This story is audio only and is 16 minutes long. That’s a lot to listen to on the internet, but it’s pretty damn interesting. The speaker is author Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. The story he tells describes a trip he made to study folk treatments for depression in Senegal and how he ended up being the recipient of that ritual. And how it affected him.
It’s a pretty amazing story. Highly recommended.
The Center for Economic and Policy research has a debt calculator that allows people to see the implications of various policies. I managed to drive the number down below the magic (according to some budget hawks) 60% line by pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reducing our nuclear stockpile, instituting a carbon tax to fight climate change, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, opening up a buy-in “public option,” increasing the social security tax cap, instituting a tiny financial speculation tax to slow speculative buying and selling, allowing the Bush estate and gift tax cuts to expire, and change the mortgage tax deduction (which only serves to inflate home prices anyway) to a 15% credit.
And all that policy allows me to increase investment in infrastructure, education and other government programs (aka stimulus spending), and increase social security benefits for low earners.
How much money can you save the government?
1) A half-hearted defense of the Star Wars prequels. I agree with his assessment of the attitudes of the Jedi in the prequels, but I’m not convinced that Lucas himself recognized that it was problematic.
2) British stores told they can no longer sell eggs by the dozen.
3) The NY Post reacts to U.S. World Cup elimination.
4) I’m not one to link to music videos, but here’s The Go-Go’s circa 1984 (love the lighting) cross-dressing onstage and looking good doing it. And Belinda Carlisle sings the hell out of this song.
5) AT-AT afternoon.
6) An American woman in a German supermarket discovers an American ethnic food section. What foods do you think they consider American?
7) More evidence on the brilliance of Facebook users. The fan page for this author’s book has 700,000 fans, and he is sure none of them care one bit about reading his book. But damn, if even three percent could be convinced to buy a copy…
Why the hell is this one wandering around my front yard at ten till ten in the morning?