Long Reads

[thrill]

This story is amazing and devastating.

"My Family's Slave"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/524490/

Man.

[Freed Roger]

This story is amazing and devastating.

"My Family's Slave"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/524490/

Man.[/quote]
Amazing person.

[GeddyWrox]

Wow.

[The Third Man]

This story is amazing and devastating.

"My Family's Slave"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/524490/

I came to post this.

[Freed Roger]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opin ... .html?_r=0

not really a long read, but am a bit obsessed with Alex Honnold's climb of El Capitan and this article does it best.

[heyzeus]

An oral history of the "Planet of the Apes" musical parody on the Simpsons.

[GeddyWrox]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opin ... .html?_r=0

not really a long read, but am a bit obsessed with Alex Honnold's climb of El Capitan and this article does it best.

NOPE

[SHOW]

[pioneer98]

This is a semi-long read about mathematicians that have tried to detect if there were patterns to when wars might break out. The idea was to try to predict when war might happen, like predicting a thunderstorm. They found that the frequency and severity of war closely follows the Poisson Distribution, which means it's totally random. Maybe that's not that mind-blowing. It means that wars just happen sometimes. They are just part of the nature of the global political/economic system of the past couple hundred years.

But crazily, terrorist attacks do follow a mathematical pattern. This means that in those cases where you have a less-powerful insurgent force going up against a much larger and rigid force, that they tend to attack in a similar pattern.

Safety in Numbers

This is the Ted Talk mentioned in the article:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sean_gourley_ ... ics_of_war

[heyzeus]

Would you like to be profoundly disturbed and depressed about the fate of our country? Yes? GREAT!

It's written by Michael Lewis, of The Big Short and Moneyball fame. Consider this like Moneyball for the federal government, only instead of how to do everything right it's how to [expletive] the [expletive] out of every [expletive] thing we do.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/ ... hael-lewis

[Donnie Ebert]

In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.

Another exception occurred in November 1954 when, 30 minutes into a screening of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, in an auditorium with around 6,000 patrons, a seat exploded and injured two women and two boys. Apologetic theater ushers asked 50 or so patrons near the bomb site to watch the remainder of the film from alternate seats, allowing ushers to rope the area off so the police could investigate after the movie.

A bomb goes off in a theater, injuring four people. They rope off the seats so the police can investigate later and keep the movie going.

What a time the 50's must've been.