URLs du Jour

2007-05-25

  • Thirty years ago today, I was in the Uptown Theatre in Washington DC. And James Lileks remembers where he was too. Slashdot has lots of fun links.

  • The WaPo has an interesting story today on folks who "declare e-mail bankruptcy": swamped with too many unanswered messages in their inbox, they just give up and start over. Or not start over, in some cases, just swearing off e-mail altogether.

    Pardon the strong language, but most of those folks are latecomers and wimps compared to Geekfather Donald Knuth. Read his explanation of his dropping e-mail back in 1990:

    I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
    (You can also read his rationale for spelling it "email" instead of "e-mail." I'm not convinced.)

  • How to lose the immigration debate: imply that your opponents are bloodthirsty lunatics, or just garden-variety bigots.

    (As one of the commenters to the latter article says: "You lost me at 'Some people just don't like Mexicans'". Which happen to be the first six words in the article.)

  • Republicans of a libertarian bent (or libertarians of a Republican bent) may be interested in Ross Douthat's musings on how well the "libertarian" label fits on Rudy Giuliani vs. Ron Paul. My own take: libertarianism aside, I'm not sure Dr. Paul isn't a total wacko.