August 2012
7 posts
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America’s Worst Historians →
The careful study of history does not yield a litmus-test slogan on the order of “We’re an exceptional nation.” It’s no wonder that you have Paul Ryan this week declaring his intention to “go back to the founding principles” and other congressional Republicans fatuously claiming that the founding fathers promoted small government, and therefore so should we. Sure, the founders’ America was a...
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The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire →
So after more than 50 years in the digital market, libraries have come right back to where they started. Our dream of an electronic library has been built, but others own and manage it. We are left with the tangible property we began with, our physical books, the thousands of buildings that house them, and the millions of people still coming through our doors to use them. In reality, those are...
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The Power Dynamics Behind The Phrase "My Boss Is... →
There’s a third reason here, and that’s that we don’t really give women credit for being assholes as much as we should. Very often when a woman does something that would earn a man the epithet “asshole” gets called a “bitch” instead, when really it has nothing to do with some primordial feminine malignity, it just has to do with the fact that this person...
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DeAndre McCullough (1977-2012) →
“That isn’t the end of the story,” he complained to me years later. ”You don’t know that the story ends that way.”
“If you give me another ending, Dre. I’ll write it. I promise. In a new edition, in a magazine article, anywhere I can. I’ll write that fucking story so hard.”
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Were They Prepared for Retirement? Financial... →
The results raise several issues. First, a noticeable fraction of persons die with virtually no financial assets—46.1 percent with less than $10,000. Based on a replacement rate comparison, many of these may be deemed to have been well-prepared for retirement, in the sense that their income in their final years was not substantially lower than their income in their late 50s or early 60s....
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Drew: i like places with the word merchant in them
Drew: makes me think of some spice merchant
Drew: from old times
