Link Banana

• Because they give us pictures like this.
• And also some like this.

(both via kottke)

There’s been a fair bit of coverage of London’s maybe-important mayoral election, which is tomorrow. Anne Applebaum offers the best, and most entertaining primer I’ve seen.

The candidates haven’t exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary. Though he’s been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can’t stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of “drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”).

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—”Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3”—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. “Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon,” he once remarked, “there lurks a blithering buffoon.”

Ken, by contrast, isn’t funny or self-deprecating at all. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro’s dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a “chiseling little crook” and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving “like a concentration camp guard.”

The dismissiveness of the title Time gave this excerpt (it’s the same one I used above) bothers me a bit. What Rutka Laskier, a Polish Jew who died at Auschwitz when she was only 14, wrote could certainly stand on its own merits. This juxtaposition struck me:

I am writing this as if nothing has happened. As if I were in an army experienced in cruelty. But I’m young, I’m 14, and I haven’t seen much in my life, and I’m already so indifferent. Now I am terrified when I see “uniforms.” I’m turning into an animal waiting to die …

Now to everyday matters: Janek came by this afternoon. We had to sit in the kitchen … I told him that I had given away all my photographs. He got very upset. We were joking around; we spoke about “Nica and the gang.” While we were talking he suddenly blurted out he’d like it very much if he could kiss me. I said “maybe” and continued the conversation. He was a bit confused; he thought I was Tusia or Hala Zelinger. I would have allowed [myself] to be kissed only by the person I loved, and I feel indifferent towards him.

(via brijit)

Jeffrey Goldberg got a blog at The Atlantic yesterday. His first post included a number of clever lines. Like:

Friends tell me that I will take naturally to blogging because I am in possession of many poorly considered opinions about issues I understand only marginally.

Sounds like a passable description of this blogger.

As nominally communist countries who believe firmly in capitalism as a way to economic development, China and Vietnam obviously have a lot in common. From this week’s Economist’s Special Report, an explanation of some of the ways they differ:

A foreign diplomat in Hanoi who used to serve in Beijing says that “everything here is more moderate than in China.” Vietnam is a bit less harsh with dissidents than China, and its capitalism too is less red in tooth and claw. Its health and education services have adapted more successfully to the transition to a market economy. Its press is strictly controlled, as in China, but the growing numbers of internet surfers have free access to most foreign news websites: there is no Vietnamese equivalent of the Great Firewall of China.

Whereas China is led from the top down and one man is clearly the paramount leader—Hu Jintao, who is both the head of the Communist Party and the state president—Vietnam has a consensual leadership. Its triumvirate of president, party boss and prime minister must reach accommodations with an increasingly independent national assembly and a host of other forces, and avoid upsetting the many surviving heroes of Vietnam’s independence wars.

From the large stack of old reading I’ve been meaning to do, I found this:

Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracy—a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

(via Coudal)

I’m not quite sure how to explain twistori without all the magic escaping. Just go give it a look.

(via Magnetbox)

Shmuel Rosner’s argument against Jimmy Carter’s recent plea for engagement is rather inelegant. I did, however, find this contention interesting.

There’s no moral virtue in talking to one’s enemies. Engagement is a tool, but so are disengagement and isolation. Both are effective, if used wisely; both can be damaging if used in haste. Talking to one’s enemies is a tool—as is complaining about one’s reluctance to talk to one’s enemies. This is the tool now being used by Hamas and Syria—assisted by Carter—as they try to escape and counter the isolation being applied to them. Making the case for engagement helps them achieve their strategic goal.

Only 18% of the people live in a country whose press is rated “free” by Freedom House. You may be heartened a bit by the fact that that’s actually 36% or the countries, but it still seems a terribly sad state of affairs. A map (PDF) is available as well.

Also of note, The Economist’s Asia.view column examines how censorship has changed in recent years.

A very cool advertisement for clustarack. Shared because no one will ever get tired of these things. They also have a making-of video.

(via Waxy)

This ads found by Andrew Sullivan, is also great.

