a slate of good articles

Slate online has been publishing a lot of interesting articles lately. Interesting to me, at least. Since who the heck knows where the links to them disappear to after they go off the front page, here's some links of my own.

Political
1. Having once spent a semester researching and writing a paper on the background and history of the 17th Amendment, I know why repealing it and returning the election of senators to the state legislatures would be a really bad idea. It's for the reasons we got rid of it in the first place. This article gets it, not perfectly, but better than anything else I've seen.
2. I have one of these ugly and embarrassing Bush-era new U.S. passports. Fortunately I haven't had to use it yet.

Alarming Social Trends
1. The return of Jim Crow. Against gays.
2. If civilization is a place where you can walk down the street without worrying all the time about being shot, then we're abandoning civilization.

Computers
1. An article about computer code that I can actually understand!
2. It's my conviction that ten, or at the most 15, years from now, Facebook will look utterly quaint and obsolete. (No, that's not why I refuse to join it.) Remember that once, AOL stalked the Earth. This article explains why it's going down.

Life, the Universe, and Everything
1. Time zones are wonky. I can no longer trace how that article led me to this map.
2. "Every accent Meryl Streep has performed" says the headline. They missed at least one. Perhaps they didn't realize that this character from Angels in America was Meryl Streep.