articlesandessays

[articlesandessays]

To celebrate our new web shop, the @dailyrowlet has released three more designs for our products! Get them on pins, bottle openers, or round paper stickers. 20% goes to our charity of the month. Make sure you let them know what new designs you would like to see.

[articlesandessays]

His responses to most questions are short, often monosyllabic—until you hit upon a topic he is comfortable discussing, such as his fans (who delight him) or God’s opinion of man, in which case he will talk without ceasing for nearly 1,000 words. Bieber speaks about God with the easy superfluity of someone who knows how to read the Bible between the lines, who is confident he has correctly assessed its true meaning. God’s love helps him to be a good person and to recognize the cosmic value of being a good person, but God’s love is also available to him even when he doesn’t act like a good person.

Justin Bieber Would Like To Reintroduce Himself

[articlesandessays]

The perfect Star Wars movie would require no sets and no characters; only a series of visually striking images scientifically chosen to elicit emotion in the shape of the standard five act story arc. Science and law permitting, a future Star Wars trilogy will come in the form of a psychoactive drug.

Jedi Mind Tricks

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Like his cartoonishly great hair, George Lucas’s great weakness might have been his desire to be respected and taken seriously; after the first trilogy, he spent decades pretending to be a great auteur who had planned it all out after reading Joseph Campbell, his key to all mythologies. But this is like pretending you believe Santa Claus is real. You don’t. Even kids don’t really believe Santa is real; how can they believe in something they’ve never seen? They’re just happy to live in the world created by that belief. To “believe” in Santa Clause is not to care if he’s real or not, but to count the hours down until you can open your presents. And if there is one thing sillier than Star Wars, it’s taking Star Wars so seriously that you criticize it for being Star Wars, for not being original, for having failed to be something different than it is. Because here’s the thing: I don’t know if George Lucas’ hair is real, but I love that he’s rocking it like that. And Star Wars works when it is exactly as shameless as that crazy lock of hair that sweeps majestically across George Lucas’ forehead. Who cares if it’s real???

Our Star Wars Holiday Special

[articlesandessays]

An additional strength of The Marvelous Clouds is that Peters didn’t set out to write an Internet-Is-Good/Bad book like Turkle did. This allows his criticisms of new devices and his championing of “live presence” to be far more persuasive, balanced by not seeing technology as essentially less real or authentic or human, as Turkle does. Indeed, the best case for digital disconnection is made by those most skeptical of the disconnectionists

Need A Last Minute Gift? How About A Tech Book That Isn’t Dualist (via nathanjurgenson)

[articlesandessays]

[These movies] are about white men transforming the world according to their will, using their hands (and guns). Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) don’t have to abide by stupid rules or unfair structures. They can transition from nobodies to earthly gods through aggression and will. The most exciting parts of both movies are when the heroes remake the world like a painter with a canvas.

The Real Cultural Explanation for School Shootings

[articlesandessays]

Some trans women palpably fail at maleness and transition as soon as they can; some trans women give stunning, durational performances of maleness, secretly suffering for years. Every trans woman has her own relationship to the maleness she inherits at birth and turns away from when ready.

what you still don’t understand about being trans

[articlesandessays]

It’s easy to be cynical about the sanctimonious and tokenistic posturing of politicians over climate change, the disingenuous corporate responses, and the snake-oil evangelism of those selling us a future that is shiny, green, smart and redeemed, hallelujah, by big data, as we slip gently beneath the waves

We Must Learn From Sunken Cities Or Suffer Their Fate

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There’s nothing quaint or archaic about dragging out authority figures in flowy gowns to muck around with a magic rock so that people can move it without getting cursed. This is more or less how the law still works today, right down to the flowy gowns.

Before DRM, There Were Mesopotamian Boundary Stones

[articlesandessays]

What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards

Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine - The Washington Post (via nathanjurgenson)

[articlesandessays]

The OED masochistically chose to allow comments on its official announcement; at the time of writing there are dozens of responses from the world's most boring people, keyboard Quixotes leaping to the defence of Western civilisation by saying "today is a sad, sad day" and "why would you pander to this millennial token that drives us away from literature?"

Emojis Are Now The Most Advanced Form of Literature Known to Man

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kriss-laughing-and-crying?utm_source=vicetwitteruk

[articlesandessays]

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters

[articlesandessays]

Without a good quantitative measure of “aliveness,” it’s actually difficult to talk about origins. That puts us in danger of falling into the ancient Greek philosophical mosh pit, debating whether or not a flame is alive.

Inside a New Effort To Discover Life’s Origins