Link Banana

As an eighth-rate historian who wrote twenty-some poorly-researched pages about the Chicano movement as an undergrad, this examination of what America’s most famous historical Mexican-American means caught my eye. I suspect you could enjoy it without that relation to the material, however.

When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had  5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers—the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.

(via A&L Daily)

An amateur historian takes on this mystery:

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

(via Waxy Links)

A great essay about what that means.

Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

(via Marco)

This review of a forthcoming book contains a wallop of interesting things I’d never known about America’s favorite sport fish:

Among others described in Halverson’s book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California’s Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes’ ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes).

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

This shocked me:

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report.

The rest of the piece is a worthy analysis of what that fact means.

It’s pieces like this that make me love David Brooks. Telling us what we don’t want to hear, but need to. The jumping off point:

Despite the Democratic triumph that month, [Galston and Kamarck] noted, public distrust of government remains intensely high. Historically, it has been nearly impossible to pass major domestic reforms in the face of that kind of distrust. Therefore, they counseled, the new administration should move cautiously to rebuild trust before beginning a transformational agenda.

The Economist makes (or made in November) an interesting point: it’s the middle of the road stuff, not the blockbusters, that are suffering a technology marches forward.

A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.

(via Marco, who pulled the quote that most likely explains the phenomona)

Though there’s nothing obviously new in this piece by Bruce Schneier on CNN, it’s nice to see the argument against the recent hype so clearly articulated. I thought this was a point too seldom made:

Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

(via DF)

This is unquestionably the best blog I’ve run across this month, and it’s certainly in the running for best new-to-me blog of 2009. A sampling of the near-daily statistics you can learn:

• More Coca-Cola products are consumed per person in Mexico than any other country, and the company has 70% of the nation’s soft drinks market. #
• 98% of Indians have never flown. #
• More than 12,000 laptops are reported missing every week at US airports. #
• America is home to more Wal-mart employees (1.3m) than high-school teachers. #

(via @fakelvis)

Excused by nostalgia for the decade’s passing, but really here because of Jeff Atwood and my not seeing it the first time. His unquestionable best:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

In a delightful and wide-ranging essay John McWhorter makes some good points about the underappreciated upside of the dwindling number of spoken languages.

Can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?

(via IotD)

I’ve been saving this Slate piece, which you probably saw the first time, for over a month. I finally read it and it just about met my hopes for it.

“After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it. I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard.”

It’s something of a bold claim, but there’s a fair amount to like in this profile of Jerry Morris, the first man to show that heart health and physical activity went hand-in-hand. This idea, though I imagine somewhat overstated, left me spinning:

His paper (“Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”) finally appeared in The Lancet in 1953. His hypothesis, as he still called it, was greeted with general disbelief. What could exercise possibly have to do with heart attacks? True, there had always been a vague belief that exercise was good for the soul. Mens sana in corpore sano (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”), the Roman poet Juvenal had written nearly two millennia before Morris, possibly with satirical intent, and the Victorians fetishised team spirit and muddy playing fields. But before Morris, nobody knew that exercise stopped people dying.

(via @longreads)

While tidying up, I found this draft post from June of 2008. It was still interesting to me, and the link still works, so here it is:

I found Andrew Solomon’s piece on the various stripes of autism activists fascinating, and this idea intriguing:

These activists argue that autism is not an illness but an alternative way of being. The preferred terminology among disability activists is to speak of a “person with deafness” rather than a “deaf person,” or a “person with dwarfism” rather than a dwarf. But Sinclair has said that “person-first” terminology denies the centrality of autism and has compared “person with autism” to describing a man as a “person with maleness.”

More than the non-trivial history lesson that this article teaches, I love the way it clarifies and illuminates the vast amounts of the natural world that were a mystery in pre-Copernican Europe. The sense of progress, wonder, and possibility I got from it gave me a brain-boner.

And because the article made me deeply curious about it, the best version of the Waldseemüller map is on Wikipedia. If, like mine, your browser chokes on their massive full-size version, the one appended to this review will probably sate your curiosity.

Either this piece about the competing theories of Neanderthal extinction is really interesting, or I was wrong to think I was bored by all history before 1000BC(E). In either case, recommended.

(via GMSTR)

I saw at least five links to this Onion story before I read a word of it. And when I finally did, I understood why it had at least five links. It dares to imagine a different, probably better, world:

“We know it’s good, and everyone’s pretty happy with the overall taste, so why spend all our time worrying about what other people think?” PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi told reporters during a press conference at the company’s corporate headquarters. “Frankly, it just feels sort of weird and desperate to put all this energy into telling people what to drink. If they don’t like it, then they don’t like it.”

… Nooyi told reporters the company’s $1.3 billion annual advertising budget would be put into Pepsi’s savings account, spread among various charitable organizations, and divvied up into generous bonuses for the company’s minimum-wage factory employees.

(J-Walk’s the one that finally made me pay attention)

I’ve been (rather passively) looking for a book like this for the last few years. And here I have found it as a simple, unassuming webpage. There are some (to me) strange transliterations — kamma and Nibbana for karma and nirvana — but it’s an admirable introduction for anyone striving to be a good Buddhist or just curious about what that would entail.

A sample of its wisdom:

The best remedy for a lapse or transgression already committed is to decide never to repeat it; the best remedy for neglecting to do good is to do it without delay.

(via Dan Benjamin, I think)

I thought about picking out a favorite from Lloyd’s post about recent life advice pieces, but every link is well chosen and worth perusing, You’re unlikely to regret the time.

Stuart McMillen, who does an interesting combination of commentary and cartooning, points out all the ways that in a post-communist world it is Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, whose dystopia seems more prescient. He was inspired by a book I’ve tried to read more than once.

While digging around, I noticed a comment that was far to good to pass up:

So instead of reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, you can fit this simplified form of the introduction in-between television commercials.

(via K)