‘Koch Industries had a reputation for screwing over its business partners.’ →

Daniel Schulman:

Charles' philosophy had been deeply influenced by their father, whose experiences helping to modernize the USSR's oil industry in the early 1930s turned him into a rabid anti-communist who saw signs of Soviet subversion everywhere. A staunch conservative and Barry Goldwater backer, Fred was among the John Birch Society's national leaders; Charles joined in due time, and by the '60s was among a group of influential Birchers who grew enamored with a colorful anti-government guru named Robert LeFevre, creator of a libertarian mecca called the Freedom School in Colorado's Rampart mountain range. From here, Charles fell in with the fledgling libertarian movement, a volatile stew of anarchists, devotees of the "Austrian school" of economics, and other radical thinkers who could agree on little besides an abiding disdain for government.

By late 1979, as tensions with Bill were escalating, Charles had become the libertarian movement's primary sugar daddy. He had cofounded the Cato Institute as an incubator for libertarian ideas, bankrolled the magazine Libertarian Review, and backed the movement's youth outreach arm, Students for a Libertarian Society. He had also convinced David to run as the Libertarian Party's vice presidential candidate in the 1980 election (Bill had declined). David was able to pour unlimited funds into his own campaign, circumventing federal restrictions on political contributions.

Their father had loathed publicity, scrupulously guarding the family's privacy. But, to Bill's dismay, Charles and David's activism was beginning to draw attention to the company and the family. Worse, at the very moment that the Energy Department was investigating Koch Industries for violating price controls on oil, David and his Libertarian Party running mate, Ed Clark, were on the campaign trail openly antagonizing the agency by calling for its eradication.

Picking an excerpt from this piece is nearly impossible; the piece itself is an excerpt from Schulman’s book “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.” But considering the role that (two of) the Koch brothers play in American politics right now, it’s worth reading to see what it is that’s driving them. It will come as no surprise to anyone (or at least, Freudians) that it all essentially comes down to Daddy/Mommy issues.

The Art of Mending →

Gabrielle Selz:

My mother had been my father’s first wife, and the plate was their first joint purchase, bought when they were students in postwar Europe. They were living on a minuscule scholarship stipend when they stumbled across it in a small Paris shop. My father, who was studying art history at the time, thought that creating ceramics at the end of the war was Picasso’s way of contributing something useful to the world after so much destruction. My mother, too, had studied art history, but she’d switched to writing, declaring that she was much better at fantasy than at fact-gathering. But she loved the plate’s plump, shimmering white dove and its quizzical gaze.

Wonderful little personal essay.

‘Okay. And she was who?’ →

Ira Glass, in an interview with Intelligencer:

Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the New York Times, but I know nothing about how they put it together and I really don't care.

Have I mentioned lately how fucking cool Ira Glass is?

Metropolitan Museum Initiative Provides Free Access to 400,000 Digital Images →

Thomas Campbell:

Through this new, open-access policy, we join a growing number of museums that provide free access to images of art in the public domain. I am delighted that digital technology can open the doors to this trove of images from our encyclopedic collection.

What is available in what size and by who still varies, at least during my browsing, but still, it’s a pretty neat development. The actual online collection can be found here.

/via kottke.org

The ‘Interstellar’ Trailer and the Possibility of Real Warp Drives →

“The world doesn’t need any more engineers.”

The first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s next movie, Interstellar, has been making the rounds. It’s good, although, my excitement to see it is already surpassed by how annoyed I know I’m going to be by how much time will be spent debating the liberalization of the movies and climate change conspiracies, especially considering it appears as if Interstellar, at least according to Jesus Diaz, is going to feature some pretty insane-but-somewhat-realistic science:

By creating one of these warp bubbles, the spaceship's engine will compress the space ahead and expand the space behind, moving it to another place without actually moving, and carrying none of the adverse effects of other travel methods. According to Dr. White, "by harnessing the physics of cosmic inflation, future spaceships crafted to satisfy the laws of these mathematical equations may actually be able to get somewhere unthinkably fast—and without adverse effects."

We’ll just see what Neil deGrasse Tyson has to say about all of this.

Alton Brown’s Controversial Grilled Grilled Cheese Sandwich →

Albert Burneko:

During the time it takes Alton Brown just to cook the cheese from his grilled-cheese sandwich (for six to nine minutes), separately from the bread, after he spent however much time it took to get a grill fire going and grate a bunch of cheese and slice a loaf of crusty artisanal bread and fashion a pair of specialized cheese-grilling trays out of already-specialized grilling spatulas lined with aluminum foil, you could make, like, a dozen unspeakably delicious grilled-cheese sandwiches in a friggin' pan, in your kitchen, and eat them, and make some more, and eat those.

