This past June was a pretty horrible month overall and most intentionally viral videos make me cranky anyway, so when my friend Butters sent this video to me I fully expected to be annoyed and unimpressed by it (and the Where the Hell is Matt? project that spawned it). Instead I ended up so happy and so pleased that I nearly cried. I hope you like it too.

From Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace address, delivered in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

How depressing and frustrating that over 50 years after that speech—so much time that someone born while Eisenhower was actually speaking those words could’ve had children and then grandchildren—not only have we’ve gone further down that road, but it’s become difficult to imagine taking another path. How do we change course?
[ via The Constant Siege ]

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, on the importance of bohemia (and therefore the problem of over-gentrification):

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.

[ via The Morning News ]

For about as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to live somewhere with a hidden door, but I think this story about a Fifth Avenue apartment with a puzzle hunt built into it during a recent renovation by the architect Eric Clough has me thinking I’ve not been ambitious enough:

The finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky. (There is other stuff in there, too, but a more detailed explanation might drive a reader crazy.)

I wonder how many of New York’s wealthiest parents are going to be contacting Clough this week, demanding a similar feature for their kids? (And hey, even if they don’t want the puzzles they’ll probably call anyway—$300 per square foot for a Fifth Avenue apartment renovation sounds like a great deal for people in that tax bracket.)

I love Annalee Newitz and I love William Gibson, so of course I love Annalee’s interview with him on io9 today:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

I don’t think a writer can hit the dystopic key without being misanthropic. I’m actually not misanthropic. I think people are capable of wonderful things. I’m quite fond of them and enjoy their company. I can’t do Jonathan Swift. I don’t have it in me to do that. I also don’t have it in me to say to reader, “This is all real.” I’m enough of a postmodernist that I go in and out of believing in my own narrative. The happy endings, such as they, are are actually a function of that. They’re the “that’s all folks” at the end, waving the big three-fingered glove. I want to remind people that they’re reading a novel about an imaginary future. If I had my way, I’d even be reminding people about the whole culture of reminding people.