sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Emily posted this story on Facebook as soon as we woke up this morning. After trying and failing to articulate the experience myself, I've opted to cross-post her note instead, as she captured it very beautifully. Comments here will reach her.

I wish you all could have been in DC last night.

Last night was one of the most memorable of my life, and I'm having a hard time making sense of it all, but I keep coming back to this moment, silly as it may have been:

Walking towards the White House with Emily and Emily, I approached a young black woman talking on her cellphone. She had that perfect combination of features that make a person seem so warm and welcoming: a huge smile, a dance in her step, and big, steady eyes that lock onto yours for a moment longer than you expect. So when she put her hand up for a high five, I pushed it back down and instead wrapped her in a bear hug.

Over at 43Folders, Merlin Mann has twice been critical of the concept of multitasking.

In general, I take his perspective to heart, in the sense that what we call multitasking is often just a cluttered use of time, which creates the illusion of efficiency at the expense of... well... efficiency.

I just posted over at gnovis on one of my pet topics: nostalgia. The meat of the post concerns a discussion of religious fundamentalism that I read today in "Empire" by Hardt & Negri, but I also pull in some comments on iPods, public transportation, bowling, the 1989 NBA finals, and heterosexual man-kisses. How could you possibly NOT read it?

I have long had a vaguely secretive fascination with what I'm going to call, in this post, "collective nostalgia," though I am often more inclined to call it "false nostalgia," emphasizing that the object of this nostalgia is generally something imaginary.

To scholars of nationalism and nation building, this concept is quite familiar, in principle if not in name -- the public memory that underlies national histories is characterized by a collective memory (and collective forgetting) that is selective, essentialized, and at times imagined.
-Full Article at gnovisjournal.org

Part 1 of 6 in a series discussing the 6 broad "topics" that I've incorporated into the latest design of my site. In this post I will justify the "Odds & Ends" category, give an overview of the other categories, and explain why I've decided to impose this somewhat rigid structure upon my blog.

Today is a big day for baseball, obviously, with the release of the Mitchell Report, and I've seen a number of different reactions--

• The journalistic:Steroid Report Implicates Top Players
• The curiously analytical: Is Today Mark McGwire’s Best Day in Years?