Thursday, April 24, 2014

Resources for April 24, 2014

XKCD:



ACLU: The Department of Justice announced expanded criteria for clemency applicants during a press conference today. According to the DOJ, thousands more will now be able to ask the President to commute or pardon their sentence.

Dialogic Cinephilia archives:

April 23, 2014

April 24, 2014

Zander, Ben. "'Rite of Spring' Revival." Radio Open Source (April 22, 2014)

Jameison, Dave. "Fast Food CEOs Make 1,000 Times More Than Their Typical Workers: Report." Huffington Post (April 22, 2014)

Giroux, Henry A. "Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as a Public Sphere." Truthout (April 22, 2014)

Dialogic Peace & Conflict Studies archive: Scott Horton (Lawyer -- Human Rights, Emerging Markets and International Law)

Sharma, Akhil. "On Family Life." Radio Open Source (April 23, 2014)["We’re in conversation with the writer that so many other writers are talking about, the Indian-born New Yorker, Akhil Sharma. His novel is Family Life, a faithful recounting in fiction of a horrific swimming-pool accident that did catastrophic brain damage to his gifted older brother and smashed his family’s immigrant adventure. But our conversation, like the book itself, is also about how writers are made, how agony becomes art, how memory wants be nudged forward. Akhil Sharma is telling us he chiseled 7,000 pages in draft to barely 200 pages in hardcover. It was a project, he says, that was full of love more than sadness, that was designed to be useful to his parents and others, and to move like a rocket. The conversation jumped from writing to life and back again, from Hemingway to Chekhov and Proust and the devices of storytelling and fiction. And we found that we were high on each other almost before we began."]


Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day:

fissiparous \fih-SIP-uh-rus\

adjective 1 : tending to break up into parts; 2 : creating disunity or dissension : divisive

EXAMPLES

The election for class president had a fissiparous effect on the school as students took sides for their favorite candidate.

"In Calvinism: A History, D.G. Hart … shows how Protestantism's fissiparous nature has allowed it to adapt and, in some instances, transmogrify to fit local and personal needs." — From a book review by Michael P. Orsi in the Washington Times (Washington D.C.), December 12, 2013

When it first entered English in the 19th century, "fissiparous" was concerned with reproduction. In biology, a fissiparous organism is one that produces new individuals by fission; that is, by dividing into separate parts, each of which becomes a unique organism. (Most strains of bacteria do this.) Both "fissiparous" and "fission" trace back to Latin "findere" ("to split"). The second part of "fissiparous" is rooted in Latin "parere" ("to give birth to" or "to produce"). Other "parere" offspring refer to other forms of reproduction, including "oviparous" ("producing eggs that hatch outside the body") and "viviparous" ("producing living young instead of eggs"). By the end of the 19th century "fissiparous" had acquired a figurative meaning, describing something that breaks into parts or causes something else to break into parts.

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