December 2009
Can farming save Detroit? →
kateoplis:
With a net worth of more than $100 million, John Hantz is one of the richest men left in Detroit. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management. One day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a...
Clocks and Clouds
enormousair:
…You can’t build clouds. And that’s why the future you dream of never comes true.
Before airplanes existed people dreamed of airplanes and of what the world with them would look like. But just as the reality was not at all like what they dreamed, so we have no reason to think that the future will really develop in the way we dream now. For our dreams are covered in tinsel like...
"WHO BEAT HIS ASS,"
heheheheheheheeheheheehehe:
“Kmart. I think they chose him because he looks like he dosent care if he gets his ass beat for no reason. I think Kmart saw that in him.”
“Kmart beat his ass.” - from Shoplifting From American Apparel
Capitalism.
Terror Sex, pt. II
“…[H]uman universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point gave expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they...
The many mysteries boil down to three →
austinkleon:
The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who planted the bomb? Will the travellers reach their destination? What is Mother’s childhood secret? There is the supernatural: dark metaphysical forces, never to be fully exposed, yet hinting of themselves in a way that suggests the author could reveal more if he chose, and might do, in his next book. And...
Iran is burning...
…If the government was going to send goons, then they were going to deal with them the way goons are dealt with. We had seen burning homes, bleeding protesters and protesters being dragged across streets. This time around, we saw burning police cars, bleeding Basijis and riot police being dragged and beaten.
— John Shahryar
…and, for once, this doesn’t mean the...
Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the... →
clothedinsky:
tumbledore:
“Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for...
Ron Silliman: "How has poetry changed in the last...
…Quoted in full, because it’s that good.
Poets blogging is just a symptom. The decline of indie bookstores, including the closure of such stalwarts as Cody’s & Shaman Drum, is just a symptom. The slow painful death of newspapers, most of whom have already tossed their book review section and literary critics overboard, is itself just a symptom. The collapse of academic literary...
unsustainable:
bibliotheque:
Ryan Adams/Come...
Rhetoric, pt. III
syntheticpubes:
“Most serious news stories are peppered with information that is laughably false, and reporters are always fully aware of how false that information is. Newspapers are constantly quoting people who are openly lying, and almost every sound bite you hear in the broadcast media is partially false. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s not that the truth is being ignored;...
Ethics and Aesthetics
melissa:
“I was thinking about sex. About the woman I helped from her boots and into her heels at the last party. The heels were black patent, red on the bottom and inside. She leaned close to me before the reading and no one could see what we were doing. I was also thinking about another woman there who left before we had a chance to talk much. As I was watching her go I thought that I could love...
"...The minimum wage machine allows anybody to... →
(via Tomorrow Museum)
The Academy Is Eating Itself
“The Modern Language Association’s annual forecast on job listings, being released today, predicts that positions in English language and literature will drop 35 percent from last year, while positions in languages other than English are expected to fall 39 percent this year. Given that both categories saw decreases last year, the two-year decline in available positions is 51 percent...
"All told, this is a city with the opposite... →
(via claytoncubitt)
"The real impact of this is psychological, in that... →
(via @rome_viharo)