Reading

Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
The story South Korea likes to tell about itself is ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, in which a country rises from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a stylish economic success story. The story of hallyu fits with the nation-building narrative, but the reality of Korean culture’s international popularity is more complicated.
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Derek Parfit’s approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral theory-building. For it places intolerable pressure on what might seem like an uncontroversial moral principle: that if something is wrong, it must harm some particular person or group of persons.
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage of the mass protesters, Black political rights still depended on federal enforcement. And the more the national government intervened, the more whites associated it with a loss of freedom.
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
History was expunged from the national school curriculum more than a decade ago because, it was claimed, there was no interest in it. Evidently, the political establishment continues to fear that knowledge of their history might further empower young people, who are more interested in good governance than in the ethnic politics of elderly men reluctant to concede power.
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Lucian Freud’s etched portraits look at first like mangled bits of realism but are in fact stealthy works of cubism: many selves, many facets, many moments in one. They display two kinds of time: the time it took to make the work, and the person the portrait anticipates as a result of that long observation. 
Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 23:29
by Gregory M. Mikkelson

In late summer of 2001 I moved from the USA to Canada, where my rose-colored glasses paradoxically made the grass look even greener. While President Bush had just reneged on the Kyoto Protocol, Prime Minister Chrétien stood by it, having been one of the first to sign. Two years later Chrétien withstood the pressure to join Bush’s disastrous war against Iraq.

Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 22:46

Not so long ago, political analysts were speaking of the “G-2” — that is, of a potential working alliance between the United States and China aimed at managing global problems for their mutual benefit. Such a collaborative twosome was seen as potentially even more powerful than the G-7 group of leading Western economies. As former Undersecretary of the Treasury C. Fred Bergsten, who originally imagined such a partnership, wrote in 2008, “The basic idea would be to develop a G-2 between the United States and China to steer the global governance process.” That notion would become the basis for the Obama administration’s initial outreach to China, though it would lose its appeal in Washington as tensions with Beijing continued to... Read more

Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 22:00

Posted on behalf of the Drupal accessibility maintainers and written by Mike Gifford.

Drupal is well known for its accessibility. While not perfect, Drupal made an early commitment to accessibility when Drupal 7 was released at the beginning of 2011. Its release was delayed several months because the core team was working to include accessibility releases for both front-facing and back-end user interfaces. This was a huge step for a general purpose content publishing tool like Drupal. Our community was one of the first to make accessibility accommodations for people with disabilities as not just users, but also as authors. 

Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 22:00

Various houseplants in a shrimp pan sauce

The bottom half of a mouse with pizza grease

Rubber bands and hair ties in whole milk

Raw chicken juice reduction, from garbage

Window condensation, fish tank water, and one piece of kibble

Something crunchy we found on the floor at 3:00 a.m.

Whatever it is that the people eat

House flies and tuna au jus

Prescription food for a cat that isn’t you

One bite of a giant loaf of bread

Wooden table corners

The top half of a mouse, gently shredded

The cream cheese off a bagel

Moth

People skin after they just worked out

Plastic bag in gelatin and fish aspic

Sour cream and ground beef from a Taco Bell nacho bowl

Preprocessed dry kibble (vomited up by another cat)

Just gravy

Somehow even wetter gravy

A teaspoon of each of the six assorted traditional flavors of regular cat food

Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 21:52
Få lobbyorganisationer i landet är mäktigare än Svenska Bankföreningen, som satt i system att rekrytera ex-politiker till vd-posten. Denna organisation och dess inhyrda lakejer har systematiskt motarbetat alla försök till ökade krav på branschen, inte sällan med hjälp av domedagsscenarier där Sverige påstås regrediera till bronsåldern om inte samhället värnar storbankernas lönsamhet. Det är en […]