“The Women Take Over” by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate​.com):

… it’s hard to imag­ine President Obama con­jur­ing up, from even the dark­est, most devi­ous under­ground lab, a new jus­tice who would be half as fierce as the four-car train of whoop ass we saw today.

It’s hard to imag­ine any­one con­jur­ing up a bet­ter com­men­ta­tor on the Supreme Court than Dahlia Lithwick.

Her writ­ing on yes­ter­day’s oral argu­ments in Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt is a beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tion of why I’d rather read her than pretty much any other jour­nal­ist work­ing today.

Portraits In Faith: Parker Palmer:

When you are lost in the dark you still have a self that you can use to try to nav­i­gate and nego­ti­ate and grope your way towards some light. But when you become the dark, you don’t have any­thing to work with. And all sem­blance of reli­gious faith or a feel­ing of God’s pres­ence just dis­ap­pears. What I don’t under­stand is how some peo­ple are able to come through depres­sion and find them­selves more alive and more whole on the other side. I don’t under­stand the mys­tery of tenac­ity or what­ever you want to call it that allows some peo­ple to go through that pro­found expe­ri­ence and find them­selves back in the light with a bet­ter life than the one they had before.

Read the rest

According to Zentall, an activ­ity that uses a sense other than that required for the pri­mary task — lis­ten­ing to music while read­ing a social stud­ies text­book — can enhance per­for­mance in chil­dren with ADHD. Doing two things at once, she found, focuses the brain on the pri­mary task.

Know that it is OK to do two things at once: carry on a con­ver­sa­tion and knit, or take a shower and do your best think­ing, or jog and plan a busi­ness meet­ing. Often peo­ple with ADD need to be doing sev­eral things at once in order to get any­thing done at all.

Seth Godin:

When peo­ple say, “The tip­ping point,” they often mis­un­der­stand the con­cept in Malcolm’s book. They’re actu­ally talk­ing about the flip­ping point.

The tip­ping point is the sum total of many indi­vid­u­als buzzing about some­thing. But for an indi­vid­ual to start buzzing, some­thing has to change in that person’s mind. Something flips from bore­dom or igno­rance to excite­ment or anger.

Brilliance from Seth Godin:

When I played clar­inet in high school, I never prac­ticed. I blamed it on my dog, who howled, but basi­cally I was a lousy music student.

At my weekly les­son, though, the teacher would scold me, guess­ing that I’d only prac­ticed three or four hours the week before. I was so good at sight read­ing that while I was truly mediocre at the clar­inet, I was way bet­ter than any­one who had never prac­ticed had any right to be.

We often test sight read­ing skills, par­tic­u­larly in job inter­views. In that highly-charged encounter, we test the applicant’s abil­ity to think on her feet. That’s a great idea if the job involves a lot of feet think­ing, but oth­er­wise, you’re inspect­ing for the wrong thing, aren’t you? Same with a first date. Marketing your­self to a new per­son often involves being charis­matic, clever and quick—but most jobs and most rela­tion­ships are about being con­sis­tent, per­sis­tent and brave, no?

What one per­son has to offer another is their own being, noth­ing more and noth­ing less.

Pity the leader caught between unlov­ing crit­ics and uncrit­i­cal lovers.

Seth Godin:

Steve devoted his pro­fes­sional life to giv­ing us (you, me and a bil­lion other peo­ple) the most pow­er­ful device ever avail­able to an ordi­nary per­son. Everything in our world is dif­fer­ent because of the device you’re read­ing this on.

What are we going to do with it?

Steve Jobs (again):

Simple can be harder than com­plex: You have to work hard to get your think­ing clean to make it sim­ple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Steve Jobs:

Creativity is just con­nect­ing things. When you ask cre­ative peo­ple how they did some­thing, they feel a lit­tle guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw some­thing. It seemed obvi­ous to them after a while. That’s because they were able to con­nect expe­ri­ences they’ve had and syn­the­size new things. And the rea­son they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe­ri­ences or they have thought more about their expe­ri­ences than other people.

This is amazing.

Hot Dogs

by Christopher Walken

Do you enjoy eat­ing hot dogs? I hope you won’t be put off by my frank­ness when I tell you that I absolutely love them. In fact, I enjoy no food item more than a freshly-boiled hot dog. Now, I’ve done a lot of movies, and it’s true that I’ve worked with quite a few celebri­ties who did not share this opin­ion. I’m sorry to say that these peo­ple have always angered me.