A BBC corespondent recently visited Chechnya (the site of a long-time separatist war against controlling Russia) and made an eerily familiar conclusion:

“The locals are idiots,” fumed one Muscovite as the spring sun became comfortably warm and the delay continued. He did not know that the Chechen next to him had just said the same to me about Russians.

I did not feel that the north Caucasus was about to explode again. People are exhausted and the rebels are now thought to number only a few hundred.

But the missing and the dead have relatives and Chechnya has a long tradition of blood feuds.

There are countless unemployed young men.

Moscow must persuade them and their younger brothers that they have a future. If not, joining the militants may appeal more than joining the police.

A new generation of fighters may yet challenge the Kremlin’s control over Russia’s southern edge.

(via Passport)

I feel it would be a mistake not to mention this snippet from Chris Baker’s excellent psuedo-review of GTA IV. I wonder if it will give any anti-video game crusaders pause. He seems to doubt it will.

The game’s improved characterizations give far greater weight to the act of killing. Grand Theft Auto was never the most violent game going. In the sci-fi shooter Gears of War, you can chain saw enemy aliens until fountains of blood seem to splatter onto the inside of your monitor. But since the game’s world is firmly entrenched in the clichés of 1980s blockbusters like Aliens, you feel some distance from it all. There’s no such distance in GTA IV, where the physics of death feel shockingly real—bodies can’t be blown apart or torn to pieces, but they react convincingly to explosions and severe impacts. Each death is a decision. At one pivotal moment, Bellic has to choose between killing two people—one a total jerk who could help advance his career, and one a good friend who can’t do much for him. There’s no right or wrong decision here—well, actually, there are two wrong decisions—and players will struggle to make the choice. No cheat code or online FAQ can help you here.

Two bits caught my eye recently, both expressing the complicated and often conflicted relationship we have with our parents.

• For McSweeney’s, Jen Statsky made a mostly-playful list of “Conversations My Parents Must Have Had While Planning to Raise a Child.”
• For the New York Times Magazine, Bob Morris explained his complete failure to try to convert his 82-year-old father to city living.

It sounds frivolous but that’s doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. In fact, that may make it more so.

(via kottke)

I feel like I heard of this idea recently, but I can’t remember where. It intrigues me.

In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.

It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don’t suffer alone. “Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals,” said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own,” to be a tiger, a bear, lupine leader of the pack.

This is cool. Also available in slow-motion. If you’re curious, it’s brakes failed and engineers couldn’t figure out how to save it.

(via MetaFilter)

As you may have heard, a new Israel-focused lobbying group opened in Washington recently. Gary Kimiya’s thoughts on the subject are worth considering:

Nothing is more urgently needed in our political discourse than for the taboo against speaking forthrightly about Israel to be overthrown. After all, notwithstanding its profound connection to some American Jews and its (partly justified) status as a beloved icon with whom we have a “special relationship,” Israel is not the 51st state — it is a foreign country, and one smack-dab in the center of the Middle East, a region in which we have some considerable national interest. The enforced silence about Israel has prevented us from thinking clearly about the Middle East, and helped enable both the disastrous war we are now fighting in Iraq and a possible future one against Iran.

But because of the highly sensitive nature of the subject, American Jews must lead the way.

Which is why the birth of J Street, whose goal Ben-Ami says is “to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel,” is cause for unalloyed celebration. “Over the course of a quarter century of doing American politics, I’ve seen the way in which the Israel issue plays out,” Ben-Ami said in a phone interview from J Street’s Washington, D.C., office. “And it greatly disturbs me and it greatly disturbs a very large number of progressive American Jews, who believe very strongly in Israel but feel that the way in which the American Jewish community’s voice has been expressed on these issues doesn’t reflect our values or opinions. Only the voices of the far right have been heard. They’ve really hijacked the debate when it comes to Israel.”

Wanna see something really cool? Watch this short video of all the flights in the air over the USA at a given time.

(via siracusa)

A fascinating idea is being implemented in Tanzania:

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

The programme, jointly funded by the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, marks an important step in the fight to tackle Aids, which claims 2m lives a year.

(via Passport)

From the file labeled “Clever enough to excuse it’s shallowness,” a short audio story. Copious profanity ahead.

(via kottke)