19th April 2012
The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret
“During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.
See also: Drones Won’t Be Taking Over Our Wars Anytime Soon, C.J. Chivers
Forty Years in Solitary
“On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.
They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.
18th April 2012
What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York
“We’ve looked at how much the costs of things like Reeses peanut butter cups and TV sets have changed over time—very specific items. Let’s cast a wider net. For more than a century, the young flock to New York as the place to launch a career in the arts. Is it as expensive a proposition now as it always has been? Has the size of the potential rewards increased or decreased? And more importantly, just what was it like? In what ways was hanging at the Algonquin Roundtable just like (and not like) bumming around the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel? Let’s look at the Bohemian set over time, as seen through the eyes (and pocketbooks) of some of the women writers we’ve been reading for decades, from Dorothy Parker and Hurston onward to today.
13th April 2012
The Crisis in American Walking
“Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis that is the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a legitimate way to travel but a necessary adjunct to one’s car journey, a hobby, or something that people without cars—those pitiable “vulnerable road users,” as they are called with charitable condescension—do. To decry these facts—to examine, as I will in this series, how Americans might start walking more again— may seem like a hopelessly retrograde, romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau’s woodland ambles. But the need is urgent. The decline of walking has become a full-blown public health nightmare.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
“In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier.
12th April 2012
American Mozart
“Kanye West is, according to the president of the United States—the first black president of the United States—a “jackass,” a narcissistic monster who tore a massive hole of self-regard in the American cultural quilt. Worse even than the president’s epithet, which he first offered on September 14, 2009, is the near-universality of his verdict, which has been echoed for years on talk shows and gossip sites across America. Most painful of all, perhaps, was the classic “Fish Sticks” episode of South Park, which portrayed Kanye as a designer shades–wearing egomaniac who is so humorless and devoid of self-awareness that he can’t comprehend a simple joke about fish sticks. Being represented as the most humor-impaired man in America by the South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker may have actually hurt more than what the president said. What did Kanye West do to deserve all this?
10th April 2012
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever
“Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.
See also: How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education
9th April 2012
The Neuroscience of Bob Dylan's Genius
“At first glance, the moment of insight can seem like an impenetrable enigma. We are stuck and then we’re not, and we have no idea what happened in between. It’s as if the cortex is sharing one of its secrets. The question, of course, is how these insights happen.
5th April 2012
How To Write The Great American Novel
“There have been maybe 15 truly great American novels, and you and none of your friends have ever written them. They are all basically unfilmable, except for maybe To Kill A Mockingbird and I think Stranger in a Strange Land would make a good movie. But maybe you want to make kids forever have to read your book in freshman English classes and struggle with the magnitude of your truth and beauty. An honorable goal, to be sure. Here’s a few tips on how to write a book that ought to be carved into marble, made into a bestselling movie with action figures and make you a much better, much happier person.
3rd April 2012
Tape Delay
“Beginning in the 1960s, a group of scholars, later dubbed the Harvard school, began to notice a number of alarming problems with such imperialist readings of the Aeneid. They pointed out incident after incident where Virgil undermined the sense of glorious progress, or even overturned it. Beneath the poem’s golden patina they found a far more pessimistic view, one that seriously questioned the idea of human progress and imperial power. This new reading hit Virgilian scholarship like a lightning bolt, revolutionizing and redefining our entire understanding of the Aeneid, Virgil, and Augustan history. Though the debate is ongoing, it is now the dominant interpretation in the field. The question is: how did we miss Virgil’s real meaning for two thousand years? And what made it possible for this small group of scholars to point it out?
