Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Daily Links: December 20, 2011




The 12 All-Time Ugliest Christmas Sweaters

50 Clever Ikea Ideas for Your Dorm Room

55 Fiction is a form of microfiction with a few rules, including a limitation to 55 words. Started as contest in a local San Luis Obispo, California alt-weekly paper in 1987, the contest has since been replicated elsewhere, including two related books (Google books previews) and two unrelated websites. The latest contest is now done.

Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe'. Kenan Malik's essay is awarded 3 Quarks Daily's Top Quark for politics & social science by judge Stephen M. Walt: "Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe 'European civilization' rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the 'West' unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of 'Western' culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as 'bedrock' values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a 'clash of civilizations' is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all." 

What did the world search for this year? Find out with Google Zeitgeist

When you give out money based on politics, without any accounting, this is what you get: 13 Snow Cone Machines for Homeland Security.

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