Culture: May 2008 Archives
DoubleShot Coffee Company: Ethiopia... Yirgacheffeâ„¢, Sidamoâ„¢, Harrarâ„¢
Ethiopia trademarks the names of its coffee-growing regions, and there are repercussions for coffee shops and coffee drinkers.
A month before Rebecca Walker gave birth to her first child, she says that her mother, author Alice Walker, "wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother." "Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating." (Via Michelle Malkin.)
Oxford American: The Cult of House Worship
"There was a time when church-building and public building were rivals to residential construction. But in America, Domus has become one of the most potent gods in the pantheon of Mammon, and his temples far outstrip anything we build for church or state.... McMansions have become McVersailles and McBlenheims, McTaj Mahals." (Via World on the Web.)
Wiktionary: IPA pronunciation key
A handy table showing International Phonetic Alphabet symbols and words in 16 languages which use the sound that corresponds to each symbol.
Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race - New York Times
Central Point, Va., and the Supreme Court case that overturned the last ban on interracial marriage in America: "By the time that Richard and Mildred [Loving] had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships." (Via Far Outliers.)
BaylyBlog: What 13-letter word ending in "animous"...
PCA's Heritage Presbytery fails to stand against the death-by-dehydration of a disabled Delaware woman.
Joyce Lee Malcolm writes: "As a horse owner and backyard rider even I know that until a horse is four years old his bones are still developing. The racing industry needs to grant these animals another year before pushing them onto the track.... And the trend toward speed rather than stamina should stop. These horses are now designed for shorter and shorter racing careers, their solid torsos balanced on long, fragile legs. Like American cars built of fiberglass for better mileage, their bones are light for speed, but woe betide you in an accident."
WORLD Magazine | To Narnia and the North!
"The untamed terrains of Northern Ireland, much more than the pastoral landscapes of England, imprinted themselves on [C. S. Lewis's] youthful imagination and later emerged in the fantastic stories of the mature author."
The Conservative Revival - New York Times
David Brooks on the revival of the British Conservative Party after a decade in the wilderness, with a Burkean emphasis on the "little platoons" that make society work: "These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They're trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control." (Via Crunchy Con.)
Orson Scott Card: J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz
Author of Ender's Game takes apart Rowling's plagiarism claim against the Harry Potter Lexicon, a print version of an online reference work which she had previously used and praised. (Via Mister Snitch!)
Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready! - By Hanna Rosin - Slate Magazine
"A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: 'Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear,' he wrote. 'Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality.'" (Via Dawn Eden.)
