Blog
-
Today, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California decided that Proposition 8 to the California constitution violated the United States constitution. This decision marks one more step in the historic–and seemingly endless–march for gay rights in the United States and the world. California has long been a center of gay activism and…
-
I found this article the other day, and it isn’t that recent article by today’s terms (read: 6 months ago) but it is still relevant. First and foremost, I found it particularly interesting how Deresiewicz tied the history of friendship to our latest foray into “faux” friendship, seeming to trace a line directly from Plato…
-
So being in Mongolia has been a bit of an affirmation of Friedman economics for me, not that I had such a problem with them before but Mongolia takes the models to such an extreme that it provides a willing test subject and performs very well. We pulled into Ulaanbaatar (UB) by train at about…
-
Recently, I was putting together a project proposal for a client when I stumbled across a fairly common problem. Embarking on a new venture, for any startup, is risky, but for tech startups, perhaps, the risk is hedged by relatively little overhead and a short timeline to development. After all, a new website can be…
-
I have had the pleasure in the last week of becoming intimately familiar with Mailchimp, the Web 2.0 version of Constant Contact. My overall impression of Mailchimp is that it is not only fun, but satisfying to use. That’s what a Web 2.0 product should be about. To summarize, Mailchimp is an email program which…
-
María Rosa Menocal’s aim in Shards of Love is to trace the origins of what she deems the Romance philological tradition—a tradition steeped in myth, love, longing, and a conversation with the past in the form of memory. She traces this tradition to the medieval lyric, and thus tries to connect Western philology, in its modern…
-
The apartheid museum presents itself as an attempt to educate and renew, not to shock and horrify. It stands in stark contrast to museums which chronicle other instances of human suffering such as the Holocaust and slave museums; the Apartheid Museum is designed to provide a path backwards into history, yet simultaneously put history in…
-
So we’ve been consistently on the road for the last couple days and we’re now settled in Cape Town. I’ll give a brief account of what happened in the past two days.
-
So New Year’s was a blast. We had a slow evening. We went to the shopping mall and bought smoked game, potatoes, vegetables and spices, went back to the room and cooked a New Year’s feast for dinner. We had a kitchen area in our room which we used–and abused. When we were done there…
-
When I had finished writing the last update Ioana and I left the internet cafe and Codrin was gone. He said he was going to the shop next door but he wasn’t there, so we wandered around a bit looking for him and then went off to the cafe for another drink. It turns out Codrin…
brian mayer 