I love Alton Brown—I’ve seen every episode of Good Eats, I listen to his podcast, I habitually use several of his recipes and many of his tips and tricks, and I have many kitchen tools simply because that’s the (insert kitchen tool here) he used/uses.

That being said, Burneko is 100% right—when I saw Alton’s video (prior to the article) on how to make grilled grilled cheese, I was kind of shocked. Alton has always been about either simplifying a process previously thought to be difficult, or demanding precise tools/ingredients/measurements to make something simple sublime. His grilled grilled cheese seems to be neither. What a disappointment.

‘The Last Shot,’ 20 Years Later →

Amos Barshad:

The one-season, one-team structure is the most elemental form of the sports book. Its classics — David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink, Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights — are many. They spotlight a particular sports community and use that focus to tell us something about American society at large. On first glance, it seems remarkable Frey was able to find such an insular world within the biggest city in the United States. But Coney Island, as he writes in The Last Shot, is not New York City: “Surrounded on three sides by water, and cut off on the fourth by the great ethnic divide of Brighton Beach, the Coney Island peninsula feels like a separate territory, as removed from the rest of New York as Guam.” The neighborhood’s pitfalls — marked back then by the ever-encroaching drug trade — were omnipresent. And as anyone who’s ever fallen asleep on a Brooklyn-bound subway can tell you, Coney Island is the end of the line.

This is a must-read for anyone who read “The Last Shot.” And if you haven’t read “The Last Shot,” and you consider yourself either a thoughtful sports fan or a sociologist (in my estimation, the intersection of that venn diagram is pretty large), then what the fuck are you waiting for?

The Plots to Destroy America →

Kurt Eichenwald:

Conspiracy theories have been woven into the fabric of American society since before the signing of the Constitution. But what was once dismissed as the amusing ravings of the tin-foil-hat crowd has in recent years crossed a threshold, experts say, with delusions, fictions and lunacy now strangling government policies and creating national health risks. “These kinds of theories have the effect of completely distorting any rational discussion we can have in this country,’’ says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center who recently wrote a report on the impact of what is known as the Agenda 21 conspiracy. “They are having a real impact now.”

I’m skeptical any time someone makes an argument along the lines of this has always been a problem, but now it’s really taken a turn for the worse. Is it true that the nutters and hardline ideologues now have faster, more efficient ways of spreading their whacko theories? Of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s any bigger of a problem. If anything, the conspiracy theorists of yesteryear had to work much harder to spread their beliefs; today’s army “truth” spreaders are lazy. Anyone with an internet connection and a disenfranchised sense of fear can be a “conspiracy theorist.” And as for politicians now subscribing to these beliefs? Same thing. Politicians are everywhere now. All of the words that come out of their mouths are cataloged, tweeted, blogged, and debated. Of course we’re more liable to find them spouting off.

‘Capital in the 21st Century deserves all of its praise, but it should not serve as gospel on inequality.’ →

Lawrence Summers:

Perhaps the best way of thinking about Piketty’s wealth tax is less as a serious proposal than as a device for pointing up two truths. First, success in combating inequality will require addressing the myriad devices that enable those with great wealth to avoid paying income and estate taxes. It is sobering to contemplate that in the United States, annual estate and gift tax revenues come to less than 1 percent of the wealth of just the 400 wealthiest Americans. With respect to taxation, as so much else in life, the real scandal is not the illegal things people do—it is the things that are legal. And second, such efforts are likely to require international cooperation if they are to be effective in a world where capital is ever more mobile. The G-20 nations working through the OECD have begun to address these issues, but there is much more that can be done. Whatever one’s views on capital mobility generally, there should be a consensus on much more vigorous cooperative efforts to go after its dark side—tax havens, bank secrecy, money laundering, and regulatory arbitrage.

An eloquent, thoughtful, measured response to “Capital in the 21st Century.” It’s so refreshing to read something like this.

Cats and Dogs Dressed as People, 100 Years Ago →

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In Focus’ Alan Taylor:

Photographer Harry Whittier Frees, born in 1879, began a career in cute-animal photography in 1906, building out a small studio to produce postcards, calendars, and children's books. While I was researching World War I events on the Library of Congress website, I stumbled across a collection of Frees's work from June of 1914, and just had to share. The LOLcat is not a new phenomenon.

My wife is going to accuse me of being a hypocrite for posting this (I’ve got a strict rule about not bothering me with pictures of OPCs—Other People’s Cats), but I think this set of pictures is worth the charge. Make sure you click the title to see the rest.