| Failure to Compare |
[02 Jun 2015|10:00am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/06/the_opposite_house_by_claudia_emerson_and_sand_opera_by_philip_metres_reviewed.html On Nov. 21, 2014, the United States launched what Micah Zenko, writing in the Atlantic, termed “its 500th non-battlefield targeted killing.” Exactly two weeks after that strike, which, according to an unnamed source, used two missiles to destroy a house in northwest Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, killing six people and wounding three more, the American poet Claudia Emerson died from cancer that had traveled from her colon to her liver and brain.
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| Why So Poky? |
[02 Jun 2015|02:06pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/06/the_poky_little_puppy_and_other_awful_canonical_children_s_books.html Reading to one’s children is, as everyone knows, one of the great pleasures of parenthood. I love the creaturely warmth of my daughter snuggled up close and the feeling of giving her something intrinsically human and necessary. And Eliza loves being read to. She enjoys the stories and the pictures, but more than that, I think, she responds to the mental intimacy: the knowledge that she and I are looking at the same pages and interpreting the same sentences. It’s a balm for the terrible isolation that arrives around age 2, along with language and self-consciousness—the knowledge that one’s experience is inescapably private. And so the time I spend reading to her can feel, for both of us, like communion.
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| Your Socks Can No Longer Get You Deported |
[02 Jun 2015|03:22pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/mellouli_v_lynch_drug_paraphernalia_case_kansas_law_can_t_deport_legal_resident.html Moones Mellouli made a lot of mistakes. On April 4, 2010, Mellouli—a native of Tunisia and a lawful permanent resident living in Kansas—got into his car drunk and with a suspended license, and he hit the road. Then he got caught by a cop and hauled into jail. While locking up Mellouli, the police found four orange tablets in his sock. Mellouli quickly admitted the pills were Adderall, a controlled substance for which he had no prescription. Ultimately, Mellouli pled guilty to a very minor charge: possessing drug paraphernalia in violation of Kansas law.
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| Your Socks Can No Longer Get You Deported |
[02 Jun 2015|03:22pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/mellouli_v_lynch_drug_paraphernalia_case_kansas_law_can_t_deport_legal_resident.html Moones Mellouli made a lot of mistakes. On April 4, 2010, Mellouli—a native of Tunisia and a lawful permanent resident living in Kansas—got into his car drunk and with a suspended license, and he hit the road. Then he got caught by a cop and hauled into jail. While locking up Mellouli, the police found four orange tablets in his sock. Mellouli quickly admitted the pills were Adderall, a controlled substance for which he had no prescription. Ultimately, Mellouli pleaded guilty to a very minor charge: possessing drug paraphernalia in violation of Kansas law.
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| The New Randroids |
[02 Jun 2015|10:29pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/rand_paul_and_the_tech_vote_why_he_wants_it_and_could_just_get_it.html Every time Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul assails mass government surveillance on the floor of the Senate, it is surprising to see who emerges to praise the erratically unorthodox Republican, from Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald to true-blue progressive reporter Marcy Wheeler. This support comes with caveats, of course. But the lefty applause for Paul also arrives at a moment of a distinctly lacking enthusiasm for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. More importantly, these plaudits align with many of the concerns of a quiet but influential contingent of liberal-leaning techies who might one day become Rand Democrats—or Democrats willing to support some other, future right-wing firebrand with lefty-compatible ideas about civil liberties—much in the way disaffected blue-collar workers became Reagan Democrats. Think of them as the New Randroids—and definitely not because they admire Ayn Rand, which they don’t. Progressives and loyal Democrats would be wise not to ignore them.
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