.

/via A.N. Devers