Tim Wise argues that several prominent themes and moments of the current presidential campaign are directly tied to American racism. He has also written a follow-up to criticism of the original piece.

A tribute as only The Onion could write one. See also their previous entry, Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20, a dead-wringer for his prose style. I had serious, serious trouble slogging through Infinite Jest and gave up circa page 150, but I’m increasingly feeling that I need to sample one or more of his less intense works. Just as soon as I put aside an uninterrupted week to pick my way carefully through Neal Stephenson’s latest tome, Anathem.

It is rare to see a child star make such a conscious, deliberate, and well-executed jump to serious theater. Usually when a kid gets their starring role at age 12, they end up pretty messed up by the end…

A lack of awareness along with the belief that cycling is “exotic” or “environmental” instead of simply efficient puts cyclists in constant danger both from the careless and the malicious.

An easy source for per-course book lists and comparison pricing for US college students. Currently supports BU, Northeastern, Brandeis, Tufts, and UPenn, with more schools to come.

In 1964 the US Army enlisted two physicists with no nuclear background to see if they could design their own functional nuclear bomb using only publicly available information and experimentation. The project was an experiment to see how hard it would be for other countries to develop nuclear weapon programs. The results were not encouraging.

Pat Buchanan suggests parallels between NATO’s treatment of Russia and the predicate of Italy before World War II. His overarching point is sound — we can’t continue to bait the bear and escalate the situation without thinking through the endgame, and the potentially disastrous consequences.

This is what YouTube was made for!

The best part of this article is the last line.

Charles Van Doren writes about his part in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Somehow it seems far less dramatic than the movie, and he never mentions chocolate cake.

Anyone who has graduated from a residential college in the last 20 years should be able to corroborate this. So why do legislators and interest groups refuse to acknowledge it?

So this is what has become of the American dream? It makes me ashamed to even live in such a country as ours. What sort of a people would inflict this kind of suffering? It is as horrific as the dystopian society of the film Brazil, with its layers of incompetence and neglect and hostility towards our fellow man. (via pf)

In 1997, author Neal Stephenson in Time discussed how the use of emerging cryptography technologies by terrorists could scare citizens into tolerating a much stronger Big Brother. It is interesting to ponder why these technologies never took off like many techies imagined they would. Not surprising, though, is that terrorism (and Big Brother) has thrived regardless.

Phillip Toledano’s beautiful exploration of his time with his 98 year old father, who suffers from short-term memory loss. (via SvN)

It’s novel, but is it revolutionary? Time will tell.

Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris, and their musical collaborators describe how a Web phenomenon grew out of the dark days of the writers’ strike. (via Whedonesque)

And they were attending a font conference… (via kottke)

Economic woes, rising transportation costs, and general uncertainties are causing Americans to abandon travel plans, and thus lose those brief but important respites from the tireless demands of modern careers.

First he concludes that it is torture, then he looks at the arguments for and against the United States carrying it out on war prisoners.