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Student Teacher Gift Ideas!
Hi all! A fan at The Organized Classroom Blog's Facebook fan page posted the following question to us last week: "Help. I have a male student teacher who is leaving soon. Any ideas for a goo
Making Elapsed Time Fun!
I don't know about you, but I know teaching elapsed time to third graders can be a nightmare! It is such an abstract concept to teach anyway - and then practicing it later is like pulling teeth! H
9 Ideas For Organizing Differentiated Instruction
Do you WANT to differentiate, but are completely frozen in fear just thinking about all the chaos that COULD ensue in your classroom if you tried it? I am here to help with 9 tips that might get
Field Trip Tips for You!
I don't know about you, but I have always enjoyed taking students on field trips (when working for districts where we actually had the funding to go). It was great watching them explore outside of
Fun Games for the Classroom
Hey Organized Classroom friends! I hope this week is shaping up to end well! I know so many of you are testing, or preparing to test now or in the near future and those weeks are hard on everyo
3 Tips for Utilizing Pinterest in your Weekly Planning
Hey Organized Classroom friends! Today we have an awesome guest post all about using Pinterest for lesson planning - fabulous! Remember you can always join 100,000+ other teachers and follow my te
Oh the Places We Will Walk
I don't know about you, but living in northern Ohio in the winter creates an urgent sense of cabin fever, which sets in about March. I would LOVE to get outside and enjoy the weather, but I am not
Cutting Out Cuteness
OK - in the title I literally meant cutting out. As in scissors. :) For those of you who might be new on the blog, I did a review back in July for the Silhouette Cameo and I have been busy cuttin
A Writing Lesson from an Author
Author Kathleen Wainwright has published her first children's book, Summer in the City. Welcome to day 8 of her 10 day virtual tour! Today Kathleen will be sharing a letter writing activity that
Feeling Lucky?
I cannot believe we are heading into March already this week! Personally, I am ecstatic because I am {<------>} THIS much closer to warmer days. Can you tell that I am ready for the snow
Easy Teacher Hair Helper
Hey all! So, you all mainly only have ever seen me when I have worn my hair down. And hair I have. It is thick, wavy, and super coarse. Chemical straighteners don't work their magic very well eith
New! The Organized Classroom Magazine!
Hey friends! Sorry if you have been hearing about this all day, but I just want to make sure as many people know about it as possible through every venue possible (back to work as normal tomorrow, I
Regaining Control of Your Classroom
We all know one. The person who has the out-of-control classroom. I'm not talking the class where students are out of their desks, a little louder than usual, but still learning -- I'm talking the cla
Big News! Want a Sneak Peek?
Hey fans and readers! You know you are my number one motivation and my new project is a direct result of your input! Whooo hoooo! While I won't tell you exactly what it is yet, I can tell you thi
Are You Missing Out?
Did you know even if you have "liked" a Facebook fan page, you do not see all of the posts? I bet you haven't seen some posts from your favorite fan pages in months and never even realized it! Fac
Zoom Into Science
If you are like me, you might enjoy teaching science because it typically is a little more hands-on than say reading a book or studying about a world explorer (not to say those aren't fun), but they d
10 Tips for Organizing Your Technology Center
Hello Organized Classroom Blog Readers! I am Heidi Raki of Raki's Rad Resources, and I am super excited to be here today to share some ideas for you on how to organize your technology center. I starte
How Do You Say A Number?
Here is a fun little DIY project for those of you that teach math! I created a "How do you say _____ frame" made out of a cheap dollar store 8"x10" frame. First, I pulled the glass out (nothing sa
Parent Request Resources {Giveaway}
Hey all! Do you ever have those parents that come to you asking how they can better help their child at home with skills that he or she might be struggling a little with? Maybe you want to differe
Get Help with Classroom Helpers!
Hi, Organized Classroom Blog Readers! I'm Linda Nelson from Primary Inspiration, and I'm thrilled to be here with you today! I'd like to share a simple way to handle classroom jobs.Jobs are a great wa
Easy and Economical Valentines for Students
With class sizes these days, it can be hard getting gifts - even small ones - for all students in the classroom for holidays. As a parent, trying to find something that is not candy-related for my
Handy Job Chart {Giveaway}
This week, I am reviewing the Magnetic Job Labels from Learning Resources, which are part of their new 2013 line up of products! They include a set of 10 magnetic labels that you can use on any mag
Managing the Year with the Extremely Challenging Student
Today we have a guest blog post talking all about behavior management, which I am sure many can relate with during this time of the year. Enjoy! All teachers have had or will have an exper
The Ultimate Blogger Binder
I know I have a lot of blogger (or soon-to-become blogger) friends who read regularly - so this is a shout-out for them! I have seen a ton of blogger planners out in cyberspace recently and none had
Shhhhhhh: Quieting Those Desk Tops
Hey OCB friends! Here is a quickie tip for those of you who have student desks with lids. I don't know about you, but it drives me bonkers to no end when they slam them shut - or let them drop and
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text: I just returned to Hong Kong for a visit after a 40 hituas in the US (I left age 10). If you were disoriented, think how I felt. Nothing looked like I remembered that time. I had to google images from the 60s and 70s just to know I wasn't hallucinating my memories. The area you are staying at, near Causeway Bay, certainly is a very crowded shopping district. I was there at night looking for a place to eat and couldn't believe the crowds everywhere and in the restaurants. If this is a depression, I'd hate to see what it was like during the boom years.

subset: commoncrawl


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Badass Comedy Shows & Training
A hand transplant gone horribly wrong…
This video was featured on Comedy Central's "Atom TV". It was also a semi-finalist in the 2008 MTV Movie Awards Spoof Contest (Thanks, Break.com).
It's a spoof of "The Eye," starring Jessica Alba.
Thanks to Wes Craven and YouTube for the feature! And thanks to TubeFilter for the fat press coverage!
Directed by Drew Baldwin
Written by Brock LaBorde & Drew Baldwin
Edited by Jared Richard
Produced by Brock LaBorde
Starring Erin Banks, Drew Baldwin, Brock LaBorde, Rory Windhorst, Lauren McCarthy, Akul Dang, Eric Pierson, & Jared Richard


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This is a guest post written by Morandir835, an e-cig enthusiast, admin on the Vapor4Life forum, and a regular on their ECF sub forum.
On December 23, 2011 I celebrated my one year vapiversary. Thanks to all the chaos going on around me, I wasn't able to blog then as I had hoped. Now that everything has settled down, I figured it was time.


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"I just feel like you are never ever going to pick up your phone - like ever."
The best of Taylor Swift - youngest CMA Entertainer of the Year
I cry every time I hear this speech…
i just really hate how people say they want celebrities to be real but when taylor swift refuses to change how she dresses to appease people who make fun of her, continues to dance and enjoy her life despite people making fun of her, gets heartbroken and picks herself back up despite the entire world humiliating her, people say she's fake or that they hate her
just remember, these guys paid like $300+ dollars to make fun of taylor with signs she won't see. :-)
hahahaha… arent they cool…


