“I remember, you know, in college listening to Bob Dylan, and my world opening up, because he captured something about this country that was so vital.”
- Barack Obama on Bob Dylan (via CBS News)
OK, I’ll bite. See you June 12.
And you thought Iowa was only good for corn? Four desserts that will change your mind from Drew Kerr’s Iowa Food Road Trip.
Honestly, if I has to choose just one thing to eat at the end of my life, these cookies would be it.
Source: metromag
A tribute to Adam Yauch. Hollywood Bowl, 4 May 2012.
Levon, you will be missed.
Progress (via)
It’s a weird and naive notion that there is a bright line between objective and subjective, fact and opinion, reality and narrative. Post-war journalism in the U.S. has been besotted with this kind of technocratic positivism, the notion that a reporter’s job is to convey facts and that anything else is personal opinion, bias, or outright deception. But facts are not truth. Facts do not, in and of themselves, have meaning. Facts only add up to something — literally make sense — when they are embedded in some kind of framework or narrative that fits into our cultural identities and ways of seeing the world. That’s how humans are built to learn, going back to the Stone Age. So “telling a greater truth” is a thing of real value, not some theatrical pretense. Helping people understand and contextualize events, work through the meaning and resonance of the facts, is a humanistic endeavor, and in today’s fraught and complex world, there’s never been a greater need for it.
David Roberts, writing about the Mike Daisey/This American Life fiasco in Grist.
“I think we are terrible animals. And I think our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us and should.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, via @brainpicker
Can it be summer now?
If you’re a writer in the Twin Cities, you’re a part of this tradition. This is your time. Write about Minneapolis. Write about St. Paul. Write about Loring Park and Highland Park and Uptown and Lowertown and Frogtown and the Southside and the West Side and the East Side and the North End. Write about the neighborhoods where you grew up, or live, or work, or visit. Write about what these places mean to you. Write in your own voice about them. Don’t fall back on Wobegone cliches. Celebrate the histories and heritages you find, but be disrespectful — be contemptuous, even! — of the received wisdom that this is a nice, quiet, modest little prairie town full of milquetoast Scandinavians and quirky DSM-IV disorders. That’s complete bullshit. This is a weird, sprawling, multifaceted pair of cities with millions of stories in them.
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if the internet were a garage sale, these are the things i'd pick up and look at. some i might buy, some i'd put back but think about later.
