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Jerry Monaco

Jerry Monaco's Public Library

01 Dec 09

Interpreting revolution: "Che: Part I" and "Part II" by Victor Wallis

  • Of course, any number of real omissions can be found. This is not a biography of Che (his early development was portrayed in The Motorcycle Diaries), nor does it offer more than the briefest glimpse of his private life. As for his role (between 1959 and 1965) in Cuba’s revolutionary government, this is represented almost exclusively in the form of flash-forwards from the pre-1959 guerrilla struggle (Part I of the film) to scenes from when he spoke at the UN General Assembly in 1964. There is thus no attempt to encompass his significant (and controversial) impact on the economic transformation of Cuba, or his role in Cuba’s internal struggles of that period. What the UN scenes (including interviews and small talk) offer is a sense, on the one hand, of Guevara’s intellectual agility and his understanding of imperialism and, on the other, of his detached and ironic attitude toward the trappings of power. These flash-forwards, then, serve to dramatize the outcome of the victorious struggle of Part I, and thereby also to frame the tragic unfolding of Che’s subsequent Bolivian venture (1966-67), which is the theme of Part II.
  • It mentions only in passing the urban middle-class opposition to the Batista regime,
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30 Nov 09

Secretary Laid Off After Getting Cancer, Lawsuit Alleges - Gothamist

  • A legal secretary is suing a midtown law firm for allegedly cutting her loose just hours after she revealed that she had a cancerous tumor. In October 2007, Theodora Benedict sent an e-mail informing her employers at Tarnow & Juvelier that doctors had diagnosed her with a rare tumor behind her sinuses, and she would have to miss a week for surgery and a week for recovery. But instead of "get well soon" cards, Benedict, 61, says she got the boot—two hours after clicking send.

Powell's Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - The Original of Laura

  • reproducing facsimiles of Nabokov's 138 penciled index cards at the top of each page and printing typeset transcriptions with minimal editorial changes and notes below,
  • The photographed cards are perforated, to encourage us to stack and shuffle them -- as Nabokov apparently did -- into an order that might make more sense. Nabokov's neat handwriting is punctuated by eraser smudges, inserted phrases, and emphatically crossed-out or scribbled-over words.

Powell's Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - Evicted From His Own Head

  • The subject of the story "Quadraturin" is a Soviet city dweller, Sutulin, who lives in an apartment so tiny that when he hears a knock on his door one evening, he doesn't need to get out of bed to open it: he merely "threaded a toe through the door handle, and pulled." The stranger at the door persuades Sutulin to take a free sample of an experimental substance that is supposed to make rooms bigger. Sutulin begins to apply the Quadraturin to his walls as the instructions on the tube advise, but he accidentally spills the entire contents of the tube on his floor. He wakes up the next morning in a "faintly familiar, large, but ungainly room," where his furniture looks awkward and the angles of the walls are uneven.
  • In "The Branch Line," a commuter named Quantin falls asleep on a train, using his briefcase as a pillow. He dreams that the train has dropped him off in an otherworldly city where he sees crowds of people marching with placards (Glory to the Unwakeable). Quantin stumbles into an auditorium where a speaker is exhorting "the kingdom of dreams" to revolt against reality.
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24 Nov 09

Sex Toys: Your New Best Friend - The Tech

  • According to The Tech’s Sex Survey, 13 percent of all MIT students have a sex toy. Overall, 16 percent of MIT women have toys. However, this statistic is as low as 6 percent for the females in the freshman class, whereas it shoots up to 26 percent for the females in the senior class. These numbers argue that sex toys become more prevalent as students go through their MIT career, and whether you’re a virgin or one-half of a couple, you can integrate toys into your sex life and use them to get better acquainted with your (and your partner’s) body and preferences. To protect your health and prolong the life of your product, keep in mind the following when purchasing and using:

Capitalism and Functioning Democracy Are at Odds - The Tech

  • The ability to govern one’s affairs also implies that control over resources and the means of productions needs to be shared among people. The attack on property rights that is implicit in this argument is not an attack on the people’s rights to own a house, or a car, or enough land to provide for themselves. It is an attack on the rights of a private entity to exclusively own natural resources (mines, water, land) and means of production (factories and shops) at the expense of all other people who depend on those resources for existence.
  • For the democratic process to be meaningful, those who are affected by a decision should participate in the decision-making. Democracy and inequality are mutually exclusive. Th
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Nonfiction Book Reviews: 11/16/2009 - 11/16/2009 7:00:00 AM - Publishers Weekly

  • What Darwin Got Wrong Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-28879-2

    The authors of this scattershot treatise believe in evolution, but think that the Darwinian model of “adaptationism”—that random genetic mutations, filtered by natural selection, produce traits that enhance fitness for a particular biological niche—is “fatally flawed.” Philosopher Fodor and molecular-biologist-turned-cognitive-scientist Piattelli-Palmarini, at the University of Arizona, launch a three-pronged attack (which drew fire when Fodor presented their ideas in the London Review of Books in 2007). For one thing, according to the authors, natural selection contains a logical fallacy by linking two irreconcilable claims: first, that “creatures with adaptive traits are selected,” and second, that “creatures are selected for their adaptive traits.” The authors present an ill-digested assortment of scientific studies suggesting there are forces other than adaptation (some even Lamarckian) that drive changes in genes and organisms . Then they advance a densely technical argument that natural selection can't coherently distinguish between adaptive traits and irrelevant ones. Their most persuasive, and engaging, criticism is that evolutionary theory is just tautological truisms and historical narratives of how creatures came to be.

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