“A boss is like a teacher, and I am like the cool teacher. Like Mr. Handell. Mr. Handell would hang out with us, and he would tell us awesome jokes, and he actually hooked up with one of the students, um… and then like twelve other kids came forward. It was in all the papers… Really ruined eighth grade for us.”
—Michael Scott
April 2011
“The British Office, like the American Office, was an exceptionally well-made show. It accomplished what it set out to do. But both shows started with the same idea: turn a lens on the most mundane, pointless existence in the modern world. Where the British found despair, the Americans found hope. Where the British saw pain, the Americans saw joy. Where Tim and Dawn seemed to die a thousand small deaths every episode, Jim and Pam found a thousand small moments of happiness.”
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The Office: Why the American Remake Beats the British Original (via diablocodyisnotevenherrealname)
It’s all about time. I’ve always admired how British shows tend to have short runs and not overstay their welcome, but I think the American Office is better for having taken the time to figure out what it really wants to be. It’s undoubtedly better for gradually giving minor characters increased visibility and fleshed out personalities, a la The Simpsons. Ryan’s trajectory, in particular, is pretty epic.
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“[At gigs] we’d probably play hardcore songs for fifteen minutes, then put down our instruments, and Rick would D.J. and we’d do another ten minutes. We’d basically be doing bad cover versions of those twelve-inchers live. Maybe each of us would say eight rhymes that we wrote. You emulate the music that you love, and then after a minute you start to figure out your place in that.”
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The whole oral history is fantastic, with observations from Thurston Moore, Molly Ringwald, Rick Rubin, Run, DMC, Darryl Jenifer (Bad Brains), Tabitha Soren, Kate Schellenbach and Chuck Eddy, among others.
China's Strategic Pork Reserve →
foreignpolicy.com
China is a porcine superpower as well as a human one. The Middle Kingdom boasts more than 446 million pigs — one for every three Chinese people and more than the next 43 countries combined. So when there’s a major disruption in the pork supply it hits the economy hard; the “blue-ear pig” disease that forced Chinese farmers to slaughter millions of pigs in 2008, for example, drove the country’s inflation rate to its highest level in a decade.
To prevent further disruptions, the Chinese government established a strategic pork reserve shortly afterward, keeping icy warehouses around the country stocked with frozen pork that can be released during times of shortage. The government was forced to add to the reserve — taking pigs off the market — in the spring of 2010 when a glut led to prices collapsing.
“We need you to come in and lock shields, and strengthen up the men who are going to the fight for you. To let these other women know on the other side — these planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women that have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness — to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient. That’s what we need you to do. Because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow…deficits will continue to grow.”
—Rep. Allen West (R-FL), reminding women that they share the blame, along with poor people, for America’s current predicament.
“
To be anti-racist is to be clear on two points: First, race is a discourse, not a fact. Second, race is a discourse that affects everyone in material (which is to say) factual ways. People love, fight, earn incomes, change lives, and die around race. This isn’t made up stuff—but it is the real result of a discourse that is essentially made up stuff. And that is what is so hard to deal with. Race feels real because its effects are real.
[..]
Too many smart people right now are caught like deer in the headlights of the narcissistic “Was I wrong” business of individualized acts of racism (or not-racism), which in the broad scheme of things isn’t the point at all. If you want to be anti-racist, spend less time thinking about whether you were naughty, and more time learning how race has become a short-hand for power relations.
” —Theresa Senft
Behind A Major Law Firm's Decision To Ditch Its Defense Of DOMA →
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com
As public relations debacles go, this was a doozy. But the firm must have calculated that the alternative would have been worse. In the intervening week, a series of public and behind-the-scenes developments made it clear that the firm would suffer recriminations for defending what many of its top clients and future recruits — not to mention gay rights advocates — consider to be an anti-gay law.
Sources with knowledge of the backlash confirm that one of King & Spalding’s top clients, Coca Cola, also based in Atlanta, directly intervened to press the firm to extricate itself from the case.
The GOP continues to back itself into a corner.
