Somebody stole my idea for a super-accessible site of basic facts busy people need to know about important issues in the political process: http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/
Looks like they stole the idea even before I had it, the crafty bastards. (Thank gawd. Making all those charts looks like a lot of work.) Here I was sitting at the Take Back the American Dream conference, obsessing over accessibility and attention and how to reach people outside the echo chamber, and then boom, I see a flyer for this.
It's a promising start, in any case.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Update
So, funny story -- I'm now actually being paid to blog.
I am a staff writer covering politics and sundry things at Campus Progress.
Some of you might be checking this out from the link in my bio. No, it's ok, go ahead and look at when my last post was.
I KNOW, right??
Anyway, linking to this in a public place shamed me into at least thinking about updating it more often. And in the course of blogging professionally I seem to get more ideas for things to blog about personally. There are some shiny objects on the AP-style cutting room floor.
Monday, July 11, 2011
A Google+ Ode
(by me, with apologies to W. Whitman)
Come my wan-faced children,
Follow to the Field Trial, get your profiles ready,
Have you your laptops? have you your sharp-edged wits?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
For we cannot tarry here,
We must share my darlings, we must bear the brunt of beta,
We the youthful geeky races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient for an invite, full of pride in online friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you blogging with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Have the Facebook users halted?
Do they droop and exit Farmville, wearied by their ill-kept privacies?
We take up the task of Circles, and the Hangout and the Huddle,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer cleaner world, streamlined world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of +1 and the couch,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Come my wan-faced children,
Follow to the Field Trial, get your profiles ready,
Have you your laptops? have you your sharp-edged wits?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
For we cannot tarry here,
We must share my darlings, we must bear the brunt of beta,
We the youthful geeky races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient for an invite, full of pride in online friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you blogging with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Have the Facebook users halted?
Do they droop and exit Farmville, wearied by their ill-kept privacies?
We take up the task of Circles, and the Hangout and the Huddle,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer cleaner world, streamlined world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of +1 and the couch,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
How can one lead such disparate lives?
As blogged by Jonathan Blanks, an epically terrible piece of prose got published on Thought Catalog (I'd already come to the conclusion that they're generally too sophomoric to bother with, but this was in another league). It was so epic, in fact, that I decided it couldn't be bound to just a single medium:
Land of Opportunity
My dad wrote this Star Spangled Banner parody (and five others also posted to his YouTube profile), which won the Washington Post's Style Invitational contest that week:
Sunday, May 22, 2011
"...and I feel fiiiine"
Why, TNR? I'm back from a fantastic buzzy day of getting my Masters degree and laughing my ass off at rapture jokes, and you gotta go put a heartbreaking human face on the evangelical crazies. People who not only stopped saving but who spent all their savings -- and their kids' -- in anticipation of being raptured. Suckerpunch.
This sort of thing is, obviously, terrible. And maybe there is something kind of sick, or at least smug, at the root of our obsession with it. But I don't think that's ALL there is. With that, I give you five reasons why it's still OK to laugh at the rapture:
1) This is simply the stuff that memes are made of. In an Internet culture already giddy over the zombie apocalypse, we love end-times narratives that are as wacky as they are implausible. And this shit's bananas. So much that it's taken on a life of its own, in mythic rather than human proportions.
2) As people who value rational inquiry, we may look down upon those who don't -- but more importantly we find them fascinating, and terrifying. They fascinate us because we genuinely don't understand how someone can be that irrational. And they scare us because we worry about how irrationality currently rules our public discourse -- climate deniers, debt ceiling deniers, vicious homophobes. Rigid idealogues of all sorts. So when we see card-carrying members of the Cult of Irrationality throw down the gauntlet by presenting a falsifiable fact to public scrutiny -- by SETTING A DATE and putting it on BILLBOARDS fer cryin' out loud -- it's hard to resist a bit of satisfaction that THIS time -- at least -- at last -- facts might enjoy a moment of unqualified triumph.
3) And it's more than just satisfaction for skeptics. It could, dare we hope, mean real change for one or two believers. Someone who has built their life on falsehood, when confronted with undeniable evidence of its falseness, might realize that fact and do something to turn things around. Or they might not. But they might!
4) Even if believers decide not to change their ways, we might see a generation of evangelicals turning away from small-government conservatism. If they were among those who blew their life savings in anticipation of the rapture, now they get to experience firsthand what it's like to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"!
5) End of the World parties are a heap of fun, and should really become an annual tradition.
This sort of thing is, obviously, terrible. And maybe there is something kind of sick, or at least smug, at the root of our obsession with it. But I don't think that's ALL there is. With that, I give you five reasons why it's still OK to laugh at the rapture:
1) This is simply the stuff that memes are made of. In an Internet culture already giddy over the zombie apocalypse, we love end-times narratives that are as wacky as they are implausible. And this shit's bananas. So much that it's taken on a life of its own, in mythic rather than human proportions.
2) As people who value rational inquiry, we may look down upon those who don't -- but more importantly we find them fascinating, and terrifying. They fascinate us because we genuinely don't understand how someone can be that irrational. And they scare us because we worry about how irrationality currently rules our public discourse -- climate deniers, debt ceiling deniers, vicious homophobes. Rigid idealogues of all sorts. So when we see card-carrying members of the Cult of Irrationality throw down the gauntlet by presenting a falsifiable fact to public scrutiny -- by SETTING A DATE and putting it on BILLBOARDS fer cryin' out loud -- it's hard to resist a bit of satisfaction that THIS time -- at least -- at last -- facts might enjoy a moment of unqualified triumph.
3) And it's more than just satisfaction for skeptics. It could, dare we hope, mean real change for one or two believers. Someone who has built their life on falsehood, when confronted with undeniable evidence of its falseness, might realize that fact and do something to turn things around. Or they might not. But they might!
4) Even if believers decide not to change their ways, we might see a generation of evangelicals turning away from small-government conservatism. If they were among those who blew their life savings in anticipation of the rapture, now they get to experience firsthand what it's like to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"!
5) End of the World parties are a heap of fun, and should really become an annual tradition.
FTR
This is where that post I started to write (and thought about extensively, and debated IRL and on Twitter/Facebook) defending the appropriateness of celebrating bin Laden's death, and rebutting that oft-referenced Twain quote--would have gone, had I actually written it in time to be timely. This has been your journey into the Annals of Abandoned Intention.
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