Samuel Bradin, 83, from Rockland County, N.Y., is a survivor of Aushwitz where he was as a 13-year-old, the only member of his immediate family to survive the camp. He was liberated from Bergen Belsen on Jan 17, 1945, and came to the U.S. in 1949.
Survivor Henry Flescher, 89, was born in Vienna, Austria, and initially escaped to France where he was eventually interred in Drancy deportation camp.
We tend to think of an event like the Holocaust — well, there are no events like the Holocaust — as an unfathomably alien and distant historical aberration. In fact, we are separated only by a little time and a little geography, and there are little pieces of it floating all around us.
(Via Talking Points Memo.)
“Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they’re ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven’t quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that’s ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.
Sometimes it happens like that. You don’t choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.
”
(Source: etsy.com)
(Source: missamerican-pie)
Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.
Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.
Yep. Pretty much sums it up.
(via W&CIE)
“It is Genghis Khan bathed in sherbet ice cream.”
Resolution: The next time I’m writing fic, if the characters therein spend an afternoon or evening in the library/doing work/reading/writing/attempting productivity of any kind, they will spend at least 75% of that time dicking around on the internet/battling recalcitrant muses/staring out the window/cursing the cursor on a blank page.
“The Recalcitrant Muses”: my new favorite band name.
In a dramatic show of support for the open access movement, the editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week. In a letter to contributors, the board singled out a conflict with owners over the journal’s licensing terms, which stripped authors of almost all claim to ownership of their work.
In a blog post after the resignation, board member Chris Bourg cited her experience of “a crisis of conscience about publishing in a journal that was not open access” in the days after the death of Aaron Swartz. The board had worked with publisher Taylor & Francis on an open-access compromise in the months since, which would allow the journal to release articles without paywall, but Taylor & Francis’ final terms asked contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access article. As more and more contributors began to object, the board ultimately found the terms unworkable.
The ultimate future of the journal is still undetermined, but the next issue appears to be dead in the water. In a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the journal’s editor-in-chief said he did not wish to vilify the publishers, but for the journal’s authors, the “math just didn’t add up.” The result, at least for now, is a journal with a well protected paywall and no editors.
