real talk

i have friends who assure me that this is a feeling that stays with you well into your thirties (or, if my mother is to be believed, nigh unto your sixties).
damnit. anyone know how to make pictures fit? n/m, just click the clicky.

read of the day

this is such an awesome concept. it's two wicked fun things, hip-hop battles and international relations, making sweet sweet geeky love all over the npr website. wheeee!

blogging FAIL

(maybe if i post this AWESOME video and then start writing prolifically the month-long gap between posts won't be as obvious. ok it's a plan. aaaand break)

read of the day

i think this is sort of nicely put. the thrust being:

"In fact – and this is what Sotomayor means when she talks about reaching a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived her life – rather than distorting reality, perspectives illuminate it or at least that part of it they make manifest. It follows that no one perspective suffices to capture all aspects of reality and that, therefore, the presence in the interpretive arena of multiple perspectives is a good thing. In a given instance, the “Latina Judge” might reach a better decision not because she was better in some absolute, racial sense, but because she was better acquainted than her brethren with some aspects of the situation they were considering. (As many have observed in the context of the issue of gender differences, among the current justices, only Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows what it’s like to be a 13-year-old girl and might, by virtue of that knowledge, be better able to assess the impact on such a girl of a strip-search.)...You can call it empathy or (as some in the audience suggested ) you can call it understanding or imagination. I called it hearkening to the spirit rather than the letter. But whatever you call it, everyone present that evening agreed that it was what we wanted."

a haiku for new haven in spring

squirrel scampers past
twix wrapper gripped in its mouth
probably rabid.

I GETS A COOKIE.

i learned to write my name in nepali script (devanagari) today.
मली
wheeeee. absurdly proud of myself.

someone gets a cookie.

"The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for the wrongs of slavery."

best intersection of homosexuality and fruit leathers. ever.

seriously, you remember this shit?

if you're like me, your health-food oriented parents fed you these when you were a kid, instead of anything that was COOL and shaped like a DINOSAUR or a ROCKET...made out of SUGAR and BLUE DYE 16....anyway, neither here nor there...best quote ever from my friend (he happens to be gay), who was having his first experience with fruit leathers:

"i want to COVER a woman with these. just like, slap them all over her body".

by god it never occurred to me as a child...but i think he's RIGHT.

read of the day: "suffering and art"

i really appreciated this discussion about the ethics of photographing suffering. there were some good points of practical distinction made (it's easier to preserve moral integrity when a photo is properly captioned and contextualized, and when it is not subsequently commodified). i also found that this comment resonated with me:

“You have to remember that the stronger the image is, the more it hurts,” said Ms. McNally, an assistant managing editor and the director of photography at The Times. “When a photograph of a horrific situation is mindfully and artfully put together, and works on multiple levels, it simply grabs your attention and is more effective. Those pictures tend to live long in your memory because all the elements work together to reinforce the narrative and emotion.”

that's what's most striking for me. i find it almost nonsensical to argue that (barring aforementioned issues of commodification) one can detach the formal/aesthetic and empathetic messages of a picture. like being in love (i imagine), being truly moved, having your "heart wrenched," by an image is both both intensely tragic and intensely joyful. by making these images wrenchingly beautiful, a photographer makes them wrenchingly human as well.

anyway, enough of that serious/theoretical nonsense...back to our regularly scheduled fart jokes.

waiting on tehran

wowza. unprecedented turnout for the iranian presidential elections today. they've extended polling for at least four extra hours. certainly this insane turnout is a good sign for reformist challenger mousavi.

so the eyes of the world are on iran. foreign engagement with iran has been somewhat suspended as people have held their breath waiting for today. does it matter though? khamenei ain't goin' nowhere. how then, would the dynamics of a new government pan out, with a head of the executive, at least rhetorically, more willing to engage the rest of the world? how big an electoral mandate would he have to have to avoid a major whip-cracking from khamenei and the guardian council?

do i actually have enough people who read this to do an open thread?
meh, probably not. go for it, though, and i'll spin some more thoughts later when i make more progress on the annual report i'm supposed to be writing. regardless, between last week's cairo speech, the much-viewed and commented upon max blumenthal video, and iran's election, it's an interesting fortnight in debates on american mid-east policy issues.

UPDATE: no one/everyone (fp bloggers) wins so far. get ready for the whole country to be completely stabby for the next, like, three days while the votes are counted. check out the nyt liveblog here.

an excellent point...

the lovely sarah k. smith of wonkette pretty much hits (at least one) argumentative nail on the head in the whole sotomayor life-experience-and-impartiality/insane-old-white-men-calling-a-distinguished-latina-jurist-a-racist kerfuffle.

"The horror, that anybody would admit that judges can only aspire to impartiality! Why, that is sort of like a journalist admitting they can only aspire to objectivity. In other words, it is a concept that absolutely enrages conservatives while it just seems like a given to other Earthlings. The point is this: the only people who can reach judicial decisions from the taint of racial or gender bias are people free from the taint of race or gender itself, which is to say, white males."

wheeee! sanity at last!

more on this later when i'm not working...

farewell, emusic...

i am, as we, er, blog, contemplating what is going to be my final emusic purchase, for now at least.

oh dear emusic, while i'll miss your free samplers and your literate editorials which relieve me of having to form my own opinions, i've decided to cancel. my ipod doth overflow already with your bounty (should have gotten the 80 gig) and i often forget to use my downloads...and when i move to nepal, $11.99 > 10% of my rent.

