I LIKE THIS ARTICLE A LOT

...We now throw away forty percent of all the edible food we produce. And when we throw away food we don't just throw away nutrients; we also throw away the energy we used in keeping it cold as we lost interest in it, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting it, along with its proportional share of our staggering national consumption of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water, packaging, and landfill capacity. According to a 2009 study, more than a quarter of U.S. freshwater goes into producing food that is later discarded.

--David Owen, The Efficiency Dilemma

PART II

Jay-Z loves the Peace Corps.

--Petter Hessler, Village Voice

One day four years ago, Jay-Z was reading The Economist...

--Kelefa Sanneh, Jay-Z's Decoded and the Language of Hip-Hop

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Brady and I have started a 5-day Pity Party--if we get it out of our systems then we can leave it behind and never think of it again. You're welcome to join, but only if you're prepared for 120 hours of straight up sadness.

The last time I used the "bliss" tag was in early April.

Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands--thousands--of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P. G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You'll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they'd find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain. Every June they graduate, grow up, work and move on. They'll have kids, Mac, who will come to you someday for English, and you're left facing another term of Joeys and Sandras, Tonys and Michelles, and you'll want to know: Is this what it's all about? Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember, if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You're with them, day in, day out, and you'll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it's bye-bye teacher, nice knowin' you, my sister's gonna be in your class in September. But there's something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forget how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at you like you just arrived from another planet and they're right. Day after day in the classroom means you're in another world, Mac.

--Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

By dismissing Mr. Williams, one of its senior news analysts, NPR argued that he had violated the corporation’s belief in impartiality, a core tenet of modern American journalism. By renewing Mr. Williams’ contract, Fox News showed its preference for point-of-view — rather than the view-from-nowhere — polemic. And it gave Fox the opportunity to jab NPR, the public radio organization that has long been a target of conservatives for what they perceive to be a liberal bias.

--Brian Stelter, Williams Episode Shows 2 Versions of Journalism

Juan Williams has driven me crazy since the 7th grade. Begone.

Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

--Elizabeth A. Harris, Paladino Attacks Gays in Brooklyn Speech

Ugh.