As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schnei er had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”
”—Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Things He Carried” (November 2008).So…this is a real thing. This begs the question: Which columnist would you most want to see slapping around terrorists in a comic book setting?
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Instead of recommending some Tumblrs for you to follow on this Tumblr Tuesday, we’d like to provide the opportunity for some feedback. Do you like what you see here? What would you like to see more (or less) of? Who should we be following?
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Anyone have the HMS Invincible on their holiday wish list?
I regard free speech as a fundamental moral right, a normative as well as instrumental value. She treats speech rights as immoral when they involve expressions of hatred. She aims for a society in which people feel “safe” from exposure to the hateful feelings of others. I aim for one in which people can safely harbor and express their ideals and emotions, including their hatreds. She asserts that the law can regulate speech without regulating emotion or belief; I assert that emotions, beliefs, and speech are inextricably bound: I shape my ideas by articulating them; writing is how I formulate and clarify my thoughts. She regards hate speech as conduct; (censors often conflate speech and action). I insist that it’s speech. In other words, if our debate had devolved into an exchange of epithets, if we’d hurled hateful names at each other, then according to her standards, we would each have been guilty of criminal conduct. I’d say we were guilty of embarrassing ourselves.
She welcomes the intrusion of state power into personal relations when they involve what she considers hateful speech. I shudder at the thought of it. Her vision of a safe society inspires in me visions of a Maoist re-education camp.
”—Wendy Kaminer and Femi Otitoju debate the moral limits of free speech.The Wikileaks docu-dump hints at trouble in China:
During the meeting, U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana C. Gfoeller asked Zhang about allegations that China had offered Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to close a U.S. air base. In response, a flustered Zhang argued that China couldn’t afford to make the offer in question.
Kyrgyz officials had told Gfoeller that China had offered Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to close Manas air base, a U.S. Air Force installation in Kyrgyzstan used by the U.S. military to resupply troops in Afghanistan. The cable describes Zhang as essentially losing it in response, temporarily unable to speak Russian, and sputtering angrily to his Chinese aide.
“It would take $3 from every Chinese person” to pay for it, the cable quotes Zhang as saying. “If our people found out, there’d be a revolution.”
Alexis Madrigal probes the weird history of industrial gravy:
LIFE magazine ads from the 1960s testify to the proliferation of dry mix gravies. Pillsbury offered a “Daring Offer,” a free sample of any of its gravy mixes to make good on its promise to beat the taste of all competitors. Meanwhile, Durkee’s proclaimed, “All sauce and gravy mixes are made for convenience, butDurkee’s is for dining!”
Even now, one can go into any store and find a plethora of little pouches packed with powder. Add water, heat, stir, and it’s ready. Indeed, the texture, smell, and taste of these mixes is certainly gravy-like.
But homecooking is to industrial food processing what walking is to flying an airplane. The gravy mix isn’t just huge vats of drippings mixed with flour and water. More than a century’s worth of food engineering have gone into making a powder you mix with water and microwave in three minutes to manufacture a smooth gravy.
Elizabeth Wurtzel examines the appeal of Sarah Palin:
So I suppose I should confess: I like Sarah Palin. I like her because she is such a problem for all these political men, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their polls, and their Walter Dean Burnham theories of transformative elections, and their economy this and their values that–and here comes Palin, and logic just doesn’t apply. She speaks in spoonerisms, she raises wretched children, she’s a quitter, she’s a refudiater, she shoots moose and beats halibut, she has a dumb accent that doesn’t have the charm of Charleston or the Brahmin of Boston–really, she is just a lot of quirks.
But it doesn’t matter. It will never matter and I bet it never has mattered, because Sarah Palin is hot. She has sex appeal. That’s why people like her. That’s the whole story. Everyone has to stop trying to deconstruct and decode it, because there is no accounting for chemistry, and Sarah Palin has lots of it going on with her public. I don’t think anyone knows or cares what in particular she stands for, other than some general conservative cache of principles, because they are in love with her.
Most immigrants have to find a place for themselves in a different but already-existing social and national culture that, on at least some level, expects them to adapt and adopt that culture as their own. Indeed, there is often little tolerance for anything less than full and uncritical acceptance and admiration of their new land. But for many immigrants–even those who become citizens and love their new country–the equation is far more complicated.
…
In some ways, the demarcation line of loyalty for naturalized citizens is clear. You have to swear loyalty to your new home over your native land, even in case of war. But it’s easier to switch a passport than an identity. And while we may want immigrants to view their departure from their country of origin as a never-look-back divorce, I think the process of immigration and changing citizenship is more akin to a single person marrying into an existing family–with all the issues that come with that kind of blended family relationship.
”—In anticipation of Thanksgiving, Lane Wallace ponders America’s post-Pilgrim immigration balancing act.While you probably associate Thanksgiving with homecooked food made around the hearth, inventors have long been working on ways to modernize the family meal. Here, we present nine real patents – from an in-oven pie-filling machine to a drill used to speed the creaming of corn – that might help to make your holiday preparations go a little more smoothly.
Instead of recommending interesting Tumblrs to you, we’d like you to suggest some smart, provocative, and stunning Tumblrs to add to our daily read. Who should we be following and why?
All this year, and all round the globe, the Royal Society of London has been celebrating its 350th birthday. In a sense, it has been a celebration of science itself and the social importance of its history. The senior scientific establishment in Britain, and arguably in the world, the Royal Society dates to the time of Charles II. Its early members included Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, Thomas Hobbes, Christopher Wren and even – rather intriguingly – Samuel Pepys. But amid this year’s seminars, exhibitions and publications, there has been one ghost at the feast: the historic absence of women scientists from its ranks.
Tom McNichol tells the story of one man’s brush with history:
People of a certain age remember exactly where they were on November 22, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. James Tague remembers the day better than most. At the moment of the shooting, Tague was standing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, and was struck on the right cheek by fragments from a ricocheting bullet meant for Kennedy. Tague suffered only a superficial wound that day, but in a way, the injury is still fresh, 47 years late
[Above: A photograph, signed for a fan, shows Tague standing beneath the underpass near the grassy knoll minutes before the bullets fired.]
While Pixar’s films might rule this millennium’s box offices, Walt Disney was the original king of animation. And nobody can ever take that from him because like any good American business man, he got it in writing.
Really. He patented the ‘art of animation.’
It’s that time of the week again. What are you reading this weekend?