(via thesteward) Difficult to pull this off without looking costumey.

landscapelifescape:

A Camping Resort on St. John - The New York Times

“Eco-tents at the Estate Concordia Preserve, which also has upscale studios.”

takeeverything:

claytoncubitt:

Installation view of Walton Ford’s amazing ‘The Island’, 2009, up at Paul Kasmin until December 23.

“The Tasmanian wolf, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was neither a wolf nor a tiger. It was a thylacine, a marsupial cousin to kangaroos and wallabies, which evolved over several million years, in the forests of Australia and New Guinea, into a fearsome apex predator. Long extinct on the mainland, carnivorous thylacines survived on the island of Tasmania into the early years of the twentieth century, when the settlers finished them off. Their violent extinction is the central drama of Walton Ford’s latest painting, a huge and surpassingly weird watercolor whose early stages I observed during several visits last fall to his ramshackle, barnlike studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.” -Calvin Thomas, ‘Man and Beast’, New Yorker

In pictures: The week in wildlife | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Brutus, a wolf being studied by USGS scientists, returns to pack mates and demonstrates dominance behaviour over a younger male wolf. A satellite collar was put on Brutus to learn how artic wolves fare in winter and the pack route can be followed online.

Usually, I love Jezebel.  But today, Deputy Editor Dodai Stewart wrote a post, “Commenting About Race Is Complicated”, that just really struck me as wrong.  I’m going to rant about it here because Dodai closed comments on the original post.  (Emphases mine.)

Yesterday, Latoya riffed on a Wall Street Journal article about the new black Barbie dolls, and the prickly issue of reflecting a vast diaspora of people in one mass-produced toy. Her post was great; some of the comments were not.

Why? Because comments about how it’s not just black people who are not represented by Barbie, but Asians, Greeks, Irish, Russians, brown-eyed girls, brunettes, the near-sighted, etc. are not the point. In fact, comments like these miss the point entirely. These experiences/issues are, of course, valid, and have a place in the world, but not on a post about black issues. Comments like, “Where is the freckled Barbie?” have nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is the historic and systemic racism against a specific ethnic group in this country. The marginalization of African-American people from the mainstream culture. We have seen lots of these kind of comments persist on stories about race — and race as it pertains to hair — and not only are they off-topic, they’re insulting, insensitive and dismissive. Why? Because what they do is:

— Insinuate that it’s a personal issue, when, in fact, it is cultural, societal and global.
— Diminish racism to lookism or oversight
— Undermine the original post
— Degrade and disrespect the struggle of black Americans

I respect that the experience of black Americans is unique and significant, and I understand that racism against blacks in America is of a different nature than racism against Asians, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, transgender, and other groups.

However, the lack of fair, reasonable, or respectful representation of Asian-Americans in popular culture is not about oversight or lookism.  Lumping together “Asians” along with “brown-eyed girls” and the “freckled” is dismissive and trivializing.  Asian-Americans have experienced serious, violent racism in the United States for hundreds of years and continue to do so.  Marginalizing our experience as inferior to the black experience and irrelevant to a discussion on race “black issues” is, well, racist.

I think a lot of the problem with racism and the experience of Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, or bi- or multiracial people, comes from this idea that race in America must be discussed in the binary terms of black vs. white — an idea that is, apparently, rampant in the blogosphere.  Apparently, talking about the lack of Asian representation in culture on a post about black Barbie dolls “degrades and disrespects the struggle of black Americans”?  What?  How does that not perpetuate racism against Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, etc.?

nevver:

Gray Screech Owl | PDN Photo of the Day

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential.

Climatologists under pressure : Nature (via Climate Progress).

Flying Dog K-9 (via slyxc)  Celebrating finishing my law clerkship at the Senate today, and the end of classes.  I am just 70ish pages of paper-writing away from my last semester of law school.

nevver:

Jeremy Geddes