Month: June 2011

John Abell lodges his complaints about e-readers:

E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started. They do not serve as constant, embarrassing reminders to your poor reading habits. Even 1,001 digital books are out of sight, and thus out of mind. A possible solution? Notifications that pop up to remind you that you’ve been on page 47 of A Shore Thing for 17 days.

Elizabeth Cline tracks the trajectory of American retail:

In 1930, the average American woman owned an average of nine outfits. Today, we each buy more than 60 pieces of new clothing on average per year. … In the face of these irresistible deals, our total spending on clothing has actually increased, from $7.82 billion spent on apparel in 1950 to $375 billion today. And the discounters are reaping the rewards. According to the latest Standard & Poor’s Industry Survey, the average American consumer is primarily looking for value with an impulse-buy standard of quality when they purchase clothing.

Rob Horning scrutinizes the methods and meaning of today's fast fashion apparel providers (H&M, Forever 21, etc):

As the fast in fast fashion implies, the companies’ comparative advantage lies in speed, not brand recognition, garment durability, or reputable design. They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly. Zara “can design, produce, and deliver a new garment and put it on display in its stores worldwide in a mere 15 days”… 

(Image by Lena Corwin)

Bit by bit …

"Palin has her faults, but she is a serious participant in the national dialogue on the key issues of our time. The New York Times and the Washington Post, in contrast, are frivolous rags with little or nothing of substance to offer," – John Hinderaker.

A Catholic church puts that notice up on Gay Pride weekend. And then had to take it down.

Corn has a good write-up on the first details from the redacted Palin emails. Palin took only two days off to have a premature child with Down Syndrome; she was even signing bills the alleged day of Trig's birth:

The original letter about Trig that she wrote in God's voice is a little longer in the original. Here's what Palin did not include in the book. On the one month pregnancy:

 

The whole letter is so odd. Meanwhile, the Washington Post notices Palin's frantic concerns about rumors that Trig was not her biological child as far back as March 2008. The Post says that there is "overwhelming evidence" that Trig is Palin's biological son. But for some reason they do not elaborate. The decisive evidence would be medical records of her pregnancy which her former aide Frank Bailey favored releasing, and which Palin has publicly claimed she has released. She has not.

“There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives,” – George Kennan, State Department director of policy planning and "author of the containment strategy that won the Cold War" speaking about Vietnam.

Here's what it looked like with the splint removed for cleaning. My wedding ring nearly buried itself in my finger. And so I'm postponing Ptown a little.

Jhumpa Lahiri reminisces:

In life, especially as a young girl, I was afraid to participate in social activities. I worried about what others might make of me, how they might judge. But when I read I was free of  this worry. I learned what my fictional companions ate and wore, learned how they  spoke, learned about the toys scattered in their rooms, how they sat by the fire on a cold day drinking hot chocolate. I learned about the vacations they took, the blueberries they picked, the jams their mothers stirred on the stove.

For me, the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense—the discovery of a culture that was foreign to my parents. I began to defy them in this way, and to understand, from books, certain things that they didn’t know. Whatever books came into the house on my account were part of my private domain. And so I felt not only that I was trespassing but also that I was, in some sense, betraying the people who were raising me.