April 2011
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.
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 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.
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.
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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 SenftAs 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.