When you need to pass someone carrying an umbrella—and you’re going to if you’re carrying a cane umbrella with an effective width of 43 inches on a sidewalk with an effective width of 48 inches—defer to the right. This is key. It’s tempting to thrust an umbrella up or pull it down when passing another umbrella, so as to maintain uninterrupted rain coverage. But do this wrong, and you wind up colliding.

—How to Use an Umbrella - CityLab

In other words, yes, it is a problem in a narrowly defined sense that a woman reporter for the Times is making eighty grand a year while her male colleague is making ninety-five, or what have you, but it is a problem in a much broader sense that she went to Bryn Mawr and he went to Brown and both of their New York rents were floated by their parents for 4-5 post-undergraduate years of internships and sub-$30K reporting gigs; that these two employees consider this a natural state of affairs; that their employer considers it so (obviously) as well. These are the people who report on “income inequality.” In a very circumscribed sense, they experienced and performed low-income labor—for them, a rite of passage, a way station.

Go Philly!

(via Here are the deadliest US cities for biking or walking - Vox)

“Der «Alien»-Vater ist tot”

(via Kultur: Film - tagesanzeiger.ch)

So far, the greatest song I’ve seen live this year. The video I found from the Philly show doesn’t do it justice.

I meet and interact with a lot of young lefties who are just stunningly rhetorically weak; they feel all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the “right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing” and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want.

Twitter is the platform that led us into the mobile Internet age. It broke our habit of visiting individual news homepages first thing in the morning, and established behaviors built around real-time news consumption and production. It normalized mobile publishing power. It changed our expectations about how we congregate around shared events. Twitter has done for social publishing what AOL did for email. But nobody has AOL accounts anymore.

— Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer, “A Eulogy for Twitter The beloved social publishing platform enters its twilight,” The Atlantic, April 30, 2014.
(via johnvettese)