Lazy Sunday Link Drop

I go through the internet like it’s made of toilet paper. It’s an insatiable search for more information, more enrichment. Here are some things I’ve come across lately. Not all of them are recent. (But how many interesting things really are?)

• Too Weird for The Wire: “Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves.”
• Capturing Somali pirates: first-person shooter view: “Watch as some Dutch marines board a container ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates. The footage is from a camera mounted on one of the marines’ helmets.”
• Double Blind: “This came clear to Kevin Fulton on the day his cover as an IRA man collapsed. It happened inside an IRA safe house in north Belfast, in 1994. Fulton sat facing a wall, blindfolded. Curtains shut out the pale light of winter. Bottles lay scattered on the floor, and the place stank of stale beer. An interrogator paced the room, his boots scuffing against the floor.”
• How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die: “He called himself Michael Finkel. Which happens to be my name. And he told everyone he met that he was a writer for The New York Times. Which happened to be my job.”
• Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden: “While feeding the West’s seemingly insatiable fascination with all things Tibetan, the murders and demonstrations have exposed a dark and troubling underside of a tradition often seen as a beacon of wisdom and compassion in a spiritually confused world.”
• The Passion of David Bazan: “‘People used to compare him to Jesus,’ says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. ‘But not so much anymore.’”
• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: No quotation, this is some weird and heavily awkward shit. Premise: Reverend Al Sharpton goes to Liberia to hold peace talks, brings a bunch of Nation of Islam dudes with him… and Tucker Carlson. Tucker (he of the bow-ties) is dubbed an honorary member of NOI by the end of the trip: Tucker X.
• Glenn Beck Inc: “With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: ‘I could give a flying crap about the political process.’ Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. ‘We’re an entertainment company,’ Beck says.”