MP3 blog

Appropriately ugly story on 'Fiji Water' from Mother Jones

Quoted: (...) How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool? (...) The slogan on Fiji Water's website—"And remember this—we saved you a trip to Fiji"—suddenly felt like a dark joke. Every day, more soldiers showed up on the streets. When I called the courthouse, not a single official would give me his name. Even tour guides were running scared—one told me that one of his colleagues had been picked up and beaten for talking politics with tourists.

Re-faving Chris

Quoted: Rather than sticking to a single DNA script, human brain cells harbor astonishing genomic variability, according to scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The findings, to be published in the Aug. 5, 2009, advance online edition of Nature, could help explain brain development and individuality, ...

Forging Ahead - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay

Quoted: The surprising way that eBay--long thought to be a clearinghouse for looted artifacts--might help protect archaeological sites

Link to The Times Online. One of the best car reviews I've read in a long time. The writing gets far less inventive in the last half (it would have to) but the first ten paragraphs are beauts.

Quoted: (...) And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

Garrison Keillor in the NY Times. A fun Op-Ed, but I Faved it solely for the paragraph quoted below.

Quoted: As Proust said in his “Remembrance of Things Past” — or, in French, “A la recherche du temps perdu,” his memoir of doing research, or “recherche,” as a temp at Purdue and of the mysterious Madeleine, who was one of the things he remembered, but don’t let me give away the whole book, you should read it for yourselves — “Nous sommes qui nous sommes”: We are what we are, and that is the heart and soul of Republicanism today.

I hope (with conceit) that he spent substantial time crafting that breathtaking sentence.

Millions and Millions Dead | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Quoted: As the body count continues to rise, a shaken nation is struggling to cope in the wake of the mass deaths sweeping the world population. With no concrete figures available at this early stage, experts estimate at least 250,000 U.S. citizens have died in the last month alone, with death tolls across the globe reaching into the millions.

Rich People Things: writings of Chris Lehnamm on 'The Awl'

Quoted: My ill-starred tenure at New York magazine was, among other things, a crash course in the staggering unselfawareness of Manhattan class privilege. Sure, there

Fascinating first-person reportage on the what's it's like on the ground in Dubai for people of different classes.

Quoted: The Dark Side Of Dubai - The Huffington Post