He was an upper-class prep. English was not Buckley's first language: His nanny taught him Spanish, and he attended university in Mexico for some time. But there's little evidence of any Spanish influence in his Connecticut lockjaw sound. Instead, his aristocratic drawl, quasi-British pronunciations, and fondness for Latinate vocabulary seem to have originated at the schools he attended as a boy: St. John's Beaumont in England, when he was 13, followed by the Millbrook School in upstate New York. According to Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus, few of the writer's siblings shared his peculiar way of speaking. Tanenhaus also points out that Buckley picked up elements of a Southern drawl from his parents, both of whom were from the South.
Links
EFF’s full-page Wired ad: Dear tech, delete your logs before it’s too late | Boing Boing
EFF has run a full-page ad in this month's Wired, addressed to the technology industry, under the banner "Your threat model just changed," warning them that the incoming administration has vowed to spy on and deport millions of their fellow Americans on the basis of religion and race, and that they are in grave risk of having their services conscripted to help with this effort. (Trump is also an avowed opponent of net neutrality)
In memoriam: The brands that we lost in 2016 | Digiday
R.I.P Vine. So long, Meerkat. Rest in power, Sports Authority. This was a rough year all the way around.
This is what happens to the bodies of the women you know. | Medium
On Monday, December 5 at 6:30 a.m., I was kneeling on the floor in front of my toilet, hand plunged into the nearly opaque dark red water, fishing for the warm clumps that had sunk to the bottom. I had cleaned the toilet the night before in preparation, and the sterile specimen jar from the doctor’s office was waiting by the sink. I carefully sorted through the mess in my hand, looking for something to stand out. A small grayish oval with a black dot on the side emerged, no larger than my pinky nail. So that was the head, then. I put it in the jar and my hand back in the water, halfway up my forearm, to search for the body. Another grayish lump, nothing discernible, but then I wasn’t looking too closely because the dizziness was overtaking me.
This was my third miscarriage.
This is what a miscarriage looks like.
Trump’s Electoral College Victory Ranks 46th in 58 Elections | The New York Times
Putting the president-elect’s win in context.
A Historic Number of Electors Defected, and Most Were Supposed to Vote for Clinton | The New York Times
Results of the U.S. electoral vote.
Trump private security force ‘playing with fire’ | POLITICO
The president-elect continues to employ a battalion of retired cops and FBI agents to protect him and clamp down on protesters.
Vanity Fair reporter on Trump’s response: ‘I was kind of shocked’ | Columbia Journalism Review
Choking down “flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings” and dealing with bathrooms that “transport diners to the experience of desperately searching for toilet paper at a Venezuelan grocery store” were uncomfortable enough. But Vanity Fair reporter Tina Nguyen feared a...
Science and technology: what happened in 2016 | Daniel Lemire’s blog
This year, you are able to buy CRISPR-based gene editing toolkits for $150 on the Internet as well as autonomous drones, and you can ask your Amazon Echo to play your favorite music or give you a traffic report. You can buy a fully functional Android tablet for $40 on Amazon. If you have made it to a Walmart near you lately, you know that kids are going to receive dirt cheap remote-controlled flying drones for Christmas this year. Amazon now delivers packages by drone with its Prime Air service. There are 2.6 billion smartphones in the world.
So what else happened in 2016?
Using WordPress RSS Feeds | Elegant Themes Blog
Kevin Muldoon (Elegant Themes)RSS is a standard web feed format that was released in 1999. It was quickly adopted by all major publishing platforms. The word RSS stems from the phrase “Rich Site Summary”, though the term “Really Simple Syndication” has become more synonymous with the standard over the years. It...
Chris Aldrich is reading “Panel Theme — WordPress Themes for Blogs at WordPress.com”
A modern theme that makes it quick and easy to publish a webcomic.
Chris Aldrich is reading “Personal Statistics from 3 Months of Internet Reading”
In the interests of cool data, I’ve collected information about every single piece of content I read on the internet (and some of the…
👓 Twitter tests design that ditches retweet icon for “sharing” | TechCrunch
Twitter last year ditched its iconic star button in favor of hearts for favorites, and now it is considering a revamp for its famous retweet button.
Tom Wheeler Resigns From the FCC—So Long, Net Neutrality | WIRED
The man who saved net neutrality is stepping aside.
This is not a good sign for the open web.
Chris Aldrich is reading “Self-Portraiture as Self-Care”
I’ve recently started taking self-portraits as a method of self-care. It’s a way to keep hold of my corporeality – although that sounds very dramatic, it’s an important thing to do for a person who spends most of their time living in their own head. A lot has been written about selfie culture: see the tag Selfie Culture on HuffPo, and (particularly) Laura Bates's (of Everyday Sexism) Guardian article about selfie-taking as (teenage) feminism and image reclamation. I don’t agree that selfies and self-portraits are different things – they are both about holding onto one’s own image and cementing it in a place and time. Sometimes that place and time is frivolous, sometimes it’s serious. Both are okay and both should be encouraged.