Entries Tagged as 'People and Current Events'
About the Most Interesting Thing You’ll Read Today
Or this week. Or Month. Or, hell, it’s been a bad year: year.
WSJ – Lost in Translation New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish, by Lera Boroditsky (professor of psychology at Stanford and editor in chief of Frontiers in [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
A Story Sweet and Sad and Adorably Good
Telegraph – Wayward Alzheimer’s patients foiled by fake bus stop A German nursing home has come up with a novel idea to stop Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off: a phantom bus stop.
“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Journalists Struggling to Cope With This “Democratic” Modern Age
Telegraph – Raoul Moat and the unacceptable face of Facebook
In David Cameron’s clash with Facebook we can see the key cultural question of our time, says Jenny McCartney
So, she goes from describing the elitist but responsible days of old journalism, where:
Letters to newspapers that were full of violent views, or just [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
More On Iran’s Curious Moral Habits
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been “spared” stoning (she might still be hung though), but it’s brought up a subject we don’t often hear much about:
The Times – Is female sexuality more wicked than murder? By Janice Turner
Last week I met an Iranian woman who, if she had remained in Iran, could have been [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
India’s Indian Problem
I wish they had a higher res picture available. You can’t see enough of their eyes.
The Times – ‘Take their children and civilise them’: tribe faces threat of modernity
For as many as 65 millennia, the Jarawa tribe are believed to have lived as hunter-gatherers on what are now known as the Andaman and [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
The Recorder: A Bit Like Dissecting Pigs
Telegraph – Muslim pupils ‘withdrawn from music lessons’ Muslim children are being withdrawn from music lessons because some families believe learning an instrument is anti-Islamic, it has emerged.
A number of schools are allowing Muslim parents to pull their children out of classes, even though the subject is a formal part of the national curriculum. [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Poor Old Hitchens
Announced he has throat cancer today and has to cut short his book tour to have chemo on his esophagus. But anyway, the news had a link to this review of his memoirs* (which he was on tour promoting), leading with:
In 1973, at the age of 24, Christopher Hitchens was called to Athens, [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
FFS
Reprinted in full:
The Corner – April Fools, by Stephen Spruiell
More evidence that the Homebuyers Tax Credit was a dumb idea: House prices increased in April, as sellers increased prices to capitalize on the rush to buy before the tax credit expired on April 30th. Then, as soon as the tax credit expired, demand [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
If Only There Were Illegals in American Samoa Doing the Jobs the American Samoans Won’t Do
My parents were up today and my dad was talking about this story which, naturally, I hadn’t heard of. Congress raised the minimum wage again and this time, in their wise benevolence, didn’t give American Samoa an exemption:
When Democrats in Congress increased the minimum wage in 2007, the U.S. territory of 65,000 in [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Bring Back Home Ec!
A coworker (raised partially, I kid you not, on a commune) had on his Facebook a couple weeks ago a story about a cooking class for toddlers to get them interested in food (he’s very into all this sensory learning stuff). I left a comment, “Bring back home ec!” Don’t know how it went over, [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Some Refuge
The Globe & Mail – The immigration debate we don’t want to have Aqsa’s murder raises some extremely troubling questions about integration, by Margaret Wente
The Parvez family history is not uncommon. Aqsa’s father and her oldest brother arrived in Canada in 1999 as refugees from Pakistan. In those days, it was easy to buy [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Aussie Angels
AP:
SYDNEY — In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. “Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea?” the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
The Inverted Pyramid Doing a Fine Job
The opening line from this news story:
A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he ‘mooned’ a group of Hell’s Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a bulldozer.
It’s ruined a bit finding out that the “student” is 26-years-old, but it’s lovely while you still imagine him [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Young Independent Documentary Filmmaker Makes STARTLING Discovery
The Foundry – Is Hollywood Turning on Teachers Unions?
But on the way to making the film she imagined, she “stumbled on this political mayhem—really like a turf war about the future of public education.” Or more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem Success, [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
All We Have to Do Is Wait Until They Die, Boomers, Die
Peter and I have having a heck of a time finding a house. We’ve been looking for months and anything we like is outrageously expensive, and everything we don’t like still sells for those prices. And lord there are some dogs out there.
Journal of the American Planning Association, Volume 74, Issue 1 – Aging [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
