But...but...it was perfect!
SHOCKER: The world’s first “stock exchange for art” has gone bust artmarketmonitor.com/2013/05/19/fra… #neverwouldveguessed
— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) May 20, 2013
Delineating Chaos Bewitched
SHOCKER: The world’s first “stock exchange for art” has gone bust artmarketmonitor.com/2013/05/19/fra… #neverwouldveguessed
— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) May 20, 2013
Last night, the pilot of US Airways Express Flight 4560 was having some bad luck. The landing gear on his turboprop twin-engine plane just wouldn't go all the way down. So with some quick thinking and righteous piloting skills, he went in for a wheelless, sparky touchdown, and pulled it off without a hitch.
They're negative and WHOA Kinsley's going to have to have his head sewn back on! Did you see THAT?
Disney World is looking into reports that some wealthy visitors are hiring disabled people to pretend to be family members so that they can skip lines.
It was awesomer:
Chuck Muncie passed today. (link)
We have more free time than ever before, but why do feel like we never have enough? Melanie Rudd explains...

History is not always written by the winners. Take, for example, the climactic one-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs that decided the 1908 National League Pennant race - regarded by many as the greatest ever. Was it a big game? Well, says Bill James in his New Historical Baseball Abstract:
To give a modern fan the sense of it, the National League pennant race in 1908 was like the American League race in 1967, only with one of the teams being in New York and the other in Los Angeles, and with Kerry Wood or Livan Hernandez being called up by another team in September so he could make four starts against one of the teams that was trying to win the thing, and with one of the key games suddenly erupting into a major controversy which would necessitate the New York team making a special trip to Los Angeles for their 162nd game, which Roger Clemens is to pitch against Pedro Martinez, with a few odd death threats, riots, attempts to fix the game, fights between players and fans, and some loose talk about a strike thrown in for good measure. The world has never seen the like of it.
It was hard for us to play that game with the crowd which was there, but harder for the Cubs. In one place, the fence was broken down, and some employees were playing a stream of water from a fire hose on the cavity to keep the crowd back. Many preferred a ducking to missing the game and ran through the stream to the lines around the field. A string of fans recklessly straddled the roof of the old grand-stand.
Every once in a while some group would break through the restraining ropes and scurry across the diamond to what appeared to be a better point of vantage. This would let a throng loose which hurried one way and another and mixed in with the players. More police had to be summoned. As I watched that half-wild multitude before the contest, I could think of three or four things I would rather do than umpire the game.
Could Mathewson write? No, probably not...one reporter wrote [of a Mathewson journalistic effort]: "For a college man, Mathewson . . . uses about as poor language in his review of the Giants' games as any respectable newspaper will stand."
Putting Upton on [Vogue's] June cover is a two-pronged victory: It's symbolic of the high fashion world adopting more of a men's magazine mentality (which, for better or worse is geared toward fleshier, more realistic-looking models), and a step toward fulfilling a promise the magazine made in 2012 to promote images of healthier looking models.
No matter where I go, or how long I live, I know I will never meet a person with a cooler name than Strobe Talbott.
...except that we are obviously living in the twilight of empire, doomed by our own decadence to failure as a civilization; and deserving of only a slight nod from history, which will surely note with approval the idealism and boldness of our forefathers, but equally hold in contempt the cynicism and selfishness of those who came after, and, weighing up the balance, find that in our era we fell far short of greatness, and tragically short of what we could have been.
Orwell used the phrase to describe a "thinker" whose modus operandi was to...oh right, this is the Internet, so I'll copy, paste, and link:
It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.
(link)
The company is making cutbacks. We're going to have to let you go. twitter.com/missmayn/statu…
— Ally Maynard (@missmayn) May 2, 2013
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Go on a Poorly-Planned and Under-Resourced Mission to Steal Treasure From a Dragon.#DisneyLordoftheRings
— TheOtherFront (@TheOtherFront) May 1, 2013
Best game trailer, ever, from my favorite publisher, Paradox Interactive.
Read the whole thing here.
In summary, I'm not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one. My view is that full employment and robust systems of redistribution from the more fortunate to the less fortunate are possible. I see real evidence for this in the world. The Obama administration has actually enacted a lot of redistribution programs, and the government of Australia has maintained consistent full employment policies for a long time now. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, a good thing on its own terms, has had the bad consequence of breeding massive complacency among the upper classes in the West. It used to seem important to people in the rich countries to prove that market economies not only could but in fact would lead to broadly rising living standards. But today we're living in a 401(k) world.
That Darn Necromancer!#DisneyLordoftheRings
— TheOtherFront (@TheOtherFront) May 1, 2013
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
Prairie Home Companion went to Lubbock this week. Apart from its notable cultural significance, Lubbock's a nice place. There's a big university there, and good people, near as I can tell.
Why Americans are Miserable and Broke