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VanityDouble click on any word to get a popup explanation of the word and sample sentences Dictionary | Wikipedia | Synonyms | Quotation | News
Dictionary Meaning and Definition on 'Vanity'
- vanity
- feelings of excessive pride [syn: amour propre, conceit, self-love]
- the quality of being valueless or futile; "he rejected the vanities of the world" [syn: emptiness]
- the trait of being vain and conceited [syn: conceit]
- low table with mirror or mirrors where one sits while dressing or applying makeup [syn: dressing table, dresser, toilet table]
- Vanity \Van"i*ty\, n.; pl. Vanities. [OE. vanite, vanit['e],
L. vanitas, fr. vanus empty, vain. See Vain.]
- The quality or state of being vain; want of substance to satisfy desire; emptiness; unsubstantialness; unrealness; falsity. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. --Eccl. i. 2. Here I may well show the vanity of that which is reported in the story of Walsingham. --Sir J. Davies.
- An inflation of mind upon slight grounds; empty pride inspired by an overweening conceit of one's personal attainments or decorations; an excessive desire for notice or approval; pride; ostentation; conceit. The exquisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled. --Macaulay.
- That which is vain; anything empty, visionary, unreal, or unsubstantial; fruitless desire or effort; trifling labor productive of no good; empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher. --Eccl. i. 2. Vanity possesseth many who are desirous to know the certainty of things to come. --Sir P. Sidney. [Sin] with vanity had filled the works of men. --Milton. Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled, That all her vanities at once are dead; Succeeding vanities she still regards. --Pope.
- One of the established characters in the old moralities and puppet shows. See Morality, n., 5. You . . . take vanity the puppet's part. --Shak. Syn: Egotism; pride; emptiness; worthlessness; self-sufficiency. See Egotism, and Pride.
See more meaning on Vanity...
Wikipedia Meaning and Definition on 'Vanity'
In conventional parlance, vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. Prior to the 14th century it did not have such narcissistic undertones, and merely meant futility.
In many religions vanity, in its modern sense, is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects God for the sake of one's own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of God. The stories of Lucifer, Narcissus (who gave us the term narcissism) and others attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity. Philosophically speaking, vanity may refer to a broader sense of egoism and pride. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that "vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality."
In Christian teachings vanity is considered an example of pride, one of the seven deadly sins. This list evolved from an earlier list of eight sins, which included vainglory as a sin independent of pride.[See more about Vanity at Dictionary 3.0 Encyclopedia]
Words and phrases related to 'Vanity'
'Vanity' in famous quotation sentence
* It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all. - Heinrich Heine
* Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second. - Helen Hunt Jackson
Click here for more related quotations on 'Vanity'


