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  1. Escape into Whiteness by Brent Staples | The New York Review of Books

    Some of the details of 19th and early 20th century courts etc deciding whether specific mixed-race individuals count as white or coloured are bizarre, as if part of some kind of epic theatre piece.

  2. The Brilliant Music of Ravel by Charles Rosen | The New York Review of Books

    As someone who’s only awareness of Ravel is what I think of as the flouncy Torville & Dean ‘Bolero’, I love the descriptions here (especially in section 3) of exactly why Ravel’s music was avant-garde. Unfortunately, subscribers only.

  3. Predators and Robots at War by Christian Caryl | The New York Review of Books

    “The US Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots.” “There are already more [military] robots operating on the ground (15,000) than in the air (7,000).” “…a pilotless aircraft … ‘has the same rights as if a person were inside it, … official policy.’”

  4. The Court: A Talk with Judge Richard Posner by Eric J. Segall | The New York Review of Books

    Interesting (and subscribers only) but saving it for this quote: “We have a political system in which the definition of a gaffe is telling the truth.” Also, for some reason I love reading about the American judicial system.

  5. What Happened at the Macondo Well? by Peter Maass | The New York Review of Books

    I like the parallels drawn between the oil and banking industries: “lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press”, disasters blamed on rogue companies rather than industry-wide problems.

  6. School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

    I suspect much of this angry-making article applies to UK education too. Surely anyone working on, or funding, policies for education really should spend at least a few weeks with a variety of teachers and children.

  7. Elif Batuman · Diary: Pamuk’s Museum · LRB 7 June 2012

    I hadn’t heard of this. Orhan Pamuk made a museum of objects belonging to characters from his novel ‘The Museum of Innocence’, which he’d originally intended to be written as a museum catalogue. Now he’s writing the catalogue for this museum.

  8. Timoni.org - Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear.

    Great stuff. And yet I still found myself thinking “this is so complicated!” (via Stellar)

  9. qTranslate | www.qianqin.de

    Translation plugin for WordPress (maybe simpler than WPML?).

  10. 76 Premium WordPress Themes With Over 100k Customers

    Some more shiny happy themes.

  11. Themes | Kriesi.at - Wordpress Themes and HTML Templates

    Look alright. For future reference.

  12. Timeless Modern Tactile Functional

    Cos - some nice simple, not too expensive clothes. (via @joroach)

  13. The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun

    I enjoyed this understandable description of different basic ways of constructing the basic physics of platform games. (via CreativeJS)

  14. ifttt / Log tweets to a Dropbox file

    Nice idea for making a backup of your tweets and @replies. (via Stellar)

  15. FIRECalc: A different kind of retirement calculator

    It amazes me someone could go to this much effort to create a very complex tool (scroll down…) but leave the interface so bafflingly impenetrable. (via Mr Money Mustache)

  16. Soul Sides / Sliced: Breaking Down: The Emotions’ “Blind Alley” (Stax, 1972)

    I like this way of discussing a song, displaying annotations while it plays.

  17. About HTML semantics and front-end architecture – Nicolas Gallagher

    Really good in-depth thoughts about writing HTML/CSS. Reminds me a bit of that SMACSS style guide (which I can *never* remember the name/acronym for). (via Dotcode)

  18. Twitter / SeaContainers: The largest ever picture o

    100m wide photo of the royal family on the south bank of the Thames. As Londonist put it, “reminiscent of Pyongyang leader worship.” Horrific. Tag “jubilympics”. (via Londonist)

  19. Cash in the attic: short-term home letting | Life and style | The Guardian

    Couple appear in national newspaper showing off their Barbican flat which they let out to strangers, against the terms of their lease. What fun.

  20. Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

    The same with Matt Webb’s thoughts on Lanchester’s piece. Belatedly adding it to my link memory.

  21. John Lanchester · Marx at 193 · LRB 5 April 2012

    Just realised I never Pinboarded this at the time, only wrote about it. For completion’s sake.

  22. Ian Bogost - What should we do for a living?

    An interesting addition to that stuff about the value of Instagram etc coming from the activity of its users (or not): Do those users only have time for this activity because of the “leisure time bought by jobs in the non-Internet economy”?

  23. Liking :: Mission Workshop Arkiv Field Pack

    Nice non-military modular backpack system.

  24. Ice-blog » Blog Archive » Lords of Midnight – Video Footage

    ‘Lords of Midnight’ adapted for the iPad. Looks very nicely done.

  25. Wysihtml5 - A better approach to rich text editing

    Looks nice. IE8+ (and other modernish browsers). (via @dotcode)

  26. Minicons: 1500 Vector Icons for Wireframes and Interface Design. The Web’s largest Vector Icons Library!

    Handy. (via @tomcoates)

  27. Roll Call. Say hello! (Pepys’ Diary)

    This is the why. Well, one of the whys.

  28. Essex Fingerposts - a set on Flickr

    Lovely set of familiar signposts. (via Paul Mison)

  29. google-map-marker-with-shadow.js — Gist

    “Here’s how to add a coloured marker to a Google Map with a shadow in the right place.” The marker’s dynamically generated using the Google Charts API.

  30. The Sex Myth: How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to)

    Some good (but, as she says, far from exhaustive) and interesting tips on how to blog anonymously, by Brooke Magnanti / Belle du Jour. (via @tomcoates)