Monday roundup

Hey guys! I'm exhausted so this is gonna be quick, which is a shame, because there's a lot to write about.

Gotta love how this article about maritime tensions in Asia has not one but two schoolyard-kid analogies.

Anne Applebaum ably parses the Euro-elections:

Yes, the French and the British were protesting their ineffective establishment parties. Yes, the European Parliament itself, with its halfhearted mandate and wasteful spending, isn’t an institution people care about. Yes, the European elections have often been a vehicle for flaky protest votes. And of course it’s true that the European Union itself has made terrible decisions in recent years, including the creation of a currency union that devastated the economies of several of its members.

Today an ambassador was sworn in on a Kindle.

Do you feel the need to know about biofuels in your products?

The Farm Bureau hates the Chesapeake. The Post's editorial board has drunk the GMO koolaid. Also: having discovered donotlink.com, I'm using it for this horse$hit about how there are more women writers because women are basically moochers.

Organics have benefits but are not a panacea. 

AnnaLynne McCord speaks out, ends on this important note: "don't let the polite lies of society silence you."
 
WTF, Frank Bruni? Et tu? The guy had a manifesto. Ross Douthat gets it and you don't (even though he misses the point of sex-positivity, particularly as it pertains to the relevant cultural issue). I'm reminded of how a couple of my male coworkers thought Beyonce's halftime show performance was "very slutty," all while finding Seth MacFarlane's despicable Oscar opening hilarious: women's sexuality is appropriate as long as they don't own it. This is why Beyonce is such a threat to some guys: she embraces her sexuality, and owns it.

Charles Blow gets it, but that's no surprise. And yes, it is about men.

Some of this Shakespeare-Galileo connection is overwrought, but it's worth it for this:

At the heart of his argument is an ambitious effort to offer empirical assurance for what we all intuit — that art and science need each other, inform and inspire one another, and are branches from the same tree of the human longing in a universe that is more like a mirror of meaning than a window of understanding, beaming back at us whatever imagination we imbue it with.

I've only started reading this explanation about how English came to have gendered pronouns, but it's interesting.