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A Holy Find
This bible was discovered in a recent visit to the Hannah Arendt library at Bard College. To whom did it belong? Did it belong to Arendt's second husband, Heinrich Blücher, the German poet who taught philosophy at Bard for 17 years? Or perhaps did Arendt herself own it, notwithstanding her ambivalence towards all organized religion in the public sphere? We may never know.
Amor Mundi 7/20/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Sari Nusseibeh, recently retired President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, thoughtfully writes of the end of his lifelong dream that Israel and Palestine might be able to live together in a peaceful and vibrant future. All that is left, he writes, is the promise of hell. "I can, of course, see and admire beautiful individuals. Israel boasts so many of them - poets, writers, journalists, scholars, artists - and just ordinary people in ordinary jobs, trying to live their harmless lives. But that special luster of an idealistic nation to be admired has vanished. I can no longer see it anywhere. It has become replaced, in my mind - sorry to say - by what appears to have become a scientifically skilled colonialist group of self-serving thugs, bent on self-aggrandizement, capitalizing on world-guilt for past pains and horrors suffered, and now hiding behind a religious fiction to justify all the pain and suffering it does to my own people, our heritage and culture.... I cannot see an Israeli government now offering what a Palestinian government can now accept. I can therefore only foresee a worsening climate - not a one-time disaster (say, an avalanche following the killing of a Jew while performing a prayer in the Noble Sanctuary, on what Israelis call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) that can once and for all be put behind, by whichever side, but an increasingly ugly living climate in which only those who can acclimatize and be ugly themselves can survive. In simple words, even if called 'holy,' I can foresee this place turning into a hell for all those who live in it. It will not be place for normal human beings who want to pursue normal lives, let alone a place where anyone can hope to fulfill a sublime life." Read Roger Berkowitz's response on the Arendt Center blog.
In the New York Review of Books Robert Pogue Harrison notes that changing the world through work has become a Silicon Valley cliché: "When Steve Jobs sought to persuade John Sculley, the chief executive of Pepsi, to join Apple in 1983, he succeeded with an irresistible pitch: 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?' The day I sat down to write this article, a full-page ad for Blackberry in The New York Times featured a smiling Arianna Huffington with an oversize caption in quotes: 'Don't just take your place at the top of the world. Change the world.' A day earlier, I heard Bill Gates urge the Stanford graduating class to 'change the world' through optimism and empathy. The mantra is so hackneyed by now that it's hard to believe it still gets chanted regularly. Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption, makes it extremely difficult for us to imagine how, in past eras, those who would change the world were viewed with suspicion and dread. If you loved the world; if you considered it your mortal home; if you were aware of how much effort and foresight it had cost your forebears to secure its foundations, build its institutions, and shape its culture; if you saw the world as the place of your secular afterlife, then you had good reasons to impute sinister tendencies to those who would tamper with its configuration or render it alien to you. Referring to all that happened during the 'dark times' of the first half of the twentieth century, 'with its political catastrophes, its moral disasters, and its astonishing development of the arts and sciences,' Hannah Arendt summarized the human cost of endless disruption: 'The world becomes inhuman, inhospitable to human needs-which are the needs of mortals-when it is violently wrenched into a movement in which there is no longer any sort of permanence.'" You can also watch Harrison's talk on Thinking and Friendship given at the Arendt Center.
The End of Dangerous Thinking?
In a piece on the place of theory and dangerous thinking in contemporary intellectual discourse, Henry Giroux describes why such practices appear to be in decline, citing its unintelligibility, an assault on them from particular political interests, as well as the corporatization of the university, among other things. It doesn't help that good critical thinking is hard to do, and that thinking and action aren't the same: "One important function of dangerous thinking is that it foregrounds the responsibility of artists, intellectuals, academics and others who use it. Mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable represents a productive pedagogical and political use of theory. Theorizing the political, economic and cultural landscapes is central to any form of political activism and suggests that theory is like oxygen. That is, a valuable resource, which one has to become conscious of in order to realize how necessary it is to have it. Where we should take pause is when academic culture uses critical thought in the service of ideological purity and in doing so transforms pedagogy into forms of poisonous indoctrination for students. Critical thought in this case ossifies from a practice to a form of political dogmatism. The cheerleaders for casino capitalism hate critical theory and thought because they contain the possibility of politicizing everyday life and exposing those savage market-driven ideologies, practices and social relations that hide behind an appeal to commonsense. Both the fetishism of thinking and its dismissal are part of the same coin, the overall refusal to link conception and practice, agency and intervention, all aggravated by neoliberalism's hatred of all things social and public."
The Liberal Arts as Teacher Education
Stephen Mucher makes the case that liberal arts faculty should be more involved in teacher education, suggesting that teachers who are well versed in the humanities, in addition to teaching practice, prepare more curious, more creative students with better critical thinking skills: "Without a professional core of teachers who are versed in the humanities and steeped in the great questions of science, schools are especially vulnerable to forces that reduce teaching to a series of discrete measurable acts. Yet the more teaching is dissected, the less attractive the profession becomes for graduates who might otherwise consider it a viable and meaningful career option. More directly, these reductionist policy trends obscure something that humanists care deeply about -- the enduring beauty of teaching and learning. As one outgoing pedagogy chair lamented in 1900, 'the attempt to mechanize instruction is part of the monstrous error that free minds can be coerced; it has really the same root as religious persecution.' By remaining largely silent for so long, colleges of liberal arts and sciences have contributed to these developments. By pushing big questions about K-12 teaching to the margins and assigning them solely to education specialists, institutions of higher education became complicit in trends that continue to make public education more separate and more unequal."
In an interview, poet Carol Muske-Dukes takes on the notion of "unoriginal genius," which she thinks is alienating contemporary poetry from the public, and emphasizes instead an older way of thinking about verse. Let's bring back readable poetry we can recite: "Proponents of unoriginal genius would say that they are putting forward a version of interpretation and illumination of a technological age. But the fact is, this mirroring of disjunction represents no real speaking or reading or thinking population.... The struggle here, as it is with overly accessible, catchy poetry, is a struggle to be both popular and enlightening. We live in a time when language matters. Not only because of the constant threat of misunderstanding in translation - in diplomacy, in wartime, in the university and literary life - but, as always, in individual human relations. So the abdication of accessible rhetoric and a turn toward so-called scholarship is an abdication of the human. The academy has opted for pointless experimentation in language compared to my mother's generation - she's ninety-eight - of well schooled, publicly educated students of poetry who know pages and pages of poetry by heart. Should anyone who believes in sense be ostracized from the ongoing conversation of literature?"
The Laboring Animal in the Leisure Suit
Kate Losse suggests that there's something sinister behind the connection of work and leisure on the campuses of innovative tech companies: "Of course, the remaking of the contemporary tech office into a mixed work-cum-leisure space is not actually meant to promote leisure. Instead, the work/leisure mixing that takes place in the office mirrors what happens across digital, social and professional spaces. Work has seeped into our leisure hours, making the two tough to distinguish. And so, the white-collar work-life blend reaches its logical conclusion with the transformation of modern luxury spaces such as airport lounges into spaces that look much like the offices from which the technocrat has arrived. Perhaps to secure the business of the new moneyed tech class, the design of the new Centurion Lounge for American Express card members draws from the same design palette as today's tech office: reclaimed-wood panels, tree-stump stools, copious couches and a cafeteria serving kale salad on bespoke ceramic plates. In these lounges, the blurring of recreation and work becomes doubly disconcerting for the tech employee. Is one headed out on vacation or still at the office - and is there a difference? If the reward for participation in the highly lucrative tech economy is not increasing leisure but a kind of highly decorated, almost Disneyland vision of perpetual labour, what will be its endgame? As work continues to consume workers' lives, tech offices might compete for increasingly unique and obscure toys and luxury perks to inhibit their employees' awareness that they are always working." Maybe Silicon Valley's idea of changing the world is simply the collapse of the labor vs. leisure distinction.
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Learn more about the conference here.
From The Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Michael Weinman discusses Arendt's use of the term "irony" in her report on the "banality of evil" in his Quote of the Week. American modernist poet Wallace Sevens provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We look back on a free speech lecture Zephyr Teachout delivered at Bard in 2012 in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the hell that the Middle East is fast becoming in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 7/13/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
On the New Yorker blog, Joshua Rothman explores Virginia Woolf's idea of privacy. Unlike the "citizen's sense of privacy," which is concerned with the divide between public and private life and the need to keep some things unseen by other people, Woolf's novels allude to another, deeper kind of privacy that "preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information." Concrete and experiential rather than political, Woolf's notion of privacy recognizes an inner core of self, a soul, that must be kept safe from one's own compulsion to examine and analyze. Writes Rothman: "Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you've been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance-and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It's hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that's one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life's mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life's preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others' prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist's sense of privacy." Read more on the Arendt Center blog.
Alexandra Socarides takes some time to (re)think Emily Dickinson's poem "I'm Nobody! Who are you?," which is usually read as a praise of the nobodies and against being somebody. Socarides finds an ode to something entirely different: "This fall I was asked to volunteer at my sons' elementary school, where the fourth graders were writing poetry and needed a little guidance. Despite having once gotten an MFA in Poetry and having taught poetry writing in the years after that, I have almost no memory of how to guide people in the ways of making poems. So, instead, I mostly sat with the students and watched them as they attempted, in their very best moments, to write something beautiful and strange. It was then, watching these kids shift in their prepubescent bodies, hungry and tired and mostly bored, that I found myself saying, over and over again in my head, just as the strangers in my basement had said to me: 'I'm Nobody! Who are you?' This was before I learned about Dickinson and frogs, before I pulled up the manuscripts, tracked down the letters, and returned to Walden to stand, metaphorically speaking, neck-deep in the pond with Thoreau. At this moment the poem simply functioned as an articulation of the alienation that I felt each and every one of those fourth graders knew intimately. To find a friend, and to locate some shared aspect of identity in that friendship, would be to find refuge from all the frogs croaking out on the playground."
In an interview, filmmaker Richard Linklater describes what it was like to make his upcoming Boyhood, for which he worked with a group of actors a few days out of the year for twelve years. The film tracks the growth of a young boy over the same span. Like the boy, Linklater says, he's the same person now as when he started making the film, but there are important ways that he's changed too: "I feel like the exact same person, but I've got twelve more years under the belt. I've got two more kids I didn't have then, I got a bunch more films. I got a bunch more life. This thing was such a life project, it's been a real wonderful demarcation thing, all along the way. Every year you had to ask yourself these questions, you had to really study the world and see it in a new way. I think we should all take on these life projects that just make you - whatever the final result is - pay attention. That's what I like about the arts, that they make you see the world in a way you might not be attuned to. Every film is so much work the subject matter better be something you find infinitely fascinating. If you can just explain it and be done with it, you shouldn't be making it. Every film I've done I'm really feeling my way through that subject - what don't I know, what do I want to discover? And usually in the process of making the film I feel I do get to know what I was after. This, with a twelve year commitment, had to be about something inexhaustible. And that was about growing up, parenting, the culture around it, the world changing. I knew that well would never come close to going dry. And it didn't. It didn't. You had to stay so in touch with these people as they changed, and not just the kids but also the adults. You do that as a parent, you do that as a friend, but it was interesting to see that refracted through this one work of art, that you're trying to take Eller and Lorelei and Ethan and Patricia and you're taking what's going on in their lives and I'm trying to take what went on in my life at that age and my own role as a parent - it was an all-encompassing refraction of the world. It was an incredible collaboration not just amongst us but also between our own parents and the unknown future. But that's the life metaphor here - we're all collaborating constantly with a future we think we're trying to control, but we only can to a certain degree."
Riffing on big public installations by artists Jeff Koons and Kara Walker, Jillian Steinhauer wonders what public art even is: "If you take it to mean a work of art widely available and accessible to the public, then yes, a big sculpture in the middle of Rockefeller Center works fine; if, however, you think about public art as a work that engages with the public, draws them into a conversation - well, then the primary difference between the Walker and the Koons becomes clear. In her book Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, art historian Cher Krause Knight cites critic Patricia Phillips and her conception of how art 'becomes fully public': 'it is public because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address, and not because of its accessibility or volume of viewers,' Phillips says. Knight then offers her own addendum: 'To this I would add that art's publicness rests in the quality and impact of its exchanges with audiences.' This extends to the way Koons and Walker approach their subjects: Koons began with a personal object (as many of us do), added a neat formal twist ... and then stopped. Walker's art has long sprung from her identity as a black woman, but she focuses on a place where private narratives overlap with public histories. A Subtlety is no exception. Koons's failure to take this leap speaks to his white male privilege, or his lack of imagination as an artist, or both."
Education as an Introduction to Wonder
Joseph Miller tells the story of Daniel Godinez, a young man from California who found a program designed to groom first generation college students dreary and boring, until he was given the opportunity to do something otherworldly. Since having started to work with a high tech telescope, Godinez has received "county and state science-fair awards; a research mentorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a paid teaching assistantship as astronomy tutor at Santa Barbara City College; and a planetarium operator gig at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, which eventually led to a staff position as astronomy programs assistant there." He's also earned a Distinguished Scientist Scholarship to Bard College, where the Arendt Center is located. Godinez's story shows the power of education that allows students to find their own home in the world, of education that excites and interests young people in what is out there in the world, and beyond.
October 9-10The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This Week on the Hannah Aendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Martin Wagner uses Arendt to help us appreciate the value of tradition in the digital age in his Quote of the Week. Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We remember our 2011 Lunchtime Talk with Robert Pogue Harrison on "passionate thinking" in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz reminds us of the importance of privacy in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 4/27/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Race, Democracy and the Constitution
