The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

Jeff Hammerbacher, former Facebook employee, on how Facebook and other companies that focus on time-wasting rather than innovation (Zynga and Groupon vs. Google) are killing Silicon Valley.

(Although the article ends up taking a different bent. A good read.)

(Source: Slate)

fer1972:

The Last Chapter by Sandra Arteaga

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

RIP Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak (via bobulate)

(Source: elkdogmen)

Sweet Moses. Look at this mechanic working on some kind of phone tower 1,768 feet in the air.  I want you to know that he’s free-climbing without a safety line, which is somehow inexplicably OSHA-legal and is the industry standard, and that he’s dragging a 30 lb. bag of tools behind him. 

Charlotte Caron

(Source: ryandonato)

[The amount of freedom I’m about to have for the month of May]
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind. 

I woke up this morning thinking about “Depression Before Spring” — not the whole poem, just this one sentence. Summer always makes me think of cows because I grew up next to a cow pasture, and once school ended, I had the time to crawl through the barbed wire fence and wander around poking cow pies with sticks and tracking down the herd. I finally got to wake up this morning without a single deadline in front of me, and I want to chase down COWS, dammit. Sometimes, Atlanta really lets me down.

Can’t deal with this. Heather Christie’s on a roll over at the poets.org tumblr.

(Source: poetsorg)

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?

ryanhatesthis:

gifthorsedentistry:

In which Tom Hank’s ghost races hot cars against Al Qaeda in order to help his autistic son learn to tokyo drift

Nailed it.

bostonreview:

Gnome Chomsky

This news was Bad News yesterday. She was just so awesome.

newyorker:

Postscript: Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday at eighty-two, articulated the frustrations of women who came of age along clipped paths in the nineteen-forties and fifties, only to discover in the sixties and seventies the extent of their longing to tear up the grass. Her voice resounds, three generations on. From her 1963 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” a modernist collage in which careless references to women’s lives from Horace, Diderot, Eliot, and Shakespeare are recast in tight, furious stanzas about domestic confinement (“Dolce ridens, dulce loquens / she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk) to her expansive later poems that elaborate the love between two women, Rich continually stretched categories of feminine identity. She was an explorer, “diving into the wreck,” as the title of one of her most famous poems has it, to help us find what is naked and unencumbered in ourselves: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”

We’ve gathered here seven of the twenty-eight poems by Rich published in this magazine between 1953 and 1958. In these early poems, we see the formal discipline and metric grace that Rich would maintain (and push against) throughout her long career. This is decorous verse becoming rude: the anger to which Rich would give such powerful voice bubbles beneath the taut surfaces of these fine poems.

“England and Always” (1953)

“The Marriage Portion” (1953)

“Holiday” (1953)

“Living in Sin” (1954)

“At the Jewish New Year” (1956)

“Moving Inland” (1957)

“The Survivors” (1957)

Photograph by Neal Boenzi/New York Times/Getty Images.

wwnorton:

April Bernard: Recently I’ve been trying to explain to students why poems are sometimes so difficult and about the aesthetic of difficulty. My best explanation involves the premise that a poem is capturing a moment of absolute intense emotion. In the throes of an intense emotion, you can’t possibly write; your back is flat on the floor. So by the time you get to writing the poem, you’re trying to capture that emotion and put it in a usable form.

I think the difficult, elaborated aspects of a poem are like the wrapping on a present. It becomes a means of conveyance to hand the poem to somebody else because you can’t just hurl the emotion at them. You have to give it to them in a form that is stable and that won’t explode. It’s like putting dynamite in a nice box and then you hand the box, which is the poem, to the other person and the other person has to unpack it. If you’re lucky, they will enjoy the unwrapping. Part of the purposeful difficulty of the poem is meant to prolong the unwrapping process and to prolong the expectation.

April Bernard, from a 2001 interview in Post Road Magazine

(Source: postroadmag.com)

Can’t believe it’s actually been that long since Exxon Valdez. 

todayinhistory:

March 24th 1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill

On this day in 1989, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil were spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska by the Exxon Valdez oil tanker after it ran aground. Between 11 and 32 million US gallons of oil was spilled, creating one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters in history. The cleanup operation was especially difficult due to the Sound’s remote location which was only accessible by air or by boat. The spill damaged the local habitat, covering 1,300 miles of coastline and 11,000 square miles of ocean. It was the largest ever oil spill in US waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Whilst the cleanup operation was completed, it is believed that the oil will continue to have a negative effect on the area for many years.

The Shakespearean insult chart

monkfishjowls:

I just started writing an “application letter” about my interest in “writing pedagogy”.

The first thing I wrote was: 

Brains. We’re all made of brains.