Richard Scarry’s Busy Town in the 21st Century →
/via kottke.org
Donald Hall’s ‘Garlic with Everything’ →
Going to Hamden High School I discovered garlic. Spring Glen Grammar School was suburban middle class and pale. At Hamden High I first heard “Paisan!” shouted from one friend to another. In the decades between the wars, immigrants by the thousands arrived from Calabria and Sicily. Our basketball team was composed of set-shooters who averaged five foot two. As I joined the society of Hamden High, I rejected Spring Glen’s culture because it sniffed at people with accents. I hung out with friends who were second-generation Italians, and they altered my diet. In pizza joints I began my romance with garlic. It’s hard to believe, but at that time pizza was exotic. In most American cities there were no places that served pizza, much less chains of Pizza Huts, Domino’s, Papa Gino’s, Pizza Chefs, and Little Caesars. Except in southern-Italian neighborhoods, pizza was unknown coast to coast. Even in northern Italy people didn’t know pizza. In 1951 I asked for pizza in a Florentine restaurant. The waiter was puzzled. He disappeared into the kitchen, and when he came back he told me I could have it tomorrow. Did the chef find it in a cookbook? The next day he brought me the worst pizza I have ever eaten—pasty, doughy, tasteless except for garlic. I am told that Florence has pizza parlors now.
This is a perfect fifteen minutes of reading to sand down the rough edges of the memories of yesterday’s consumption.
Thanksgiving with Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko →
From Hannah Rothstein’s ‘How Famous Artists Would Plate Thanksgiving Meals.’ Make sure you click through to see the rest.
Happy Thanksgiving.
/via this isn’t happiness
In Other News, The Latest from the ‘No Shit’ Department →
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is one of the most important donors in the Republican party. He more-or-less singlehandedly kept Newt Gingrich's 2012 presidential hopes alive for months. So it is a big deal that Adelson reportedly dismissed Sen. Ted Cruz, thought to be a top contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, as "too right wing" and "a longshot."
There has already been an update to the article. The update receives a ‘No Shit’ rating as well.
The Case for Policing Reform is Much Bigger Than Michael Brown →
As a longtime proponent of sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system, I'm extremely apprehensive of the impulse to treat the killing of Michael Brown as a focal rallying point, even granting that the case has mobilized people and attention. His death is a perfect illustration of the need for dashboard cameras on every patrol vehicle and lapel cameras on every police officer in America. The way officials in Ferguson reacted to the protests over his death did illustrate the alarming militarization of U.S. police agencies. But when it comes to the problem of police officers using excessive force, including lethal force, against people they encounter, there are scores of cases that better illustrate the problem.
Focus.
A War Machine That Uses You as a Battery
There is no person, group, or ideology that owns the patent on anger.
Republicans Finally Admit That There is No Benghazi Scandal →
Read that list again. Late on a Friday afternoon, when it would get the least attention, a Republican-led committee finally admitted that every single Benghazi conspiracy theory was false. There are ways that the response to the attacks could have been improved, but that's it. Nobody at the White House interfered. Nobody lied. Nobody prevented the truth from being told.
I wonder if this report’s findings will be as publicized on the Right as the nuttiness leading up to it was.
I’m not holding my breath.
The Typography of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ →
Lola Landekic and Jessica Hische:
With that new direction in mind, how many different iterations did you go through?
Oh, I don’t even know — hundreds! Haha. It was less iterations on the style as a whole and more like, micro-changes. Certain letters got a lot more love than others. Wes’s favorite letter to criticize was the capital F and maybe, I think, the lowercase ‘r’ went through a lot of rounds. I really like how the caps turned out. I feel like it has a really good personality to it and not too much swashiness. It feels really classic and also down to earth, somehow.
But of course Wes Anderson had a favorite capital letter to criticize. And the best news? You can now purchase the typeface: Tilda.
/via kottke.org
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!
From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. "Their sense of urgency was enormous," wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more certain of their beliefs.
In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president, and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
The problem, of course, is that to the people this article is meant to enlighten will say, “Well, of course “their” science backs them up.”
Jaden Smith, Willow Smith, or William Blake? →
7. “This is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made.”
Even if you already read the article, I bet you still can’t get 100%.