Looking for scandal, the press is focusing on the apparent conflict between Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is more important than the scandal. It raises fundamental questions about the democracy, race and the constitution. Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, writes: "And race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away. Race matters to a young man's view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman's sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, 'No, where are you really from?', regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.'" John Roberts, in his concurring opinion, responds: "The dissent states that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race." And it urges that "[r]ace matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.'" But it is not "out of touch with reality" to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and-if so-that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent's views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to "wish away, rather than confront" racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate. Both opinions are worth reading. And read more about them in The Weekend Read.
The Sanctification of A Christian Pope
Pope Francis I has declared two prior popes Saints. One is well known, Pope John Paul II. But Pope John XXIII is perhaps forgotten by many. As NPR reports, "John XXIII, also known as 'Good Pope John,' was nearly 77 at his coronation and, because of his advanced age, was widely regarded as a 'stopgap' pope who wasn't going to make waves. Instead, he called the Vatican II Council, which promulgated one of the most far-reaching and controversial reforms in the Roman Catholic Church's history." John XXIII also published a little book Journal of a Soul, which Hannah Arendt reviewed for the New York Review of Books. For the Jewish thinker, Good Pope John is a Christian Pope, one of the few. Arendt tells of a "Roman chambermaid" in a hotel who asked her, in all innocence: "Madam," she said, "this Pope was a real Christian. How could that be? And how could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter's chair? Didn't he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?" Arendt had a simple answer for the maid. "No." She writes that Pope John was largely unknown upon his selection and arrived as an outsider. He was, in the words of her title, a true Christian living in the spirit of Jesus Christ. In a sense, this was so surprising in the midst of the 20th century that no one had imagined it to be possible, and the Good Pope John was selected without anyone knowing who he was. On the day of Pope John XXIII's Sainthood, it is worth revisiting Arendt's full review.
The Human Factor—Hannah Arendt
Taking Hannah Arendt's quote, "There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous," as its starting point, the Canadian Public Radio show Ideas with Paul Kennedy explores Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. The program features Roger Berkowitz, Adam Gopnik, Adam Kirsch, and Rivka Galchen. The conversation was heated at times, but overall offers a good account of Arendt's book, her thoughts on thinking, and the reason her thought matters. Take some time to listen to program.
Patricia Lockwood, at the Poetry Foundation blog, seems to be tired of being asked if poetry is work: "IS it work, though? The question persists. Is a single muscle exerted during the process? Do you sweat at all, besides the weird thing that sometimes happens under your right arm because you haven't lifted it up for 8 hours? Do you get to retire after you work at it faithfully for 50 years? The answers are no, no, and no. Can anyone fire a poet? Only Death can fire a poet." She is, of course, making a joke. For Arendt, though, poetry, and art more generally, is in fact work. Indeed, making art may be the last vestige of work in a world where the primary activity of life has become the repetitive, never ending, activity of consumption, in which nothing is left behind and all labor seeks only to further the process of consumption. Poetry, and painting, and art are outliers in the modern world to the extent they leave something behind and resist the process of consumption.
"So far, the year 2014 has been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations." Walter Russell Mead believes that geopolitics, never really gone, is back for good: "Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.
On the occasion of the publication of a biography of the author, Hermione Lee describes what John Updike was up to: "As he said of himself... he is the artist of middleness, ordinariness, in-betweenness, who famously wanted 'to give the mundane its beautiful due.' For over half a century-even though his own life moved far away from 'middleness';-he transformed everyday America into lavishly eloquent and observant language. This-even more than his virtuoso writing about sex, his close readings of adultery and husbandly guilt, his tracking of American social politics, his philosophizing on time and the universe-is his great signature tune. No wonder that some of the narrators in his stories are archaeologists, or that he's so interested in vanished cities, ancient civilizations, and extinct species."
On the 450th birthday of William Shakespeare, Bob Duggan remembers that what are understood as his great contributions now were not his most well known plays during his life: "During Shakespeare's own lifetime he was known best as the "honey-tongued" poet of such works as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in which he used classical and ancient characters to his own artistic purposes as well as practical purposes of making money during the plague-forced theater closures of 1593-1594. Readers literally read published copies of these works to pieces, making surviving copies extremely rare today. People went to see the plays, of course, but the emphasis of the theaters was on making money as much as making art."
Eric Hoover, in an essay about the ways that colleges and universities may begin to evaluate students, describes one measure designed to quantify the information in a recommendation: "Motivated by such findings, the Educational Training Service developed an online rating tool called the Personal Potential Index. Designed to quantify what's conveyed in a recommendation, it asks past instructors to rate students on a five-point scale in six categories: communication skills, ethics and integrity, knowledge and creativity, planning and organization, resilience, and teamwork. To gauge resilience, for instance, respondents are asked to what extent a student 'accepts feedback without getting defensive; works well under stress; can overcome challenges and setbacks; works extremely hard'. Recommenders can type in comments to elaborate on their ratings, if they choose." Adding comments, of course, is not the same thing as real qualitative assessment; perhaps, instead of attempting to replace the tests, institutions of higher education should abandon that requirement altogether, and instead evaluate students as students, rather than as data.
From The Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog we revisit Tracy Strong's Quote of the Week on "Thinking Without Bannisters." And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz looks at the relation of race, democracy, and the constitution in Schuette decision.
Amor Mundi 3/30/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Jonathan Schell has died. I first read "The Fate of the Earth" as a college freshman in Introduction to Political Theory and it was and is one of those books that forever impacts the young mind. Jim Sleeper, writing in the Yale Daily News, gets to the heart of Schell's power: "From his work as a correspondent for The New Yorker in the Vietnam War through his rigorous manifesto for nuclear disarmament in "The Fate of the Earth", his magisterial re-thinking of state power and people's power in "The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People," and his wry, rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan showed how varied peoples' democratic aspirations might lead them to address shared global challenges." The Obituary in the New York Times adds: "With "The Fate of the Earth" Mr. Schell was widely credited with helping rally ordinary citizens around the world to the cause of nuclear disarmament. The book, based on his extensive interviews with members of the scientific community, outlines the likely aftermath of a nuclear war and deconstructs the United States' long-held rationale for nuclear buildup as a deterrent. "Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them," Mr. Schell wrote in the book's opening section. "But since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become the historians of the future — to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.""
Standing on Someone Else's Soil
In an interview, Simon Schama, author of the forthcoming book and public television miniseries "The Story of the Jews," uses early Jewish settlement in America as a way into why he thinks that Jews have often been cast as outsiders: "You know, Jews come to Newport, they come to New Amsterdam, where they run into Dutch anti-Semites immediately. One of them, at least — Peter Stuyvesant, the governor. But they also come to Newport in the middle of the 17th century. And Newport is significant in Rhode Island because Providence colony is founded by Roger Williams. And Roger Williams is a kind of fierce Christian of the kind of radical — in 17th-century terms — left. But his view is that there is no church that is not corrupt and imperfect. Therefore, no good Christian is ever entitled to form a government [or] entitled to bar anybody else's worship. That includes American Indians, and it certainly includes the Jews. And there's an incredible spark of fire of toleration that begins in New England. And Roger Williams is himself a refugee from persecution, from Puritan Massachusetts. But the crucial big point to make is that Jews have had a hard time when nations and nation-states have founded themselves on myths about soil, blood and tribe."
Don't Get Older: or Don't Show It
Noam Scheiber describes the "wakeful nightmare for the lower-middle-aged" that has taken over the world of technology. The desire for the new, new thing has led to disdain for age; "famed V.C. Vinod Khosla told a conference that "people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas." The value of experience and the wisdom of age or even of middle are scorned when everyone walks around with encyclopedias and instruction manuals in our pockets. The result: "Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don't think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. "Young people are just smarter," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its "careers" page: "We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.""
You and I Will Die Unbelievers, Tied to the Tracks of the Train
Kenan Malik wonders how non-believers can appreciate sacred art. Perhaps, he says, the godless can understand it as "an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but one that we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry. Transcendence does not, however, necessarily have to be understood in a religious fashion, solely in relation to some concept of the divine. It is rather a recognition that our humanness is invested not simply in our existence as individuals or as physical beings but also in our collective existence as social beings and in our ability, as social beings, to rise above our individual physical selves and to see ourselves as part of a larger project, to project onto the world, and onto human life, a meaning or purpose that exists only because we as human beings create it."
The Niemen Journalism lab has the straight scoop about the algorithm, written by Ken Scwhenke, that wrote the first story about last week's West Coast earthquake. Although computer programs like Schwenke's may be able to take over journalism's function as a source of initial news (that is, a notice that something is happening,) it seems unlikely that they will be able to take over one of its more sophisticated functions, which is to help people situate themselves in the world rather than merely know what's going on in it.
In an interview, Kate Beaton, the cartoonist responsible for the history and literature web comic Hark A Vagrant!, talks about how her comics, perhaps best described as academic parody, can be useful for teachers and students: "Oh yes, all the time! That's the best! It's so flattering—but I get it, the comics are a good icebreaker. If you are laughing at something, you already like it, and want to know more. If they're laughing, they're learning, who doesn't want to be in on the joke? You can't take my comics at face value, but you can ask, 'What's going on here? What's this all about?' Then your teacher gets down to brass tacks."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, our Quote of the Week comes from Arendt Center Research Associate, Thomas Wild, who looks at the close friendship between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin who bonded over literature, writers, and the power of the written word.
Amor Mundi 10/27/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Drones are simply one weapon in a large arsenal with which we fight the war on terror. Even targeted killings, the signature drone capability, are nothing new. The U.S. and other countries have targeted and killed individual leaders for decades if not centuries, using snipers, poisons, bombs, and many other technologies. To take a historical perspective, drones don't change much. Nor is the airborne capacity of drones to deliver devastation from afar anything new, having as its predecessors the catapult, the long bow, the bomber, and the cruise missile. And yet, there is seemingly something new about the way drones change the feel and reality of warfare. On one side, drones sanitize the battlefield from a space of blood, fear, and heroic fortitude into a video game played on consoles. On the other side, drones dominate life, creating a low pitched humming sound that reminds inhabitants that at any moment a missile might pierce their daily routines. The two sides of this phenomenology of drones is the topic of an essay by Nasser Hussain in The Boston Review: "In order to widen our vision, I provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on the ground. What is it like to watch a drone's footage, or to wait below for it to strike? What does the drone's camera capture, and what does it occlude?" You can also read Roger Berkowitz's weekend read on seeing through drones.
The Loss of the Christian Tradition
Marilynne Robinson, speaking to the American Conservative about her faith, elaborates on what she sees as the central flaws in contemporary American Christianity: "Something I find regrettable in contemporary Christianity is the degree to which it has abandoned its own heritage, in thought and art and literature. It was at the center of learning in the West for centuries—because it deserved to be. Now there seems to be actual hostility on the part of many Christians to what, historically, was called Christian thought, as if the whole point were to get a few things right and then stand pat. I believe very strongly that this world, these billions of companions on earth that we know are God's images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them. And as God is God of the living, that means we ought to be open to the wonderful in all generations. These are my reasons for writing about Christian figures of the past. At present there is much praying on street corners. There are many loud declarations of personal piety, which my reading of the Gospels forbids me to take at face value. The media are drawn by noise, so it is difficult to get a sense of the actual state of things in American religious culture."
Is poetry going the way of the Dodo bird? Vanessa Place makes this argument in a recent essay "Poetry is Dead. I Killed It," on the Poetry Foundation website. And Kenneth Goldsmith, in the New Yorker, asks whether Place is right. The internet, he suggests, has killed or at least so rethought poetry that it may be unrecognizable. "Quality is beside the point—this type of content is about the quantity of language that surrounds us, and about how difficult it is to render meaning from such excesses. In the past decade, writers have been culling the Internet for material, making books that are more focussed [sic] on collecting than on reading. These ways of writing—word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriating, intentionally plagiarizing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few—have traditionally been considered outside the scope of literary practice."
In a rare interview, famously reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson prognosticates on the future of the comics: "Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don't think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I'm old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they'll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won't be the same as what I grew up with."
Cambodian director Rithy Panh's new movie, The Missing Picture is about the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In making the film, he had to confront the challenge of making a movie about atrocities that are famously without explicit visual records, and he hit upon a unique solution: clay dolls. Although these figures "are necessarily silent, immobile, and therefore devoid of the intensity of those moments in other Panh films where his camera bores in on the face of a witness and lingers there as he remembers what happened, or what he did," Richard Bernstein suggests that they give the movie a unique power.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ian Storey revisits George Orwell's prescient essay, "Politics and the English Language." Jeffrey Champlin looks at James Muldoon's essay about Arendt's writngs on the advocacy of council systems in On Revolution. And your weekend read looks at the cultural impact of drones on the nations and groups that are employing them.
A Common Language
"Any period to which its own past has become as questionable as it has to us must eventually come up against the phenomenon of language, for in it the past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to get rid of it once and for all. The Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence...for as long as we use the word 'politics.'"
-Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940"
Some years ago a mentor told me a story from his days as a graduate student at a prestigious political science department. There was a professor there specializing in Russian politics and Sovietology, an older professor who loved teaching and taught well past the standard age of retirement. His enthusiasm was palpable, and he was well-liked by his students. His most popular course was on Russian politics, and towards the end of one semester, a precocious undergraduate visited during office hours: "How hard is it to learn Russian," the student asked, "because I'd really like to start." "Pretty hard," he said, "but that's great to hear. What has you so excited about it?" "Well," said the student, "after taking your course, I'm very inspired to read Marx in the original." At the next class the professor told this story to all of his students, and none of them laughed. He paused for a moment, then somewhat despondently said: "It has only now become clear to me….that none of you know the first thing about Karl Marx."
The story has several morals. As a professor, it reminds me to be careful about assuming what students know. As a student, it reminds me of an undergraduate paper I wrote which spelled Marx's first name with a "C." My professor kindly marked the mistake, but today I can better imagine her frustration. And if the story works as a joke, it is because we accept its basic premise, that knowledge of foreign languages is important, not only for our engagement with texts but with the world at large. After all, the course in question was not about Marx.
The fast approach of the Hannah Arendt Center's 2013 Conference on "The Educated Citizen in Crisis" offers a fitting backdrop to consider the place of language education in the education of the citizen. The problem has long been salient in America, a land of immigrants and a country of rich cultural diversity; and debates about the relation between the embrace of English and American assimilation continue to draw attention. Samuel Huntington, for example, recently interpreted challenges to English preeminence as a threat to American political culture: "There is no Americano dream," he writes in "The Hispanic Challenge," "There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." For Huntington English is an element of national citizenship, not only as a language learned, but as an essential component of American identity.
This might be juxtaposed with Tracy Strong's support of learning (at least a) second language, including Latin, as an element of democratic citizenship. A second language, writes Strong (see his "Language Learning and the Social Sciences") helps one acquire "what I might call an anthropological perspective on one's own society," for "An important achievement of learning a foreign language is learning a perspective on one's world that is not one's own. In turn, the acquisition of another perspective or even the recognition of the legitimacy of another perspective is, to my understanding, a very important component of a democratic political understanding." Strong illustrates his point with a passage from Hannah Arendt's "Truth and Politics": "I form an opinion," says Arendt, "by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent: that is, I represent them."
Hannah Arendt's deep respect for the American Constitution and American political culture, manifest no less (perhaps even more!) in her criticism than her praise, is well known. After fleeing Nazi Germany and German-occupied France, Arendt moved to the United States where she became a naturalized citizen in 1951. And her views on the relation between the English language and American citizenship are rich and complex.
In "The Crisis in Education" Arendt highlights how education plays a unique political role in America, where "it is obvious that the enormously difficult melting together of the most diverse ethnic groups…can only be accomplished through the schooling, education, and Americanization of the immigrants' children." Education prepares citizens to enter a common world, of which English in America is a key component: "Since for most of these children English is not their mother tongue but has to be learned in school, schools must obviously assume functions which in a nation-state would be performed as a matter of course in the home."
At the same time, Arendt's own embrace of English is hardly straightforward. In a famous 1964 interview with she says: "The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains. […] I have always consciously refused to lose my mother tongue. I have always maintained a certain distance from French, which I then spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today […] I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language…The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved."
Here Arendt seems both with and against Huntington. On one hand, learning and embracing English—the public language of the country—is what enables diverse Americans to share a common political world. And in this respect, her decision to write and publish in English represents one of her most important acts of American democratic citizenship. By writing in English, Arendt "assumes responsibility for the world," the same responsibility that education requires from its educators if they are to give the younger generation a common world, but which she finds sorely lacking in "The Crisis of Education."
At the same time, though, Arendt rejects the idea that American citizenship requires treating English as if it were a mother tongue. Arendt consciously preserves her German mother tongue as both an element of her identity and a grounding of her understanding of the world, and in 1967 she even accepted the Sigmund Freud Award of the German Academy of Language and Poetry that "lauded her efforts to keep the German language alive although she had been living and writing in the United States for more than three decades" (I quote from Frank Mehring's 2011 article "'All for the Sake of Freedom': Hannah Arendt's Democratic Dissent, Trauma, and American Citizenship"). For Arendt, it seems, it is precisely this potentiality in America—for citizens to share and assume responsibility for a common world approached in its own terms, while also bringing to bear a separate understanding grounded by very different terms—that offers America's greatest democratic possibilities. One might suggest that Arendt's engagement with language, in her combination of English responsibility and German self-understanding, offers a powerful and thought-provoking model of American democratic citizenship.
What about the teaching of language? In the "The Crisis in Education" Arendt is critical of the way language, especially foreign language, is taught in American schools. In a passage worth quoting at length she says:
"The close connection between these two things—the substitution of doing for learning and of playing for working—is directly illustrated by the teaching of languages; the child is to learn by speaking, that is by doing, not by studying grammar and syntax; in other words he is to learn a foreign language in the same way that as an infant he learned his own language: as though at play and in the uninterrupted continuity of simple existence. Quite apart from the question of whether this is possible or not…it is perfectly clear that this procedure consciously attempts to keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level."
Arendt writes that such "pragmatist" methods intend "not to teach knowledge but to inculcate a skill." Pragmatic instruction helps one to get by in the real world; but it does not allow one to love or understand the world. It renders language useful, but reduces language to an instrument, something easily discarded when no longer needed. It precludes philosophical engagement and representative thinking. The latest smartphone translation apps render it superfluous.
But how would one approach language differently? And what does this have to do with grammar and syntax? Perhaps there are clues in the passage selected as our quote of the week, culled from Arendt's 1968 biographical essay about her friend Walter Benjamin. There, Arendt appreciates that Benjamin's study of language abandons any "utilitarian" or "communicative" goals, but approaches language as a "poetic phenomenon." The focused study of grammar develops different habits than pragmatist pedagogy. In the process of translation, for example, it facilitates an engagement with language that is divorced from practical use and focused squarely on meaning. To wrestle with grammar means to wrestle with language in the pursuit of truth, in a manner that inspires love for language—that it exists—and cross-cultural understanding. Arendt was famous for flexing her Greek and Latin muscles—in part, I think, as a reflection of her love for the world. The study of Greek and Latin is especially amenable to a relationship of love, because these languages are hardly "practical." One studies them principally to understand, to shed light on the obscure; and through their investigation one discovers the sunken meanings that remain hidden and embedded in our modern languages, in words we speak regularly without realizing all that is contained within them. By engaging these "dead" languages, we more richly and seriously understand ourselves. And these same disinterested habits, when applied to the study of modern foreign languages, can enrich not only our understanding of different worldviews, but our participation in the world as democratic citizens.
-John LeJeune
Transformation of the Intangible
Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own…
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The book is under attack. A recent article in The New Atlantis begins by calling the book "modernity's quintessential technology," but reports that "now that the rustle of the book's turning page competes with the flicker of the screen's twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer," and asks "If it isn't — if we choose to replace the book…what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?" The book's future at the university is also uncertain. Even as student surveys consistently show preference for the "real thing," a shift of emphasis towards the e-text is discernible in library catalogs and, increasingly, basic course requirements. Since 2009, roughly thirty major universities have joined a pilot program requiring the purchase of e-text in lieu of textbooks for select courses.
The challenge for those driven to distraction by these developments is to articulate, in reasonably urgent and suitably political terms, what might otherwise seem a vague and idiosyncratic sense of loss—loss of depth and of a world—in an age of digital information. To this purpose, Christine Rosen in the aforementioned article quotes Hannah Arendt: "The printed book is the 'transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things,' as Hannah Arendt put it; it is imagined and lived action and speech turned into palpable remembrance."
The quote comes from a section of Arendt's The Human Condition called "The Thing-Character of the World." There Arendt distinguishes the products of labor, work, and action in their distinct roles in the making of the world. What distinguishes the first two—the products of labor and work—is that while the former (e.g. "a bread"), being "needed by our bodies…but without stability," are destined to "appear and disappear" through "incessant consumption," the latter (e.g. "a table"), "Viewed as part of the world…guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all." Though the products of work "wear" over time through use, they do not regularly "disappear"—indeed, Arendt says later in The Human Condition that without their stability the human artifice "could never be a reliable home for men"; that without the fabrication of houses, chairs, tables, tools, bridges and the like—the world would assume "the sublime indifference of untouched nature," and our dwelling within it (to the extent that such a term would be appropriate) would mean substantially less.
The products of work, in turn, bear a special relationship to "the 'products' of action and speech, which together constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs." Because the latter "do not 'produce,' bring forth anything…In order to become worldly things…they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things—into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments." Human remembrance of action and speech may sustain the "factual world of human affairs" for a short while, but ultimately "The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent," things which survive long after the act and actor.
Seeing all this, the problem of books remains a perplexing one—for on one hand, if the written word simply compensates for the frailty of human remembrance, might a digital text serve the same purpose? On the other hand, if standard mass produced books hardly qualify as singular "works of art" (which Arendt calls "the most intensely worldly of all tangible things" because they endure both despite and because they have no use value) our only alternative is to accord books the same status as Arendt's "chair," a worldly artifact which stays in the world not only because it is durable, but because it is useful. This, however, only begets the original question of why use the book in the first place, rather than a digital copy? Absent any rare or singular artistic value to a particular volume, there seems no clear reason to preserve the book. To exit this conundrum, it seems one must explain why reification of the word in particular into a tangible thing is important.
In a recent article in Philosophy and Literature Jonathan Brent offers one answer. He writes that "'Content' is not simply 'content.' It has a form and a wrapper. If we do not recognize this, we risk making a fundamental mistake." Books, says Brent, with their "spines, headbands, prefaces (and sometimes postfaces), appendices, running feet, footnotes, headnotes, shoulders...heads…[and] tails," are not only "'content' but…unique embodiments and transmitters of a life beyond themselves[.]"
Moreover "The characters, of which words are made, are not a graven image but engraved images made originally with an instrument that in Greek was called a kharakter." Thus the covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants—a sentence—"cuts into us at the point where the flesh and word become one." In the same spirit, one might add, did God give unto Moses "two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God."
For Arendt, the reification of words serves a purpose less reliant on the rugged idea of kharacter, and more on Brent's colorful sense of "form and wrapper." Indeed, for Arendt it is precisely the "form and wrapper" which give the ordinary products of work—the useful but otherwise expendable artifacts of the world—a far more profound and ultimately political importance:
"The man-made world of things," Arendt concludes Section 23 of The Human Condition ("The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art," and the last section of the chapter on "Work"), "the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use." In other words, notwithstanding that the durable objects of the world first exist, and then persist in the world largely because of their use value, in appearing before humans they also achieve a value and meaning independent of instrumental concerns—a value and meaning in and of themselves. Arendt prepares this point some lines earlier: "Everything that is," she writes, "must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, its sheer worldly existence, everything also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality…are judged not only according to the subjective needs of men but by the objective standards of the world where they will find their place[.]"
Here Arendt, in a manner not as apparent in her later appropriation of Kant (where she attaches judgment to the sense of taste), suggests a direct connection between the possibility for political judgment and the sense of sight. The appearance of product of work in public not only establishes the thing as thing, but engenders an aesthetic quality that transcends its use value, thus giving the world itself a firmer grounding than mere utility. Moreover, the appearance of the thing in public functions like Arendt's famous "table" which at once relates and separates humans, not only in space, but also (as Arendt's own desk continues to do in the classroom at Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center) across time. In the case of books, it is not only the physical binding that appears in public, but just as importantly the great words and deeds contained within in which, through the tangible presence of the book, also enter the everyday world of appearances.
Hannah Arendt, as is well known, was a student of Martin Heidegger. In his essay "The Thing" Heidegger wrote that "the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter." Furthermore "thing or dinc…is suited as no other word to translate properly the Roman word res, that which is pertinent, which has a bearing," as in res publica which means, "not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public." In this context Heidegger warned that while "Thinging is the nearing of the world," the "frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness." The abolition of all distances fashioned by modern technology, in other words, threatens to eliminate the minimal distance required for things to appear in public in a manner that is both in-between and connecting of individuals. Thus, Heidegger warned, at a time in which "All distances in time and space are shrinking," and man receives "instant information" and witnesses "the abolition of every possibility of remoteness," the paradoxical result will be "the failure of nearness to materialize in consequence of the abolition of all distances[.]"
Such passages evoke a famous moment in The Human Condition previously alluded to, where Arendt writes that "To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time." Books—old-fashioned, time faded, coffee-stained books—are part of that world of things that, like Arendt's table, constitute the in-between that relates and separates men. Seen through the lens of Heidegger and Arendt, the problem facing the digital age—of which the vanishing of books is but one exemplary form—is whether the world itself, and the worldly in-between with its attendant plurality mediated by things that appear and endure, can itself endure; or alternatively, whether a world is still possible, and if so what kind, among humans related and separated no longer by things, but by pixel screens and antennae.
-John LeJeune


