Aristotle on trolling

“[T]his is how the troll generates strife. For what he indicates is known to be false or harmful or ignorant; but he does not say that thing, but rather something close. In this way he retains the possibility of denial, and the skilled troll is always surprised and hurt, or seems to be, when the others take his comments up. And so he sets the community apart from each other, and introduces strife where before there was scarcely disagreement. For each person who takes up what was said grasps only a part of it, and insists on that, and is annoyed when others affirm something different.”

Only 90s kids know how Elisabeth Moss played two members of this Irish girl band.

"adoy"

Easily the worst Vice headline ever

'Inherent Vice' and the Complicated Protagonists of Paul Thomas Anderson

The New Yorker

They remember. Babies remember.

JADEN: When babies are born, their soft spots bump: It has, like, a heartbeat in it. That’s because energy is coming through their body, up and down.

WILLOW: Prana energy.

JADEN: It’s prana energy because they still breathe through their stomach. They remember. Babies remember.

WILLOW: When they’re in the stomach, they’re so aware, putting all their bones together, putting all their ligaments together. But they’re shocked by this harsh world.

An anti-Friedman screed as old as I am

"It is not just the comic philistinism of [Tom] Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner, or his grating indifference to values and principles by which, perhaps misguidedly, Arabs and Jews have believed themselves to be informed. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility — qualities that may explain the book’s quite startling commercial success." –Edward Said, writing in the Village Voice, in 1989

I can't believe it's not

Pigeon Forge was not a singular product of Parton’s success—it had long been a weird, plastic tourist mecca when, in 1986, she became a co-owner of Silver Dollar City, the prior theme park, and reshaped it in her image.

me too

On the great Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel

"Cavanaugh realized that the intense heat of the transit that had so beleaguered mail service would actually work to his advantage in a burrito tunnel. The burritos could be stored frozen on the Western end and arrive fully heated through in New Jersey. Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil - it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets."

Say what you will about the Mayor (and many people do! We talked about his critics in this interview) but you have to admit he knows how to get a suit cut.

Photo by the formidable Isaac Aronjilla

Why is there a big gender gap in L.A. government and what's being done to fix it? Talk to my first cover story for the L.A. Register, laaaadieeeeez.

for $200 [weblink; via]

chag sameach!