Category Archives: tea party

Links for to keep you busy for a while

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Thought I’d do a link-dump of things that have been on my mind lately.

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Fiction/essays

Robin Cody -  “Miss Ivory Brown” (pdf),  from The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, originally in Portland Magazine. A simply beautiful story.

Peter Watts -  “The Island”, Hugo Award (sci fi) winner for the Best Novelette of 2010. It’s good.

Atul Gawande – Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? The New Yorker, August 2, 2010. A deeply moving essay about Hospice medical care for dying patients.

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Politics

Bill Moyers – “Welcome to the Plutocracy”. Originally given as a speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010 as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series, this is an unsettling account of the role of corporate money in U.S. politics.

Sean Wilentz – “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War roots”. The New Yorker, October 18, 2010. An interesting historical look at the origins of Glenn Beck’s (and others’) view of American history. It’s all been done before.

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Productivity

David McRaney, “Procrastination”. You Are Not So Smart, October 27, 2010. A meta look at procrastination, explaining how it is “fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking”. Encourages long-term thinking and planning ahead of time to trick yourself into working better, through the lens of recent behavioral science, Netflix, and marshmallows.

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Science (!)

Doctor Science, “You’ve never been to the moon But don’t you want to go”, Obsidian Wings, November 01, 2010. An overview of some undertakings by Galaxy Zoo, a collection of crowdsourced science projects.

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I got a window seat at work this week. The plants are happy, as am I.

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(BTW, I highly recommend Instapaper for marking articles and essays to read later. It can sync with your mobile device and all sorts of cool stuff.)

This is how it’s done

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Jon Stewart once again masterfully demonstrates why he’s the most trusted newsman in the U.S.

Check out this interview between Stewart and John O’Hara, one of the founders and intellectual leaders of the Tea Party movement.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
John O’Hara Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com

Part two is here (for some reason it’s not embeddable).

Kudos to Jon (and John) for demonstrating that substantive dialogue is possible across ideological divides. He’s able to break simplistic narratives and engage the essence of a matter. Even if such a conversation still ends in disagreement, it promotes commonality and mutual respect.