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Lukewarm Media have just announced that they are working on a brand new game for the PlayStation 4, Primal Carnage: Genesis.
Primal Carnage: Genesis will be an episodic FPS game that mixes up both linear and open world gameplay. It will also be using Unreal 4 as their engine of choice.
Ashton Andersen, Game Director and Founder of Lukewarm Media had this to say on the PlayStation Blog.
From towering behemoths like the brachiosaurus and the tyrannosaurus rex, to smaller creatures like the raptor and the dilophosaurus, there is no doubt that there is something magical about them. In order to capture that magic in real time, we used Unreal Engine 4 as our software platform of choice.
When talking about their decision to make the game episodic, Ashton said:
In the early stages of development, it became clear that we wanted Primal Carnage: Genesis to champion an immersive story driven experience. How do we tell that story? We looked into several different storytelling methods and happened upon the episodic approach. It was a difficult decision for us, given the relative newness of episodic storytelling.
No confirmed release date yet, but Lukewarm Media will be sending out regular updates as development progresses.


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Meet Stillwater, a giant panda who becomes the neighbor of Addy, Michael, and Karl. Each child visits Stillwater and receives a story taken from classic Japanese folk tales. The stories are applicable to something the child is experiencing at that moment, but they are also a broader life lesson on generosity, luck, and anger. Award winning illustrator Jon Muth alternates his characteristically elegant watercolors with bold ink drawings in this special book. 41 pp., hc.
Click here for a special offer on this and two other Zen children's books by Jon Muth.
Price: $17.00Product Code: B-579
Read more about Children's Books


