Welcome back! We missed you! We may republish a few things you might have missed, but we may not. Poke around!
Super cool old pictures of the Ross Sea Party.
There is actually not much point in telling you if you live in a state where your signed DNR is automatically invalidated by being pregnant, but in case you want to know if you can be used as an incubator against your wishes and those of your family, here you go! Maybe you don’t want to be kept on a vent for eight months to bring a motherless child into the world, but, again, not your call. (I live in one of these states.) I mean, maybe you DO want that, which is also totally valid, so maybe they should make DNRs with a line that says “ignore this if I am pregnant/do not ignore this if I am pregnant,” and then you can make your own decision, which is surely what the government wants, right? Right?
The New Inquiry has a piece on the intersection between libertarianism, biological determinism, and paleo diets, a synergy which is apparent to anyone who just wants to eat a lot of meat and vegetables and eggs in the privacy of their own home without also having to hear about Rond Paul (a portmanteau of my own invention.)
We don’t want your breakup poems, but these people do!
I was so late reading this fabulous Poirot retrospective, but, happily, they don’t really become dated after a month, do they?
Virginia Woolf asks (well, “asked,” in 1924) what Jane Austen’s fiction would have become, had she lived longer:
Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvelous little speeches which sum up in a few minutes’ chatter all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove forever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is. She would have stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: she died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.”
This is a really interesting conversation, not really about Beethoven’s actual ethnicity, but about historiography and defensiveness and asking people to explain things to you, which is one of the reasons Medieval POC is an awesome Tumblr. Hat-tip to @sassycrass (who wrote this great thing for us.)
Wisconsin is attempting to use cheese to de-ice their roads, because when all you have is a hammer…
Depressing, yet informative, dispatch from the ACLU’s trip to GITMO.
