Search Results for: Time

Northwestern Is Poised to Compete in March Madness for the First Time in History

Northwestern center Dererk Pardon, right, celebrates with center Barret Benson after Northwestern defeated Michigan 67-65 in an NCAA college basketball game Wednesday, March 1, 2017, in Evanston, Ill. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

It’s become one of the most well-known sports trivia questions: Name the five college basketball programs that existed in 1938 (when the NCAA tournament was first held) to have never danced in March Madness. By this Sunday, though, that number will likely drop to four. Northwestern, the only high-major school of the group (which includes William & Mary, St. Francis NY, Army, and The Citadel), currently has a 21-10 record, and is coming off the greatest win in the team’s history: tied with Michigan in the final seconds of a Big Ten game last week, Dererk Pardon snagged a full-court desperation pass right under the basket and laid the ball in, giving the Wildcats the win and essentially punching its ticket to the NCAA tournament (though Northwestern lost on Sunday to Purdue, the team is currently a 9-seed in Joe Lunardi’s ESPN Bracketology). Read more…

A New American Pastime: Putinology

Photo by Kai Schreiber, via Flickr Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For The Guardian, Russian-born journalist and author Keith Gessen breaks down seven theories about Vladimir Putin that have gained traction as a result of a diversion that’s become popular with Americans in the Trump era: Putinology.

Putin’s recent ubiquity has brought great prominence to the practice of Putinology. This enterprise – the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information – has existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade. It kicked into high gear after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, but in the past few months, as allegations of Russian meddling in the election of President Donald Trump have come to dominate the news, Putinology has outdone itself. At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia’s president. You might say that the reports of Trump’s golden showers in a Moscow hotel room have consecrated a golden age – for Putinology.

And what does Putinology tell us? It turns out that it has produced seven distinct hypotheses about Putin. None of them is entirely wrong, but then none of them is entirely right (apart from No 7). Taken together, they tell us as much about ourselves as about Putin. They paint a portrait of an intellectual class – our own – on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

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On Wearing a Hijab for the First Time: They Never Really Did See Me

Photo by Franco Folini (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Weeklings, Khirad Siddiqui reflects on wearing a hijab at age 13, as a young woman in Plano, Texas, seven years ago. She discovered “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American Muslim who also felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”

I can remember every moment of the day I first started wearing hijab. I can remember waking up early on my thirteenth birthday because I couldn’t contain the excitement I felt. I can remember the exact shade of the pink fabric, and the way it felt tighter than I had expected. I can remember my father’s smile, and the length of my mother’s hug. I can remember the slow morning drive through my hometown in Texas, and the way my parents asked me one last time before they dropped me off if I was sure this was what I wanted. I can remember the conviction of my answer. And, of course, I can also remember the fear. I can remember too the way my teachers would avoid eye contact with me, and I can remember how tentative my friends were when they asked if my parents had forced me into it, as if they were suddenly scared for me, or of me, or both. I can also remember how slowly, through stilted conversations and glares from passersby, I felt the world constrict around me. I can also remember how suddenly everything felt sharper: people’s voices, their smiles, and their comments. Nothing was friendly anymore. That day shaped me, and I remember all of it.

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Birds as an Antidote to Bombastic Noise, or How to De-stress in Stressful Times

Magnolia Warbler by Bill Majoros (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In this interview by Patricia Treble at Maclean’s, author Kyo Maclear talks of birds and bird-watching as an “ode to the beauty of smallness, of quiet, of seeing the unique in the ordinary… in an age in which bombastic noise often triumphs over quiet contemplation.”

Q: You have to keep very still when birding. We’re in a world now where everyone has to do stuff. This is the antithesis: you are the observer and the birds are working.

A: The one thing I’d thought of is that we spend most of our lives in survival time. There’s a sense of hanging off the ledge, trying to tread water, trying to keep ahead of the deadlines or the business of the city. Birds are the antithesis of that, for sure. I discovered that there were things that did not pay off in the birding world. Rushing, for example. Impatience. All the things that we do to self-optimize in our working lives don’t work out at all in the birding world. To realize that there’s an actually entirely different way of being if you’re watching birds.

I hadn’t thought it was about observing the birds in action, but it’s true: they are very industrious, very active. The grebes [mentioned in the book] are very collaborative. They are nest-building but doing it together. There is a sense that they are barn-raising together. It’s not about ego, you know.

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James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time,’ Published On This Day in 1963

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

-From James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, published January 31, 1963.

Serena Williams and Roger Federer: The Greatest of All Time

This weekend, Serena Williams and Roger Federer each won their respective singles titles at the Australian Open, the first major tennis tournament of 2017. The achievement by two of the greatest tennis players of all-time was remarkable for several reasons: Serena Williams set an Open Era record with 23 Grand Slam singles titles under her belt. Roger Federer extended his record as the male tennis player with the most Grand Slam titles with his 18th win. And both players, at the ripe old tennis age of 35, demonstrated athletic excellence in a sport dominated by 20-somethings (I should also note that the Australian Open women’s final also featured Serena’s sister, Venus Williams, 36, who is also excelling at an age when most other players have chosen to retire). To celebrate these achievements, I’d like to share two of my favorite profiles of Serena and Roger. Read more…

1999 Was The Last Time Everything Was Fine

Longreads Pick

A personal essay nostalgically looking back at 1999, a buoyant time for the economy and publishing–before the bursting of the dot com bubble, a stock market crash, and the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessett Kennedy, and her sister.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 3, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,849 words)