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Summer Soltice promotion, Sonic is offering half-price milkshakes for the Winter Soltice which is tomorrow, Friday, December 21, and the longest night of the year.
You have to mention the offer when ordering to take advantage of it though.
Seems like a pretty good opportunity as any to try out the new Chocolate Mint Holiday Shake. It's a little bit cold to be eating/drinking ice cream for me, but I know some people who love ice cream during the winter.
Sonic's shakes are available in Chocolate Mint (limited-time only), Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Pineapple, Banana, and Caramel.
The offer is good at participating locations only.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
News: Sonic - Half Price Shakes for the Winter Solstice
Labels: Limited-Time, News, Sonic


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Afghanistan's disputed election: Divide and rule
Despite the death of its leader, the Shabab is as dangerous as ever15
Somaliland: An inspiring book fair, a raft of challenges
Somaliland has sought international recognition since 1991, but is little noticed12
The hostage trade: Handsome ransoms
The many motives for kidnapping in Syria5
Africa's deadly insurgencies: Ranking high on the wrong measures
Extremism is growing in Africa12
Crime in Somalia: Pirates v economists
A new weapon against Somali bandits: free trade11
On Amazon, Sweden, teaching, Iraq, city planning, Somalia, Chinese4
Drug prohibition: Khat and mouse
Banning the east African stimulant may backfire6
Terrorism in Kenya: Frightening tourists away
A rising tide of violence on the coast is affecting the whole country6
The surge in refugees: Flight of the dispossessed
A record number of people are being uprooted by conflict4
Security in Kenya: Little law, less order
Crime, terrorism and police abuse are all rising together13
Twitter in Kenya: A million conversations now
What Twitter tells us about one of Africa's capital cities4
Terrorism in Kenya: Going bang day and night
Bombs on buses scare many in Kenya and undermine faith in its military mission in Somalia2
Kenyan farmers: Insure my cows
A new kind of insurance may protect herders against drought1
Employment law: Faith in the workplace
Managers are having to accommodate workers' religious beliefs while taking care in expressing their own23
South African business: Somali shop-swap
In a few years immigrant traders have come to dominate informal retailing1
A new offensive in Somalia: The real fight is behind closed doors
African Unions troops are once again attacking Shabab extremists in the south but the more urgent task is finding political agreement in the capital19
Kenya is rollicking haphazardly along. But its president, distracted by his indictment by the International Criminal Court, is hamstrung by greedy old-timers23
Oil in Somaliland: The black stuff can be very useful
The Somaliland government is trying to use oil contracts to gain international legitmacy33
Governing the oceans: The tragedy of the high seas
New management is needed for the planet's most important common resource38
Somalia's civil war: Pushing it across the borders
The most recent efforts to squash the insurgency at home may push it abroad7
Somaliland: Can't get no recognition
Lobbying for independence by Somaliland is showing some results but not enough to cut loose from the rest of Somalia35
Kenya and its Somalis: Go back home!
A Kenyan plan to get rid of Somali refugees is harsh and ill-designed3
Afghanistan's disputed election: Divide and rule
The Economist explains: How online advertisers read your mind
The Economist explains
Brazil's household survey: Slower going
Americas view
Reconciling the Scots: The kirk and its wounds
Unrest in Yemen: Houthis get huffy
Labour and English-only votes: The lesser EVEL
New Zealand's election: Clean sweep
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Teamster retirees, spouses, and surviving spouses who are entitled to Medicare Part
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TEAMStar Prescription Drug Plans (PDP). Participation is not automatic — you
must enroll in Medicare Part D to receive benefits. You are entitled to this program
regardless of your health history or the drugs you take. If you have limited income
and resources, you may qualify for Extra Help. Contact the Social Security Administration
to see if you qualify.
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Our friendly Customer Service Team is ready to assist you.
Contact Us
This website is intended to provide you with information about Medicare prescription
drug coverage so you can make an informed decision about how Medicare Part D can
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in TEAMStar Medicare Part D depends on contract renewal.
Medicare Complaint Form:
Click the link below to submit feedback about your prescription drug plan directly
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©1998-2014 Teamstar. All rights reserved. E0654_W13


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Halloween may be over, but you can always dress up your speaker system (or your cat, but they don't seem to like it too much). The Chip Chick says that Audiovox has developed Home Decor Speaker Covers, which give a fresh look to your old speaker system.
The problem is: They don't work with just any audio system. They are specifically designed for their HD510 system. I have to respect that the company figured out a way enhance an existing product instead of just changing the color and expecting you to buy a whole new system.
If your significant other is sick of seeing your system, consider this like a witness protection program. With 20 covers available, you can make your speaker looks like a tabletop, an antique trunk, or even a set of books—which makes you look smarter to boot!
Follow Electronic House on Facebook and Twitter.
Swann is looking to combine security, home automation, energy management, and more.
An awkward room gets remodeled into a custom theater with automated lighting and 4 subwoofers.
Lamps are for heating up fast food, not for high-performance home cinemas.


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Jiu Jitsu GearMMAWarehouse.com understands the significance of the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu/grappling community and the importance of Jiu Jitsu in MMA. All of our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gear is designed and built to the high standards of professional grapplers in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA fighters who train in No-Gi and BJJ Gi. We seek to provide the best products specifically designed to improve and optimize performance so you can perform at your best.
Take a look at our bjj/grappling gear from the best brands in the world and equip yourself with excellent Jiu Jitsu and grappling gear from MMAWarehouse.com.
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Thanks for choosing 1-800-PACK-RATThe Simplest Way to Store or Move your Stuff.
April 6, 2012
It is very common for people to combine storage and moving. Their new homes may not be ready before they have to move out of their old homes. They may be taking a temporary job somewhere. They may be taking an extended vacation before they move to their new homes. Or they may simply need some time to downsize as they move into their new homes. Regardless of the reason, combining storage and moving doesn't have to be complicated or inconvenient. Most people picture having to rent a truck or make multiple trips with their cars to load everything into a self storage unit somewhere. But self service movers have made the process so much simpler and less stressful.
Your self service mover will deliver as many portable storage containers to you as you need. If you need to put one container in storage and move the other, you can. If you need to put everything in storage, you can do that easily too. Your self service movers will pick up your containers and take them to a storage facility. You don't have to unload anything. Your containers will remain packed just as you packed them. Only you have the key to unlock your containers, no matter where you are in your storage and moving process. When you no longer need storage, your containers will be delivered to where you need them. When you have emptied them, they will be picked up and taken away. No driving required.
Self service movers have made combining storage and moving stress free, flexible and easy. You don't have to load and unload multiple times, rent equipment multiple times or hurry to accomplish everything in a short amount of time. Storage and moving has never been so simple.


