Massive Attack
A latenight linkdump follows.
- best 100 songs from 1973 to 2003: Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" (at #52) and Orbital's "Halcyon + On + On" (not on the list!) define the 1990s for me. But it's not a Best-of-the-1990s list, now is it?
- MIT Open Courses master list with reading lists, syllabi, exams and assignment instructions. No markers or course credit, though. Evidently you have to pay for that. But sitll. I'm holding out until the intermediate and advanced Mandarin courses come out. That's gonna be gravy.
- Fred Kaplan on the foreign policy miscalculations of George W. Bush. I'm more inclined to agree with the argument that the lack of the effective domestic use of the political capital he gained post-Sept. 11 will be his downfall in 2004.
- the worst you'll hear about George W. Bush. I've read worse.
- letter to the editor of The New York Times re: student cheating: “Get students to understand why it is important to do the assignment. Then cheating won't make sense.” Something I've been thinking of lately, well in advance of when it will be needed: how to strike the proper balance between trust in students and discipline. See also: Edmunson on cheating, to which the letter refers.
- Hendrik Hertzberg, on why Canada is great: “Their health-care system is a mess, but it's a fairer, more humane mess than ours is. They have mastered the knack of having guns without using them to slaughter one another. They have a comparatively sensible approach to the drug problem: while our federal government tries strenuously to put marijuana smokers in jail, even (or especially) when the marijuana has been smoked for medical purposes in states whose people have voted to sanction such use, their federal government is about to decriminalize the possession of small amounts. And now—with a minimum of fuss, hardly any hysteria, and no rending of garments—they have made it legal for persons of the same gender to marry each other.” You'll note that I didn't quote the part about our government thinking that intervention in Iraq was wrong. Because, well, take a guess.
- New York Times anti-RIAA cartoon: “But I have a paper due tomorrow!”
- the quote by Quentin Tarantino in the middle of this article (you can't miss it) reminds me of the short film Stalker Guilt Syndrome, from which I suffer.
- does it matter who killed Jesus? No, says Steven Waldman. This linkdump has been brought to you by the Windows Key combination Windows Key + M (which minimizes all programs in Windows), Prefuse 73's One Word Extinguisher and the Increase Text Size menu item in Mozilla Firebird, which does exactly what you'd expect it to do.
