vinay

High school teacher Joel Rogness lets students in his honors world language class blog as their literary heroes. Instead of making them write essays about the themes of The Catcher in the Rye, Rogness’ students can pretend to be Holden Caulfield writing a blog post, and then get feedback via comments from their peers around the world.

Could Blogging Be the Key to Raising a Generation of Great Writers? – Education – GOOD

I can’t take any more options. I’ve already spent weeks comparing sets of features I’m pretty sure I’ll never need. I tried out at least fifteen applications on my desktop, phone and on the web. I was completely overwhelmed by choices. The process began to take over my life. I spent hours in front of my laptop, I’d demo various features for my wife and kids, and my quest quickly became the only topic I could focus on when interacting with friends.

Tweetage Wasteland : Buried Under an Avalanche of Options

Lately, I’ve come to realize that I hate doing research like this. I can’t (for instance) read lifehacker, or tips on the perfect naming scheme for text files.

The closest I come to research is asking someone who knows {travels,listens,cooks} what they like, then I go with that.

If I start researching, I don’t stop until I have a 100% solution (which I never find). If I buy something that gets my 90% of the way there, I really don’t mind compensating for that 10%.

This secret shift to full-on entanglement is also, to my mind, a well-meant but ill-conceived undermining of the Arab Spring. Regime change by force of foreign arms is not a democratic revolution; it is the imposition by foreign powers of their agenda in the service of groups we do not know or understand – and will never know and never fully understand. It actually wrests power away from Libyans and gives it to Westerners, perpetuating a dependency the Arab spring has finally been able to break from. It is, to put it simply, messing with the momentum of history, the real balance of power in the region. And if this has been done covertly already, if the president has bypassed Congress, the American people, and the UN and has already secretly armed the rebels, then we need to get more than angry. To have a third war foisted on us – this time by by secretive fiat – requires serious protest from the president’s core supporters more than anyone. This nascent war needs to be nipped firmly in the bud.

Shoes – Not “Boots” – On The Ground – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Transforming the most creative strategies of the tax team into law is another extensive operation. G.E. spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Records filed with election officials show a significant portion of that money was devoted to tax legislation. G.E. has even turned setbacks into successes with Congressional help. After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether – NYTimes.com