My closest friend in the world lay next to me a day after her son died and asked me to sing her a song. To my horror, I couldn’t think of one. Finally she murmured, “Just do ‘Jingle Bells,’” and so I did. That was the day I realized that Christmas songs have nothing to […]
Jen Graves
Posted inNews
Computer Scientists and Election Lawyers Are Privately Lobbying Hillary Clinton to Challenge the Vote
Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com Okay, look. He has 290 electoral votes, she has 232. Six “faithless” electors have declared themselves. If they follow through, he gets 284. Michigan, which has 16 electoral votes, is still too close to call. If this group of people, including “voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director […]
Posted inArt
“It’s Crazy”—Pacific Northwest College of Art Suspends a Master’s Program, Leaves Teachers and Students Stranded
What’s going on in there? Photo courtesy of Another Believer I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days and keep waiting until I have time to follow with some reporting of my own. But I haven’t had time and I think you should know about this news about Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of […]
Posted in2016 Democratic National Convention
How Hillary Was Shrunk
Late last night, when the house finally fell quiet, I listened to Hillary Clinton’s speech. In the middle of listening, my husband recommended we press pause on Hillary 2016 and switch over to another broadcast: Hillary 1969. What happened next shouldn’t surprise anyone. Of course the student sounds different from the politician. But I wasn’t […]
Posted inPolitics
Science Can Tell If You’re A Conservative?
This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing’s pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Messy Melodrama
A Late Quartet: The Messiness of Life, Set to Music
A Late Quartet: the inherent messiness of life, set to music.
Posted inDrunk
With Gentrification Come Temperance Cries in New York
But g’head and let poor people stumble around bad neighborhoods. Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times calls it out.
Posted inArtsy
Katrina U Bitch
Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Here is a video from SFMOMA, by photographer Richard Misrach, who spent several weeks taking pictures there immediately following the destruction. He intended to make art pictures, but instead he ended up using the snapshots that he took as notes, using his small […]
Posted inArtsy
The Last Full-Time Art Critic at a Daily Newspaper in the Northwest
D.K. Row’s author page on The Oregonian still lists him as the daily paper’s full-time art critic (since 2002). But Eva Lake reports his position is changing, and that he’ll now report on “philanthropy, amongst other things”? There goes the last standing full-time art critic at a daily newspaper in the Northwest.