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Justin. 20. Southern California. Merchandising major. Asshole.
Friends with BenefitsMila KunisJustin TimberlakeWill Gluck
image: Download
Friends with Benefits (2011)
Sick and watching romantic comedies, could I be any more of a stereotype right now? I have to say though, I actually enjoyed this movie. I thought it would be extremely cheesy, and it was, but not as much as I thought it would be. I sort of like the fact that it plays with the normal rom-com stereotypes, but at the same time it falls into the stereotypes as well. The acting wasn't all that bad, and the directing wasn't terrible either. I actually have decided that I want to be just like Mila Kunis' character; or, at least I identify with her the most (more towards the beginning of the movie though, not the sappy ending). I feel like now that I have seen this movie I need to watch No Strings Attached since that' basically this movies counterpart.
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hellooo7068's Video Channel
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I am Matt, I am a Christian..... I goto College, I act in plays, or try to write my own for my church, people say Ima funny guy, Ima fun guy, and can have fun doing anything. I am jes tryin to write ne thin right now, but I will write more at the right time... lol arite more to come ladies and gentlemen, more to come, God bless!
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Depoy - Local Area Photos and Information
Local Area Photos | Local Business Directory | Local Real Estate | Local Employment Center
Depoy is a populated place located in Muhlenberg County at latitude 37.216 and longitude -87.24.
The elevation is 499 feet. Depoy appears on the Greenville U.S. Geological Survey Map. Muhlenberg County is in the Central Time Zone (UTC -6 hours).
Muhlenberg County: Cities & Towns | ZIP Codes | Schools | Features (airports, churches, hospitals, etc.)
BOUNDARY MAPS: | Greenville Division | Muhlenberg County
Depoy - Searchable Map, Aerial Photos & Driving Directions
|BIG Map |
Driving Directions |
Data Source - USGS GNIS FID: 490823
BOUNDARY MAPS: | Greenville Division | Muhlenberg County
Nearby Cities, Towns & Census Designated Places
Depoy, KY
(< 0.1 mile)
New Cypress, KY (2.4 miles N)
Nebo, KY (3.1 miles NE)
Bancroft, KY (3.4 miles S)
Graham, KY (3.4 miles NW)
Greenville, KY
(3.6 miles ESE)
Powderly, KY (4.7 miles ENE)
Hillside, KY (4.7 miles ENE)
McNary, KY (4.9 miles W)
Morehead, KY (5.1 miles NE)
Nearby Neighborhoods, Subdivisions & Other Small Populated Places
Luzerne, KY
(1.4 miles E)
Jarrells, KY (6 miles SW)
Stringtown, KY (7.4 miles ENE)
Briar Creek, KY (8.5 miles NNW)
Lone Star, KY (8.7 miles SSW)
Jagoe, KY
(9.8 miles N)
Bivins, KY (11.3 miles SSE)
Mays Store, KY (14.5 miles SSE)


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Getty Images
CHICAGO, IL - APRIL 30: Chicago Bears Corey Wooten throws out the first pitch before the game between the Chicago Cubs and the San Diego Padres on April 30, 2013 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by David Banks/Getty Images)
While watching the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby on Monday night, Matt Forte made a suggestion that the Bears should absolutely make happen. Put together a home run derby for football players.
Wish they'd do a home run derby for NFL players. It'd be fun as well as hilarious.
— Matt Forte (@MattForte22) July 16, 2013
Please do this, Bears and Bears players. Who wouldn't want to see if Lance Briggs could hit a ball? Or if Julius Peppers could be a three-sport athlete, since he played basketball in college? If Jay Cutler could hit one out?
And why stop there? Let's do an all-sports competition. Throw in the three-point shootout from the NBA and shoot the puck from the NHL. See who can score a soccer goal. Perhaps even a tumbling competition? Televise it all and use it to raise money for Bears Care.
Training camp is important for preparing the players for the season and for deciding who is on the team. At the same time, it can be boring and tedious. Why not throw in a home run derby to break up the boredom?


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The cross as a symbol both in the Ancient mythology as well as in religion. The cross as a pure piece of jewelry and ornament or expression of a certain standard of living. The cross takes many uses The Rose and the Thorns symbols of love and sorrow
This great custom product in heather gray from our department Men and Sweatshirt category can be printed just for you in the size and style you like. The design Rosicrucian Cross with Rose and thorns was created by namo and uploaded to Spreadshirt for you to have printed on a Sweatshirt. Next to a host of other great customized designs, you can find this Rosicrucian Cross with Rose and thorns design in Spreadshirt's Symbols category. If you are interested in topics like Blood or Death, then you'll love Rosicrucian Cross with Rose and thorns designs by namo. Spreadshirt also offers a huge selection of custom t-shirts, hoodies and accessories for the category Symbols as well as top Rose clothing. namo's designs have already impressed many of our customers, so we are sure that we've got right stuff for you! Spreadshirt is your destination for great designs of all kinds – whether it's Blood, Death or Rose. We are sure that you will find something nice in our shop, there are many amazing custom Symbols t-shirts, hoodies, or accessories for you to find!Tags: Design ID: 10616574
sunglasses_mustache3 Other Designed by surreal197
love to train Designed by skill11
Wicked strong Designed by 3087565
The Official Save the Ta-tas® Logo Other Designed by SAVETHETATAS
A mustache with a gift ribbon Other Designed by namo
Two owls Other Designed by SumuLee
Sloth Love Hug iPhone 4/4S Case Designed by carlhuber
segelschiff_o_3c Bags Designed by Judith-M83
This men's sweatshirt is ideal for those cold days! Made with pill-resistant air jetspun cotton yarn and 1x1 Lycra® spandex ribbed collar and cuffs. Fully double-needle stitched. Made from 50% preshrunk cotton, 50% polyester with a fabric weight of 7.75oz.
still to fill


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Our Press: Father of Invention in Cookie
Here's a shout out to our friends at Cookie Magazine, who've featured us this month in their new April issue. Starting on page 30, you will find a neat monthly article called Mother/Father of Invention, which highlights Ursula, myself (Maxwell) and Sara Kate living for a year and a half in our 265 s/f apartment...
It highlights why we moved when we did - the "breaking point" - and how great Ursula is ;-).
>> Father of Invention: Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan
The interior designer and blogger offers lessons in small-space family living.
It's just a short little bit of an article, but it also lists my pithy answers to perennial childrearing questions, the choices Sara Kate and I have made in putting together her nursery and provides a nice detailed list of a few of the elements we consider out "top picks."
Best of all, it's really a great pitch for Ohdeedoh, our Kids Design site and the fastest growing of all of our sites, so head over there if you want more of that kind of kid-o thing.
13 Comments
That picture of Ursula? SO MUCH CUTENESS.
Is there no link to the whole article? Have you discussed this issue of the "breaking point" before on AT and I've missed it? No fair addressing this only in a print source that I don't read!
(Obvs, kidding about my "no fair" comment--you have no obligation to discuss it anywhere, I'm just curious.)
What lovely photographs. Stunning.
Ursula is adorable on all counts !!
That's great, and a lovely photo, but "which highlights Ursula, myself (Maxwell) and Sara Kate" is bad, bad, bad grammar. In that case, you could have said that the article "highlights Ursula, Sara Kate, and me."
I just read the article today. I have to say that I was impressed with the suggestions for baby needs. I work as a nanny in Washington DC. There is so much stuff bought for these "wee ones", $1000 cribs they will use for 2 years, max; 2 or 3 strollers, plus backpacks, riding toys, etc. and highchairs at birth! Thank you for putting it out there. Buy smart. Do a bit of research before impulse buying! Awesome!
I'm probably never going to see an issue of Cookie in my life. Is there any way to read it on-line?
Ohmigodness, whooss a litttlee cutttteeeee whoootiieeee.
Hey Alana - I'm in Canada too (Toronto) and have seen cookie in Chapters/Indigos - if you're near one....also once in a while at some of the better-stocked magazine stands.
i love the pictures!!!
Thanks Kiwi.
I would love more info on what new parents need, and what you can skip. This is such important advice!