...great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammer. - Mark Twain, a Biography When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind - The Prince and the Pauper A serial killer finds a newly vulnerable class of victims: white, working-class men. Wanted: Caretaker For Farm. Simply watch over a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows, you get 300 a week and a nice 2 bedroom trailer, someone older and single preferred but will consider all, relocation a must, you must have a clean record and be trustworthy—this is a permanent position, the farm is used mainly as a hunting preserve, is overrun with game, has a stocked 3 acre pond, but some beef cattle will be kept, nearest neighbor is a mile away, the place is secluded and beautiful, it will be a real get away for the right person, job of a lifetime—if you are ready to relocate please contact asap, position will not stay open.
Scott Davis had answered the job ad on Craigslist on October 9, 2011, and now, four weeks later to the day, he was watching the future it had promised glide past the car window: acre after acre of Ohio farmland dotted with cattle and horses, each patch framed by rolling hills and anchored by a house and a barn—sometimes old and worn, but never decrepit. Nothing a little carpentry couldn’t fix. Jason Madara / Erik Tanner / Paul Spella / The Atlantic Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? Tech companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve conditions for female employees. Here’s why not much has changed—and what might actually work. One weekday morning in 2007, Bethanye Blount came into work early to interview a job applicant. A veteran software engineer then in her 30s, Blount held a senior position at the company that runs Second Life, the online virtual world. Good-natured and self-confident, she typically wore the kind of outfit—jeans, hoodie, sneakers—that signals coding gravitas.
That day, she might even have been wearing what’s known as the “full-in start-up twin set”: a Second Life T-shirt paired with a Second Life hoodie. In short, everything about her indicated that she was a serious technical person. So she was taken aback when the job applicant barely gave her the time of day. He knew her job title. He knew she would play a key role in deciding whether he got hired. Yet every time Blount asked him a question about his skills or tried to steer the conversation to the scope of the job, he blew her off with a flippant comment. Afterward, Blount spoke to another top woman—a vice president—who said he’d treated her the same way. Robert Nickelsberg / Getty The University of Michigan’s Plan to Increase Diversity The administration has launched a multiyear racial and socioeconomic diversity plan, but a lot of students aren’t pleased. ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Jacqueline Graniel spent her whole childhood in Southern California assuming other families also lived paycheck to paycheck.
Now, as she studies for both a medical degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, she has found that some of her classmates avoid the stress of renting and dealing with landlords by simply buying houses, sometimes with help from their parents. That’s not an option for Graniel; she sends a portion of her stipend home to support her family. Growing up with a single father, Graniel has been taking care of siblings since she was in elementary school, and she’s happy to help support the people she loves. But to suddenly be surrounded by students who have the luxury of focusing solely on school was jarring. “If I didn’t have a tight community, I would probably feel lost,” she said recently during lunch downtown with some of the people who make up that community, specifically other members of the Society for Advancement of Hispanic/Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, or SACNAS. Ricardo Arduengo / Reuters The Utility of Precision in Opposing Injustice Building a successful coalition requires engaging with the complexity of racism, bigotry, and systemic disadvantage.
Over the years, I’ve heard well-meaning people argue that events including the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King, the questioning of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and the slaying of Trayvon Martin have nothing to do with race or racism. The impulse to deny or minimize racism, to contrive any other explanation (Occam’s razor be damned) for even the most racially charged incidents, is an ongoing, pernicious feature of American life. And it provokes a necessary backlash from folks who want fellow citizens to see what is in front of their noses. Anti-racism has its own excesses at the opposite extreme—that Oberlin’s dining hall serves inauthentic sushi, for instance, is not an example of racism in American life, and such claims only make it more difficult to win hearts and minds.(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910 / Florida, Missouri) #295 on top 500 poets O Lord, Our Father The Aged Pilot Man Ode To Stephen Dowling Bots, D... All poems of Mark Twain »
Search in the poems of Mark Twain: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel." Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure ... more » ''“If you tell the truth, you dont have to remember anything.”'' ''“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” ''“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”''