SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.

P.J. O’Rourke on his time in Afghanistan:

“…Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.”

The archive of LIFE magazine from ‘36 to ‘72 is now readable in its entirety on Google Books.

What an amazing catalog of American culture and history, in it’s full context with the original advertisements and all.

Samples I found browsing:

• Thoughts on the ongoing Apollo program. September 25, 1964.
• Maps of Norway and the British plan to strike back at the Germans. April 29, 1940.
• VJ Day after atom bombs. August 20, 1945.

ckck:

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, this site is staging a “re-enactment” (or what to call it) of the events in real time (seemingly), only 40 years later and utilizing 2009 web technology. Both Houston Control and Apollo 11 have their own Twitters (!), for example. Not a whole lot going on at the moment, but it’s still T-minus 63 hours until “launch”.

This is either really cool or really cheesy (probably both), but I’ll certainly be watching. I’ll give them a standing ovation of they have the balls to do this in real time too, what with this 15 millisecond attention-span world we now inhabit.

An in-depth essay on the effects of solitary confinement. Is it torture?