What I Read This Week: April 26, 2013

April 30, 2013

Inked by april

Don’t mind me. This is just a little late. I was in New Yawk!! So here’s what I read last week…

• Remote Control – Our drone delusion. By Steve Coll, “But Awlaki’s case, troubling as it may be, raises a broader issue: the Administration’s refusal to disclose the criteria by which it condemns anyone, American or otherwise, to death.”
• Kim Gordon Sounds Off on elle.com, “We seemed to have a normal relationship inside of a crazy world,” Gordon says of her marriage. “And in fact, it ended in a kind of normal way—midlife crisis, starstruck woman.”
• Ask a Black Lapel Stylist: How to Fold a Suit Jacket When Traveling
• Pictures of people who mock me – “For years, strangers have made fun of me for being fat. But I got my power back — by turning the camera on them”
• Zero Waste – How green can you go? “Bea Johnson’s recently released book, “Zero Waste Home” ($17; Scribner), shares her experiences, as well as the expertise she has developed in attempting to create a trash-free household.”
• SoMa Dreams: Your Future Is in the Hands of Wired ’s Entrepreneur Neighbors by Kevin Kelly for Wired, “With a bit of prodding, almost every one of them can say why their work matters and where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Very few mentioned making a fortune. Money and wealth are an attraction but not the main motivator.”
• Don’t Launch Your Product by Vubhu Norby, “The fact is that when you create the big launch event, you will always see the subsequent big drop-off. Your market is not TechCrunch readers and Mark Zuckerberg does not want to eat vegetable tempura rolls with you.”
• Scaled-down homeless rights law advances, “Under the measure, a person’s housing status would be added to the list of categories included in the state’s antidiscrimination law, which applies to government entities and entities that receive money from the government.”
• The Problem with One-Night Stands in Locked-Down Boston, “I paused in the living room to offer up an uncomfortable morning salutation to the roommate, who sat on the couch wearing a robe and a distinct “who the hell is this guy?” look on her face. Yup.”
• The Science Behind Why We Procrastinate on Lifehacker, “Unsurprisingly, they found a strong link between procrastination and problematic internet use, as they wrote in the Journal of Computers in Human Behavior. But they also found that when someone was in a state of flow while engaged in a non-work related activity, she was more likely to end up with problematic internet use. In a way, then, this frames procrastination not as a time-wasting phenomenon, but more as a disconnect between intent and action. Flow is a desirable state to be in when you’re working, but you misdirect it at something else, like avoiding a boring task or the pressure of an assessment, you fall down a rabbit hole.”
• The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did
• 2nd child of Pa. couple dies after only praying
• Quora: What do people eat for breakfast outside of the US?
• Yelawolf Talks SXSW Performance, “Trunk Muzik Returns” and Why He’s Just Warming Up, “I guess you have to wait until the music. I’m writing all the reasons why it is called Love Story in the music. Passion, man. There’s a lot of truth to be told. Most of my albums have a concept. They all have some kind of theme, some kind of feeling. I really take pride in that. For the most part. Radioactive was all over the place because fucking everybody that was involved with it. Other than that, my albums are pretty consistent, vibe-wise.”
• Watched: Yelawolf – Trunk Muzik Returns and Radioactive album review on The Needle Drop
• Watched: James Blake – Overgrown album review on The Needle Drop
• Watched: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Mosquito album review on The Needle Drop
• You don’t have to pander by Seth Godin, “I’m defining pandering as using your perception of your customer’s wishes as an excuse to do work you’re not proud of.”
• Sleeping tricks on Cup of Jo, “My dad, who is a champion sleeper, once taught me a great trick: Pretend that you’re going to fall through the bed. It makes you realize how tensed up your body is and helps you relax.”
• Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge – Twelve Reasons to Die review on Pitchfork
• Simian Mobile Disco – Live review on Pitchfork
• What Mustang Learned From Social Data, “Ford social managers credit their growth more to their listening than to their talking. After all, it’s said the best conversationalists are good listeners. In social media, listening doesn’t so much require patience as it does an affinity for digging into the data.”
• A Virtual Pack, to Study Canine Minds from the NY Times
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev CHARGED In Boston Bombings While He Lay In His Hospital Bed
• The LA Weekly Posted Some Garbage, Now I Want To Talk To Them, “Women are constantly placed in a position of having to react to men’s opinions on the world. Someone at the LA Weekly made the editorial decision to run that piece. Yes, some of the women in the gallery might LOVE the fact that they’re featured in it. The fact is: it offends someone.”
• What’s Tylenol Doing to Our Minds? on The Atlantic, “Physical pain and social rejection share a neural process and subjective component that are experienced as distress.” That neural process has been traced to the same part of the brain. They figure that if you blunt one, you blunt both. As they told LiveScience, “When people feel overwhelmed with uncertainty in life or distressed by a lack of purpose, what they’re feeling may actually be painful distress … We think that Tylenol is blocking existential unease in the same way it prevents pain, because a similar neurological process is responsible for both types of distress.”
• Today on the Ranch: 4.20.13, Part 1, “The goal of the class was to cre­ate your own per­sonal color story through tech­niques Anna uses in her own work. … What was sur­pris­ing to hear was that Anna only ever works from a palette of 24 col­ors.”
• Rape and Death Threats: What Men’s Rights Activists Really Look Like on Jezebel
• Watched: Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter on Funny or Die
• City closer to acquiring Noe Valley open space
• It’s Very Condescending to Tell a Childless Woman She’d Be a Great Mom, But what would a conversation with your mother-in-law be without a little nugget of guilt that she gets to leave on your pillow before she turns down your metaphorical marital bed? “Still, I can’t say that it isn’t a little bit sad to think that I’ll never see your children,” she continued. “And I know that you two would make great parents if that’s what you wanted.”
• Watched: Suki 8 months (a cat does tricks)
• Watched: A$AP Rocky & Danny Brown on Bad Interviews

Real, actual books:

• Finished: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Still truckin’ on: Bird by Bird
• Started: Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
• Started: Mauve: how one man invented a color that changed the world

Posted in What I Read This Week.