Daily Oddities, July 23rd, 2009

We’ve got lots to talk about today, so lets get right down to the real serious stuff.
Globe: Things still really suck for EU little cousins Bulgaria and Romania, where infighting, corruption and graft are making it difficult to get anything done. Vote-buying, which we’ve mentioned before, is easy when your political power is less valuable [...]

Bibliomaniac’s Guide to Reading

Some days, it seems like reading is a lost art. Sure, we read text messages and Tweets and even Japanese cell phone novels; we read on the iPhone and the Kindle and maybe even the headlines at NYTimes.com, but when was the last time you sat down with a serious work of literary fiction or [...]

Sergei Dovlatov, and why you should care

It’s been a little while since I felt the compulsive need to write/talk/read about Sergei Dovlatov, the unsung Soviet storyteller whose raw wit and uncomfortable humor trancends national borders, economic philosophies, and continents, even if it never trancended Russian. He is also my favorite author, and the subject of this week’s New Yorker Fiction Podcast.
Dovlatov [...]

OMFG I LOVE YOU BARNEY FRANK <3 <3 <3

Be the AWESOME you wish to see in the world, Barney. BE IT.

Terror Couture

Recently, I’ve become obsessed by terrorist chic- not the kind defined so brilliantly by bradtriescriticaltheory – the sort that’s already been coopted and comodified to the point that Palestinians should be embarassed to wear the kaffieyeh, but things you could only hope to buy abroad or in the untouched pockets of outer borogh New York. [...]

Sri Lanka vs Darfur: How We Read Conflict

*(reader note: since lots of my recent traffic seems to have an infants sense of irony, I’m marking anything I said ironic  with asterisks. ****)
I was asked in an interview recently why the Sri Lankan conflict (which has about 1/2 the deaths + 1/3 of the refugees of the Darfur crisis – 95% of the [...]

Check Out my Awesome Slideshow

I am consistantly amazed at how much i get to do whatever i want.

the things i like to write about (are weird)

From time to time, when I am writing, I have this thought—which I occasionally post on FB:
“sometimes i sit down and i write some shit and i think, holy mother of G-d i am a sick, terrible person. at least i’m thin”
Usually in those exact words . Anyone who knows me knows that i write [...]

A history of the conflict in Sri Lanka, from Guardian.co.uk

Chronicle of conflict
• Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948. The country has a population of 21 million, of whom about 3.2 million are of Hindu Tamil origin.
• Tamil is one of the principal languages of the Hindu Dravidian dialect, with more than 200 million speakers across India.
• Ceylon Tamils are ethnic Sri Lankans [...]

Little Big Things in South Asia part 2—Tata’s Nano and what the 1W is missing

THE NANO IS HERE!
Back in the day when I used to read Adbusters, I remember they had a video that depicted the United States as a pig trying to squirm its way out of the map. It was supposed to represent how North America uses 25% of the world’s resources despite having only 4% of [...]