April 3, 2011
"Maybe you should be reading more of that and clicking less on the boobs."

maura:

*sucks in cheeks*

This interview is like a short story.

March 30, 2011
"On 22 June 1938, during the Great Purge, Korolev was arrested by the NKVD after being denounced by Ivan Kleymenov, Georgy Langemak, and Valentin Glushko. He was accused of deliberately slowing the work of the research institute, and following torture in the Lubyanka prison to extract a confession, was tried and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. Korolev later learned that he had been denounced by Glushko, and this may have been the cause of the life long animosity between the two men."

Sergei Korolev, Wikipedia

4:10pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZkJotx3xDkUp
Filed under: wikiprose 
March 9, 2011
Thank goodness DFW's not around for this

(h/t Mike Powell.)

March 8, 2011
Or Not

Oh well.

When I was a kid, I assumed, without even realizing I was assuming it, that I’d get to see contact; I looked forward to it like a driver’s license. (I remember having no interest in Contact when it came out: I figured I could wait.) It’s only recently that I’ve bothered to revise this and it’s making me kinda glum.

March 5, 2011
Journal of Cosmology: Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites

This is a Serious Scientific Paper and as such dense, but everyone can enjoy the abstract, which contains the breathtaking phrase “indigenous to these meteors”.

March 2, 2011
So this is a nadir.

celebraterickysargulesh:

maura:

First, let me explain what’s at the heart of this conflict: I know for a fact that there’s no single type of establishment (or type of bar/club patron for that matter) that Park Slopers would inherently view as “undesirable.” I don’t think anyone would deny that Park Slopers are about the least “racist” people on the planet. 

What IS causing strife in this situation is that over the last ten years, Park Slope has become a family-oriented and family-centric community. This can be annoying at times - believe me, as someone who has chosen not to have children, I’m more than aware of the self-entitled attitude that often pervades parts of our community.

Nevertheless, it’s just a fact that in this neighborhood, family comes first. 

Prime 6 has to realize this - but at the same time - Park Slope families need to realize that this is a free country, and that Prime 6 has a right to exist. Furthermore, no one can legally stop the owners from doing what it is they’re going to do.

Not only will Akiva Ofshtein make more money by creating a sustainable business that uses social media to bring crowd-drawing acts to Prime 6, he’ll also find that by working alongside the community he’s joining, he’ll build loyal allies in the neighbors around him - INSTEAD of the hostility we saw at  the CB6 meeting and on the internet on Tuesday.

Delete your Tumblrs, everybody. Please.

There are reasons to not want Prime 6 right there, and not a single one of those reasons involves the phrases or concepts ”social media,” “indie artists,” or, God help us all, “Yo MTV Raps ‘bling-bling’ vip club[s].”

Not to mention “processed commercial noise”.

March 2, 2011
What a Convenient World: Russian Music in the Era of Big Money

Some self-advertisement: here’s the written version of the talk I gave last weekend at EMP, filed away on my basically-defunct-but-who-knows Russian history blog Nicky’s What.

March 1, 2011
Please let this really be Britney. Also, please let every song on this album be a pickup line.

February 10, 2011

(Source: fyeahhipsterlittlemermaid)

February 1, 2011
"[T]he supposed attractions of authoritarian ‘stability’ are in fact illusory, since nothing is more volatile and unsafe than dictatorship, which lacks any method for learning from its mistakes."

— Christopher Hitchens in Slate, succinctly refuting the handwringing right who think Egyptians can’t be trusted with democracy. I did fix his prose a little.

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