Plain Text

John Curl, a woodworker and historian, has published a new book with PM Press, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. Journalist Richard Brenneman of the Berkeley Daily Planet interviewed Curl at Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop. Curl told his interviewer:

“In the globalized corporate world, either you’re an employee or you’re marginalized, a ‘useless person,’” he said, and one of the consequences is perennial unemployment. “Capitalism can’t live without unemployment,” he said.

The interview contains several such nuggets. Take a look.

Source

Richard Brenneman, Passion for Community Revealed in Curl’s History of Co-ops, Berkeley Daily Planet, Aug. 27-Sept. 2, 2009.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

Journalist Carl Nolte wrote the obituary of Him Mark Lai that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle a few weeks ago.

Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Lai worked as an engineer and spent much of his life outside work as a historical scholar, tracking down the history of immigrant Chinese in the United States. He published more than 100 essays and 10 books in English and Chinese, says the obit.

Source

Carl Nolte, Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Historian, Dies, San Francisco Chronicle, May 29, 2009.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

The San Francisco Chronicle has been republishing material by beloved local columnists. Yesterday, they published this column, A Few Good Things to Say About Cancer, by Art Hoppe, written one month before his death from lung cancer in 2000.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

Career expert Liz Ryan provides some advice for the unemployed.

Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle and Yahoo Hotjobs for syndicating this column.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

“I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks in this Feb. 2 column.

Another favorite of mine is Brooks’s column about a meal he once had at Antoine’s in New Orleans.

Webster’s online dictionary can help with any unfamiliar vocabulary.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

As we read more on the Web and less in books, newspapers, and magazines, do we lose the ability to read and digest longer pieces of prose? Thanks to the several friends who have sent the link to this article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Source: Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

Sam Roberts has written an article about the recent surprising appearance of the semicolon on New York City Transit public service placards. Read the article.

It’s interesting to note that the Sun Editorial Style Guide cautions against the use of semicolons: “Avoid using semicolons…. For conjoined sentences, consider rewriting the text as separate sentences.” This style guide, published in July 2006, is available to Sun Microsystems workers in HTML or PDF format. If you’re interested but are outside the company, Sun editor Janice Gelb recommends the publicly available version: Read Me First: A Style Guide for the Computer Industry.

Source: Sam Roberts, “Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 2008. Thanks to John Maybury of goofbuster.com for the pointer.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

In “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, writes that “we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly.”

Source: Chris Anderson, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” Wired, Feb. 25, 2008. Thanks to the Librarian in Black blog for the pointer.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off

Tamara Straus of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed novelist Carol Edgarian and editor Tom Jenks, who have been publishing a free online literary magazine, Narrative, the last five years. “The magazine’s primary goal: to connect more readers to more literary writers.” Read Straus’s interview.

Here’s a direct link to a Narrative interview (note to those with a slow Internet connection: it’s a PDF file) with one of my favorite writers, Richard Rodriguez. Narrative requires you to sign in to read, but access is free.

Source: Tamara Straus, Two Editors’ Online Journal Gives New Life to Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 2008.

Tags: Reading by GD
Comments Off