Jared Dunn

Margin Walker

The New York Review of Books | Sarah Boxer | Blogs: Decent MSM blog article. Too quizzical and patronizing, but mostly ok on facts & makes a decent effort to grok the culture. I still don't get why they focus so much on manners and so little on information democritization and social change in these pieces.

The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time: To research my new book, Elephants on Acid, I scoured scientific archives for the most bizarre experiments of all time, the kind that are mind-twistingly, jaw-droppingly strange; that make you wonder, "How did anyone ever conceive of doing such a thing?"

Martin Luther King Jr. | Letter from a Birmingham Jail: an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency | The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Volume II.: DO YOU: a. Grind the emerald in the mattress of the enema sunshine? b. Mourn the lizard in the pus of the tubercular zebra? OR: c. Get high?

McSweeney's Internet Tendency | The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure: DO YOU: a. Grit teeth and think about the war. b. Order a brandy that overflowed and ran down the stem of the glass and think about the war. OR c. Notice the electric light hanging over the empty terrace and think about the war.

Crooked Timber | John Holbo | "Heil Myself!" (and other rude Goldberg devices): It is plausible to say fascists really lack certain essential values. The problem was also that the fascists valued (or at least said they did) things that really are valuable, but in hideously corrupt fashion. It's this that feeds the bad ad Hitlerems.

The American Prospect | Ezra Klein | Misogyny and the Election: On misogyny, though, I've been shocked in the other direction: it's been more overt, more odious, and more unashamed that I could have predicted. The serial depictions of Clinton in the media are a veritable hit parade of stereotypes about women.

Whiskey Fire | Molly Ivors | My Faithful Sin-Eater: The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Vanity Fair | A Vast Right-Wing Hypocrisy: Richard Mellon Scaife is a billionaire bankroller of conservative crusades, including the Clinton impeachment. His divorce from his second wife, Ritchie, is providing another unsavory saga. Adultery! Addiction! Assault! Dognapping!?!

Yanks Fan Sox Fan | Thou Shalt Not "Suck My Ass": MLB rules on on-field swearing from 1897, with many florid and hilarious examples.

Herb Greenberg | Straight Talk on the Mortgage Mess from an Insider: What I am telling you is not speculation. I sold BILLIONs of these very loans over the past five years. I saw the borrowers we considered "prime". I always wondered "what WILL happen when these things adjust if values don't go up 10% per year?"

Geoffrey Nunberg | Obscenity Rap: Apropos of all the anachronistic cocksuckers in Deadwood, an evolutionary history of swearing since the 1800s.

The American Scholar | Melvin Jules Bukiet | Wonder Bread: Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft

Too Much Rod Benson | The Greatest MySpace Story Ever Told: I, Rod Benson, have done a lot of crazy things in my life, but falling in love with or making a song about or giving tickets to a girl who never existed is NOT on the list.

NYT | Madeleine L'Engle, Writer of Children?s Classics, Is Dead at 88: Madeleine L'Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children's classic "A Wrinkle in Time," died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn.

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