Berfrois

Your Local Internet

Your Local Internet

Technology, which at first promised global reach, could assist the local resurgence of abundant microcultures...

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Masha Tupitsyn on Steubenville

Masha Tupitsyn on Steubenville

Last week I emailed Laurie Penny's article "Steubenville: This is rape culture's Abu Ghraib moment" to my mother. We talked about it. She called it "sexual fascism." She always has the right words. I asked her how it is possible to raise human beings who are capable of things...

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‘Establishing schools is an age-old missionary strategy’

‘Establishing schools is an age-old missionary strategy’

Annunciation, Sandro Botticelli, 1489 – 1490 by Rahila Gupta The narrative of splits in Protestantism which is based on convenient binaries, with African and Asian churches emerging as the conservatives, and the US and Europe as the liberals, fails to capture the complexity of what is going on at...

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Bobbi Lurie: @EnlightenedHBO

Bobbi Lurie: @EnlightenedHBO

by Bobbi Lurie  @    xxx I am ur first follower-i hope you saw no. 1 the way Amy did in #Enlightened: watch tonight- @mikewhiteMW =Chekov of t.v. in U.S.A   @HBO_Enlightened most unifying statement i’ve read = “i wanted 2 keep it a secret but they won’t renew if so” #myfaultsorry  ...

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Jewish and Not Laughing

Jewish and Not Laughing

I was born in central London two years after the Second World War. My parents were first-generation British Jews, brought up in London’s East End by their immigrant parents who had escaped from the Eastern European pogroms in the early years of the twentieth century. Since my birth in...

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Chess, Classes, Roommates, Frisbee

Chess, Classes, Roommates, Frisbee

Susan Polgar From Wired: Top coaches like Polgar don’t exactly teach their players chess strategy; the players already know what they’re doing. But a coach can help around the margins. Several hours a week, Polgar studies the chess equivalent of game film. Chess players tend to hone their skills...

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A Litter From Vladimir Dixon

A Litter From Vladimir Dixon

Dear Mister Germ's Choice, in gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know that, being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened the window and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half ter one other the numboars of "transition" in witch are printed...

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Mina Loy’s Personality

Mina Loy’s Personality

Mina Loy by Christina Walter Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is a polemic against women’s subordinate position in modern Western culture, penned in 1914 by Anglo-American writer and painter Mina Loy, who was then living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy. This polemic, unpublished in Loy’s lifetime, is one...

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Elias Tezapsidis’s Top 10

Elias Tezapsidis’s Top 10

From its very first issue in 1986, Spy Magazine was a radical project. It was not the product of celebrities and their PR teams, nor did it aim to please those in the public sphere. Voicing the frustrations of intelligent journalists in a sardonic way, it acquired a thinking...

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Follow @inthefade for the banter

Follow @inthefade for the banter

Photograph by Nick Dimmock A million followers is nothing. Voice is everything. by Michele Catalano It was April of 2009 when everything changed. I had been on twitter almost two years at that point, as @abigvictory, using it mainly as a platform for crude jokes and observations about sports....

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Shaggy Hearts

Shaggy Hearts

Monsters University, Walt Disney Pictures, forthcoming 2013 by Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound,...

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Eefing and Beatboxing

Eefing and Beatboxing

Hee Haw, CBS-TV, June 15, 1969 – September 19, 1992 by Justin E. H. Smith I mentioned recently that whenever I come back to the US (I’m writing from Chicago), I enjoy immersing myself in this country’s rich cultural history. This, for example: My friends imagined that I was...

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