April 2013

From The Onion:

SANDUSKY, OH—In a moment of confusion, area teenager Eric Dooley briefly walked into a local teen outreach center Tuesday, a place that neither he nor any of his teenaged friends would ever knowingly enter.

“Oh, geez. I’m sorry,” the 15-year-old said as he quickly assessed the four battered foosball tables, outdated PlayStation console, overly friendly counselor, and garish orange and purple paint scheme—all intended to appeal to him—before exiting the facility in less than six seconds. “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be. Sorry. Sorry.”

Dooley reportedly joined a gang later that afternoon.

When you see the word “Amazon”, what’s the first thing that springs to mind – the world’s biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet retailer – and which do you consider most important?

From Guardian UK:

These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: “.amazon”.

The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.

Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen — coauthors of a new book, The New Digital Age — recently returned from a highly publicized trip to North Korea. In the second part of their conversation with NPR’s Audie Cornish, they discuss the role of the Internet in more repressive countries. “We fear that the natural action for, in particular, autocratic governments experiencing what we describe as ‘virtual urbanization’ will be to balkanize the Internet,” says Cohen, “filtering out content so that way the Internet experience in that particular country looks as much like the physical society as possible.”

Full piece

Mr. Blum is the editor of Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service that is helping to promote a renaissance of novella-length journalism and fiction, known as e-shorts.

Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a store within the megastore of Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of 5,000 to 30,000 words that come from an array of outside publishers as well as from in-house. Most sell for less than $2, and Mr. Blum is the final arbiter of what goes up for sale.

Full article in the NYT

From the New York Times:

DALLAS — President Obama has left little mystery about how he views his predecessor. “The failed policies of George W. Bush” wiped away a budget surplus and “squandered the legacy” of bipartisan foreign policy. Mr. Bush put two wars “on a credit card,” led the country away “from our values” and “crashed the economy.”

But Mr. Obama will surely say none of that when he helps dedicate the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on Thursday. Addressing a crowd of Bush supporters and administration veterans, the 44th president will no doubt extoll the virtues of the 43rd president and praise his years of service to the country.

It has become an awkward ritual of the modern presidency that the current occupier of the Oval Office is called upon to deliver a generous historical judgment of the previous tenant. With the opening of each new presidential library, the members of the world’s most exclusive fraternity put aside partisan differences to honor the shared experience of running the nation in difficult times.

E.L. Konigsburg, the author of the 1967 children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two children who run away from home to live secretly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died Friday. She was 83.

Full article

From the New York Times:

More than four years after leaving office, former President George W. Bush has a question for America: So what would you have done?

In a new brick-and-limestone museum, visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?

Slide show here.

OK, included “Laura Bush” as one of the topics, can we now please delete that one Blake?

Story at Salon.com

The Boston bombing suspect wanted a Chechynan dictionary, “Snatch” and books on how to make fake IDs

Full article

The Digital Public Library of America, intended to provide free open access to materials from libraries, museums, universities and archives across the country, launches at noon ET on Thursday.

Full story

UPDATE: The launch was to happen in front of the Boston Public Library. Because of the events in Boston this week the launch is being delayed.
Source: http://dp.la/get-involved/events/launch/