“The relationship between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley has historically been very cozy. The former head of Facebook security now works at NSA. Dropbox just added Condoleeza Rice, an architect of the Iraq war, to its board of directors. Obama has private fundraisers with the same people who are supposed to champion our privacy. There is not a lot of daylight between the American political Establishment and the Internet establishment. Whatever their politics, these people are on the same team.”

That’s taken from a talk Maciej Cegłowski gave May 20 in Düsseldorf, Germany. I’m not smart enough to know what it all means, but it doesn’t sound pleasant. Read the rest here.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

News from around the world:

Just as it seemed Brooklyn couldn’t get any weirder, a jogger makes a gruesome discovery…

…while a Swedish “erotic novelist” stumbles upon 80 skeletons stuffed in Ikea bags (naturally) and left in a church.

A set of braids “formerly attached to [Willie] Nelson’s head” will be auctioned in October.

The 25 most widely circulated urban legends, according to Snopes.

A seagull-eating python is terrorizing a small town in New Jersey. Meanwhile…

…a new eggnog recipe “somehow ignited” in the Garden State, injuring two workers and destroying a laboratory.

Experts from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife “still cannot definitively identify the type of animal” roaming the streets of Norwalk.

Finally, remember the “six-million-year-old turd” that was recently sold at auction for over $10,000? The one that’s “an eye-watering 40 inches in length”? National Geographic wonders whether it isn’t a “faux poo.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Back when I was a callow youth, July and August meant one thing: harvest.

I drove both truck and combine for several years during high school and college, and learned that each has its pros and cons. Combines had air conditioning but required constant attentiveness; trucks were hot and dirty but offered enough time between loads to down as much as a novel a day. There’s a sense of pride that goes with being a combine driver, but, when you took a truckload of wheat down to the river, there was always a chance you might see a girl. You know, in a swimsuit.

The photo above was taken just a couple of weeks ago. If you squint just so, you can make out a couple of combines and their attendant trucks—they’re the four black specks on the horizon—in one of the very fields I worked 25 years ago.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Back in 1942, BBC Radio broadcast the first episode of “Desert Island Discs,” a weekly program that asked guests to choose eight pieces of music* (back then it was records), one book, and one luxury item they’d take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. It’s been going ever since.

Now, if I were ever one of those guests, at least one of my picks would be a Grateful Dead album, in part because you get rock, folk, R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz, bluegrass, country, and even 20th-century avant-garde in the space of about 10 minutes. The Dead’s music encapsulates—better than any other band I’m aware of—the American experience. And if one person can be said to personify the Dead, it would have to be Jerome John “Jerry” Garcia, whose 72nd birthday is today.

I’d try to explain why he has such a hold on my musical imagination, but John Perry Barlow does a much better job of it in Rolling Stone issue no. 717, published shortly after Garcia’s death in 1995. Barlow, who with Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir wrote a sizable chunk of the Dead’s song catalogue, sums it up perfectly:

“Jerry was one of those manifestations of the energy of his times, one of those people who ends up making history books. He wrapped up in himself a whole set of qualities that were very appropriate to a certain cultural vector in the latter part of the 20th century: freedom from judgment, playfulness of intellect, complete improvisation, anti-authoritarianism, self-indulgence and aesthetic development. I mean, he was truly extraordinary. And he never really saw it himself. He could only see its effect on other people, which baffled and dismayed him. It made me sad to see that. There was nothing that Garcia liked better than something that was really diverting and interesting and lively—you know, anything that he would refer to as a ‘fat trip,’ which was his term for that sort of thing. And he wasn’t really able to appreciate himself, which was a pity because, believe me, Jerry was the fattest trip of all.”

By the way, if you happen to be in the Bay Area this weekend, you might want to head over to San Francisco’s McLaren Park for the 12th annual Jerry Day festivities.

*Feel free to leave a comment with your eight Desert Island Discs. Then I can judge you.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(9)

Want to read “the story of what it means to live in a cultural climate that stifles almost every creative impulse, and why it so often seems we should stop trying”? Me neither, especially since it’s just a compilation of tweets.

But looked at it another way—like, say, as an opportunity to poke fun at the “delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion” that mark today’s aspiring novelists (and, let’s be honest, pretty much all writers ), well…Working on My Novel could be a lot of fun.

Here’s a taste: At 11:44 p.m. on September 23, 2012, Stephen Mangol tweeted, “I’m working on my novel again, and it feels good, you guys. I love my mind.” Almost, writes Dan Piepenbring over at the Paris Review‘s blog, “as if he’s just done fifty reps with it and is admiring it all engorged with blood.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Do you think that the Weird Al video I shared last week is funny? Kevin Gallagher, who refers to “garden-variety internet pedants” and “Strunk & White fundamentalists” in his article claiming that—get this—Weird Al is the humorless one, doesn’t like it one bit.

And if you do think it’s funny, well…you’re probably a racist. Lauren Squires reveals the sinister “linguistic discrimination” behind Mr. Yankovic’s parody:

…a little rumination on Weird Al’s violent reactions against “bad grammar” raises deep and longstanding questions of social equity regarding class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender, and how these relate to languages, dialects, and social registers. There is ample research on these issues (which any sociolinguist could point you to), but the upshot is that the notion of “Proper English” typically serves to prop up the already-privileged speakers whose native language variety it is (sort of) based on. This puts speakers whose native language variety does not approximate “Proper English” at an immediate disadvantage in society, the same way that privileging Whiteness puts those who are not White at an immediate disadvantage in society. It is not the linguistic differences themselves that do this (just as it is not the racial/ethnic difference themselves that determine privilege), but the *attitudes* about them. This is why many linguists are having a hard time laughing with Word Crimes: to do so feels like complicity in an ongoing project of linguistic discrimination that intersects with class, race, and other kinds of discrimination.

You have to read the whole thing, if only to see for yourself what passes for higher education in this country.

For those who are ready to admit that they need help, there’s hope. And for Kevin, Lauren, and all the other dour descriptivists whose self-regard trumps everything else, Sergeant Hulka has a message:

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  comments(1)

Ever wonder what an “algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1251 genres” would look like? And wish it contained sound samples? Wonder no more.

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