SO. now, monthly music dumps will just be concerts, and i'll be trying to do right by this blog (and simultaneously work through my enormous backlog of music), and post a track or album per day w/ post-title moniker "daily playlist".

out with the old, in with the "stop spending money and maybe post every day, dontcha know."

the "hispanic" fallacy

so, while this doesn't make nate silver any less one of my imaginary boyfriends, i though it worthwhile to point out how even the smartest analysts are at the mercy of the problematic "hispanic" fallacy.

i was reading some fivethirtyeight posts about sotomayor's nomination, and i came across this post, where nate debunks the idea that "non-white hispanic" voters are more opposed to marriage equality than white voters.

so, although i really like the point silver's making, and wouldn't be able to question his actual math even if i wanted to, i (legitimately or not) decided to cherry pick this to bring up a major issue in the way we think about voting blocs and race as a whole. maybe this is just my inherent qualitative (anthropological) bent, but isn't a far more interesting and telling question the ways that opinions among "hispanics" differ? the category "non-white hispanic" is almost useless, really, for predictive purposes. there is such a world of difference among the experience and political calculus of, say, a first generation chicano voter in southern california, a second generation voter of cuban descent in miami, and a self-identified newyorican whose grandparents moved to the states 60 years ago, that it seems pretty inadequate to talk about some mythical category of "non-white hispanics" as a coherent voting bloc.

to be fair, it isn't like it's silver's fault. it's what he's got to work with. race in the united states is a deeply-ingrained, all-encompassing, and oversimplified category-creating discourse perpetuated by everything from talking heads on CNN to the way we apply for our driver's licenses. it just seems that in a nation where, for instance, the "non-white hispanic" population is increasing in size and diversity, that we can't rely on these overly broad categories to accurately tell us anything important about the way we and our fellow citizens actually behave. or perhaps more to the point, our continued reliance on these categories of understanding tells us a lot, and none of it comforting, about the way we continue to behave towards our fellow citizens.

big bad barry obama

i can't believe i'd never heard this before. fucking right.

also, i promise non-twitter (UGH) length posts again soon.

life imitates art.

this is literally out of an episode of 30 rock.

hmm, overcompensation much, kim jong-il?

okok. i know it's been said before, but i truly can't take the nuclear threat from north korea that seriously when such an unfortunate homonym is being bandied about in Serious News Reports.

the latest on north korea's Type-o-dong 2 BALL-istic missile technology.

"[T]he United Nations tumbled into a disarray over how to respond to what President Obama called a “provocative act.” Washington and Seoul said the North Korean rocket launched on Sunday failed to thrust a satellite into orbit...Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank, said the main motivation behind the launch was “to demonstrate the strength and vitality of Kim Jong Il’s leadership to the military and the population, and for the scientific sector to declare its fealty to Kim Jong Il’s leadership.” ...When North Korea first flight-tested the Taepodong-2, in July 2006, it blew apart 40 seconds after take-off."

don't worry, kim. i hear it happens to all world leaders at some point. doesn't make you any less of a man.

ZOMG

it's NATIONAL PUPPY DAY.
no, srsly, though, adoption, s'a good thing.

facing the tattoo music

so i'm inching closer and closer, sideways and crab-like, to sacking up and getting a tattoo. i've had it designed for a while (nb: it is not, nor was it ever, going to be a gothic-lettered "LA LUCHA"...just to clear that up. i'm in no rush to get shanked by an ecuadorian gang member or harassed by east haven cops); i've narrowed down placement to ankle, lower back, or between shoulder blades (although: painful, tramp-stamp, and inclined to fat, respectively); and now i just have to figure out where to go. SO if you've had a good experience with a particular location or artist, preferably in an easily accessible place like new haven, boston, or new york, email me or let 'er rip in the comments.

(it should be noted that this is not the design either, just a little something i whipped up for the cover of our intern protocols at my old internship. GENDER AND SECURITY: HOLLA BACK. UNSCR 1325 4LYFE)

is food the new sex?

i can't quite articulate how much the kind of answer that mary eberstadt (as echoed by george will) provides in the hoover institution's policy review makes me froth at the mouth.

eberstadt takes idle cocktail party speculations (has society's moral regulation of food choice replaced its moral regulation of sexual choice? are these shifts connected?), and turns it into a 7500-word steaming turd of ill-informed self-righteousness, thinly disguised as analysis by a throwaway reference to kant. i was going to spend a lot more time dissecting why this complete nonsense, but it's just too irritating, and, frankly, could take up several books. anyone who claims that the fact that people of a lower socio-economic class suffer higher levels of obesity is due to overabundance (and implied lack of self-control) shouldn't be allowed to get within 2 intellectual miles of food policy and trends. and any woman who waxes nostalgic for the days of pre-sexual revolution moral regulation, when "Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and wasn’t allowed back in school", should be forced to wear a chastity belt.

gloriously tasteful.

appropriate to send to a colleague who just gave birth?
absolutely.
i think it really says, "have fun breast feeding!"