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Exclusive: RNC document mocks donors, plays on ‘fear’ - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com.

*You already know what I’d say anyways.

I had grabbes these to post during the holidays, but then never got around to it. But please don’t let that stop you from reading them. The Culture of Old Europe is particularly noteworthy and enjoyable if you like looking at primitive artifacts.

Culture of Old Europe Is Uncloaked in an Exhibit at N.Y.U. - NYTimes.com.

Back to the Land - And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog - NYTimes.com.

To find overlooked New Yorkers, researchers even considered using water bills to estimate how many times toilets were flushed and gauge population based on average human needs. But, Dr. Salvo said, “That is too unreliable, from an empirical standpoint.”

New York City’s Hidden Homes Pose Challenge in 2010 Census - NYTimes.com.

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other.

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine.

Who knew that Wittgenstein is behind one of the key improvements to Google?  Let me tell you, those people are very very very very smart.

Tags: google

David Kamp on John Hughes | Features | Vanity Fair.

Following Hughes’s sudden death, at age 59, last summer, the author delves into his intense connections and sudden breaks with his Brat Pack actors, as well as the essential anomaly of his brief Hollywood reign.

Terrific piece on John Hughes in Vanity Fair this month.  Details about his rise to fame, his relationship to his early proteges, and what he did after Hollywood.

Paige Williams – Journalism, etc. - Finding Dolly Freed - Possum Living.

Paige Williams reconnects with Dolly Freed the author of Possum Living a book about how to “Live well without a job and with (almost) no money.

In a time when 1 out 5 of us are unemployed or underemployed this book might as well be required reading.

Tags: Dolly Free, Great Recession, Paige Williams, Possum Living

Nick Tosches on Opium Dens | vanityfair.com.

Nick Toshes goes on a hunt for the last opium den.  Real opium.  The Philosopher’s Stone of drugs apparently.

It’s a good read.

Tags: Drugs, Nick Tosches, Opium, Vanity Fair

Naomi Klein on Branding Taking over American Politics

I love this line about Obama’s presidency so far:

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions,

…

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede).

…

Obama … follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States).

Tags: Naomi Klein, No Label, Obama

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

These entire article reads like a bizarre Hollywood movie script starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.  Except true.  Worth a read if you feel like maintaining your general ongoing outrage about Gitmo.

The Canadian Press: Robert Parker, 77-year-old creator of ‘Spenser’ private eye novels, dies.

I’m making the saddest of sad faces right now.

My friend Linda wrote about it too.