Is Trump plotting a coup?

I agree that pushing the legal boundaries could have been a blunder, but was more likely an attempt to get other people to show their hands.

I see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the ...

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Kelly Faircloth reacts to the election

She writes:

To grow up a girl in the 1990s was to stew in a particularly rich pot of misogyny and, for some of us, to have one’s sense of the world shaped by the treatment of an uneasy trinity of women: Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky.

Sure, my experience was exaggerated by living in the Deep South—Georgia went for Bill Clinton in 1992, then promptly gave the country Newt Gingrich—and it’s not like I would have sidestepped sexism if ...

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What it is like to tutor the wealthy and the privildeged

An interesting article, from a tutor, about the way wealth sometimes protects mediocre students, and allows them to get into good colleges:

Because UT Austin is a terrific place—the rare kind of school that radiates both capaciousness and prestige—it is the top choice for many Texas high school students, and its unique admissions policy carries a lot of weight. It is discussed ad nauseam during application season; however, the reasoning behind this policy—behind the 10 percent rule, behind affirmative action—is not. ...

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Why did feminism finally get picked up by the women’s magazines?

When I was younger, my friends and I used to wonder why all of the women’s magazines were misogynist. The advice they gave was always anti-woman and pro-convention. This made no sense to us. It was as if the magazines were at war with their own customers. As near as I can tell, this misogyny was editorial policy for the entirety of the 20th Century.

Things have changed dramatically over the last 15 years, and especially the last 8 years. ...

What is the argument for design patterns?

Interesting:

Paul Graham’s essay Revenge of the Nerds is a nearly pornographic love letter to Lisp. If you can manage to read all the way to the end, there’s an interesting footnote buried at the bottom:

Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were “invisible or simpler” in Lisp.

He should have opened the essay with that evidence, because it strengthens his conclusion considerably:

In the OO world you hear a good deal about “patterns”. When I see patterns ...

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Sending email from Clojure

This makes it look very easy to send email from Clojure. The interface looks more pleasant than what I have run into in the world of, say for instance, PHP. But you do have to have all of your credentials, usernames, passwords, port numbers — stuff that PHP usually comes pre-configured to deal with.

Clever startup idea

Public whitelisting for pingbacks. Allow auto accept of others whitelist.

How far away is the nearest star?

The distance to other starts. An amazing read.