There are two types of peo­ple in this world: those who eat hot dogs when­ever it is pos­si­ble to do so, and those who opt to do other things with their free time. Who do the lat­ter think they are kid­ding? What pas­time could be more reward­ing than the con­sump­tion of hot dogs? I haven’t yet found one, and I don’t expect to in my life­time. Unlike other foods, hot dogs can be eaten at any time, in any place, and it is not nec­es­sary to cook them. Now, I ask you: Why not eat hot dogs? They are delicious.

I carry a bag of hot dogs with me wher­ever I go. I eat them from the bag when­ever I get the urge, regard­less of the cir­cum­stances. When I make a movie, my hot dogs are my co-stars. If, in the mid­dle of a scene, I decide I want to con­sume a hot dog, I do so. I waste the direc­tor’s time and thou­sands of dol­lars in film stock, but in the end, it is all worth it, because I enjoy eat­ing hot dogs more than I enjoy act­ing. This both­ers some peo­ple. I was sup­posed to por­tray Batman, but when Tim Burton learned of my hot dog crav­ings, he asked Michael Keaton to wear the cape. To this day, I am peeved about this.

When we filmed The Dead Zone, I ate over 800 hot dogs a day. It was nec­es­sary. My char­ac­ter needed to come across as intense as pos­si­ble, and I found the inspi­ra­tion for that inten­sity in my intense love for hot dogs. The direc­tor, David Cronenberg, said that he would never work with me again. I kept eat­ing hot dogs when the cam­eras were rolling, and that seemed to bother him. I say fuck him. He does­n’t even like hot dogs.

I would like to end by empha­siz­ing once again that I really like to eat hot dogs. If any of you peo­ple dis­agree, I loathe you. I despise you. Not only that, but I also despise all your loved ones. I want to see them torn to pieces by wild dogs. If I ever meet you in per­son, I’ll smash your brains in with a fuck­ing bat. Then we’ll see who does­n’t like hot dogs.

Next week: My thoughts on Woody Allen, hot dog hater and shitty director.

Source: The Onion, some­time in the late ’90s, pre­dat­ing their cur­rent web archive.

(via Gruber, on American McCarver)

This isn’t a town hall meet­ing on Parks and Recreation, but it feels a lot like one.

- Hunter (on the mis­han­dling of the “Delta hates Jews” PR mess)

I’m glad the man and his potty mouth have returned to reg­u­lar writing.

A designer knows he has achieved per­fec­tion not when there is noth­ing more to add, but when there is noth­ing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, on his 111th birthday
(orig­i­nally via Carmine Gallo)

In light of the Weiner scan­dal, Jeffrey Goldberg com­ments on Jewish women:

I’m not going near the ques­tion of what Jewish women do or don’t do in bed, but suf­fice it to say that Jewish women are ter­ri­bly, and con­tra­dic­to­rily, stereo­typed by soci­ety, and, often, by Jewish men them­selves. Either they’re dark, hot-blooded sluts (a com­mon Wasps fan­tasy, by the way — some of my best friends are Wasps with Jewish women-fix­a­tions) or they are, as Weiner would have it, the frozen cho­sen. The truth, of course, is that all women are dif­fer­ent, but I’ve noticed a cou­ple of things over the years: 1) A great num­ber of Jewish women pos­sess an irre­sistible com­bi­na­tion of sex­i­ness, intel­li­gence, ambi­tion, and a deep capac­ity for love; and 2) Many Jewish men, the less manly-men, in par­tic­u­lar, are intim­i­dated by these super­star Jewish women…

…I know this sounds as if I’m adver­tis­ing for a Jewish woman, but, thanks to the great philo-Semite Malcolm Gladwell, I found the best one, thank you very much.

Jeez.

Seeing as he and I both man­aged to over­come our eth­nic pre­dis­po­si­tion to being intim­i­dated by strong Jewesses (in other words, I get where he’s com­ing from, I guess), it sounds to me like he’s brag­ging. (“Congressman Weiner rep­re­sents a cliché stereo­type, but check me out. I can han­dle the Jewish ladies.”)