No One Answers Your Cry For Help In The Sisyphean World Of 'Fail'
By Linda Holmes
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The first thing you need to know about 'Fail,' as a concept and a one-word declaration, is that it's so utterly worn out that you could take 'Fail' itself and say, "'Fail'? Cliche FAIL." And a distressing number of people would agree with you.
Indeed, the epic fail, the typing fail, the text message fail, the publicity fail — just about everything you can fail at has now had so many fails that actual failure has almost become meaningless if you call it that. (And not because of grade inflation.)
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If I were in charge of it, this phenomenon wouldn't be called "FAIL," as that focuses too much on the behavior of the other person — on the inadequacy of the person who made the sign. No, I would name it "OH, WHAT?" Because these pictures understand what it means to ask the sky, with your fists clenched, "What are you people trying to do to me?" You people at the place I tried to get coffee, you people on the train, you people on the elevator. What, I ask, are you trying to do to me?
This is the Sisyphean world of Fail, in which the accessible entrance is a set of cement stairs, a floral wreath which certainly looks destined for a funeral shows up labeled "BELOVED HASBAND," and it takes three sheets of paper to make a sign reminding people not to unnecessarily waste paper. It is the grungy, dull, uninspired workaday world in which, like Sisyphus does in the myth, you push your little rock of bewilderment up to the top of the hill, and all it ever does is roll back down. On you. With dirt on it. Onto your foot.
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American Muslims: Incredibly Normal, Also Trusting Of Obama
By Adam Serwer
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Nearly half of American Muslims think of themselves as Muslims first! Sounds sinister—until you consider that description applies to "nearly half" of American Christians as well, with the percentage of Muslims identifying themselves by religion before nationality (49 percent) being only three points higher than the number of American Christians who say the same (46 percent).
. . . Muslim Americans like and trust Obama more than they trusted Bush, with 76 percent approving of the president's record. Obama's effort to "reset" U.S. relations with Muslims abroad doesn't appear to have worked. At home, though, Obama's outreach seems to be working pretty well. That's despite the fact that, as the Washington Post reported Tuesday, Obama has avoided certain personal public gestures that his predecessor willingly made (like visiting a mosque, for example).
I can't help but wonder if part of the difference has to do with the persistent conspiracy theories about the president being a secret Muslim—on some level, obviously, the president gets what it's like to be singled out for being "different." But perhaps it's also that Obama's gestures of tolerance, such as his support for the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, represent much more of a political risk for him than they did for Bush. Or it might just be that Democrats, the Dubai Ports World fiasco aside, never completely succumbed to the kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric common in the Republican Party today. The bigger difference may simply be that in the age of full-blown Sharia panic, the contrast between the president and the opposition makes Obama's inclusive rhetoric all the more meaningful.
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Did the use of psychedelics lead to a computer revolution?
By Wendy M Grossman
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You might be excused for thinking these are the words of a philosopher or a stoned Grateful Dead fan, but no. It's from an interview in 2000 with Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy and Britain's first software billionaire, currently in the process of selling his company to Hewlett-Packard for $10bn (£6bn). Lynch, who was talking about the power of the pattern recognition that forms the basis of Autonomy's success, went on to talk about the fascination of dreams, near-death experiences and the accounts of those experimenting scientifically with LSD in the 1960s: all forms of altered perception.
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From 1961 to 1965, the Bay Area-based International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through acid trips for research purposes. Some of them were important pioneers in the development of computing, such as Doug Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse, then heading a project to use computers to augment the human mind at nearby SRI. Grim also names the inventors of virtual reality and early Cisco employee Kevin Herbert as examples of experimenters with acid, and calls Burning Man (whose frequent attendees include Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) the modern equivalent for those seeking mind expansion.
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There's a basic principle to invoke here: coincidence does not imply causality. As early Sun employee John Gilmore, whom Grim calls a "well-known psychonaut", says in that article, it is very difficult to prove that drug use led directly to personal computers. The 1960s were a time of extreme upheaval: the Vietnam war and the draft, the advent of female-controlled contraception, and the campaign for civil rights all contributed to the counterculture. Was it the sex, the drugs or the rock'n'roll – or the science fiction?
In 1998 Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, said in a discussion of his enjoyment of science fiction: "I think it's also made it easier for me to think about things that weren't quite ready yet but I could imagine might just possibly be feasible."
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Cancer: Still a Bad Metaphor
By Rebecca Dresser
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It’s been more than 30 years since Susan Sontag published her classic essay, “Illness as Metaphor.” A cancer patient herself, she was angry that cancer had become a popular metaphor for society’s villains. According to Sontag, calling things like Nazis, Communists, and the Watergate events “cancers” stigmatized and demoralized patients. People with cancer are “hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil,” Sontag wrote.
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Why does the cancer metaphor have such staying power? Other illness metaphors don’t have the same appeal. Sudden deadly events aren’t “heart attacks.” Incrementally developing dangers aren’t “diabetes” or “obesity.”
Cancer metaphors are powerful because cancer is, in former President Nixon’s words, the “dread disease,” the one people fear more than any other. Heart disease may be the leading cause of death in this country, but surveys show that more people are afraid of getting cancer.
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The true harm in portraying cancer as evil comes from the effect this language has on healthy people. As Sontag asserted, it makes cancer “not just a lethal disease but a shameful one.” With cancer, you become an outsider, someone who may look strange from treatment side effects and can’t fully participate in ordinary life. Friends and acquaintances aren’t sure how to talk to you, and some avoid you altogether. Cancer carries less stigma than it did when Sontag wrote, but more than a few people still act as though cancer patients are somehow contaminated.
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