Most of the manuscripts in Timbuktu are safe, thanks in no small part to librarians. The Islamists "damaged or stole only a limited number" of them before fleeing; none of them destroyed an entire library or collection.The manuscripts cover subjects from science, astrology and medicine to history, theology, grammar and geography. They date back to ( Read more... )

after having read both Aaron Bady and Corey Robin on the subject. Here is Bady's first paragraph:Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln is about Obama, we are told, or don’t need to be told. It is about the triumph of a political compromiser, and it argues that radical change comes about by triangulation, by back-room deals, and by a ( Read more... )

Public Shaming has found a bunch of people who were not happy that a few high school marching bands and dancers from Mexico took part in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Here are just a few:


( Read more... )

Somewhere in the conversation reblogged here:But… and is it just me… or do people say a lot about the LGBT people who were oppressed during the Holocaust but not a whole lot about the asexual and demisexual victims?

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First-term Republican state rep. Loy Mauch is on record as saying the following ( Read more... )

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To Radiolab listeners. Not to the Yangs. No acknowledgment that the science was highly dubious, to say the least. No response to the accusations by Hmong speakers that the final edits were highly slanted. No addressing of Radiolab's refusal to provide the Yangs with a transcript without a court order.

Hmong commenters such as Diane in MN and ( Read more... )

Apparently, if you're a smug white radio "journalist" who wants to prove that the U.S. was wrong in 1981 to accuse the Soviets of selling chemical weapons to the communist states in Laos and Cambodia, despite many refugees' reports of deadly "yellow rain" coming out of the sky, you don't interview and grill former members of the Reagan ( Read more... )

A quote from one guest at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in the Hamptons:I don't think the common person is getting it. Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them. We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies - everybody who’s got the right to vote - they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower ( Read more... )

"In 1939, Germany established gun control," [Samuel] Wurzelbacher states over footage of himself shooting apples off logs at a makeshift range. "From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated."

He makes a similarly glib claim about the Armenian genocide.
Sammy, why don't you let someone ( Read more... )