On the Imprint design blog, J.J. Sedelmaier has an exhaustive take on the gorgeous posters that were used to advertise Chicago rail service in the 1920s. The South Shore line stretched as far as my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, meaning replicas of these prints could be seen in some of the fancier shops around town growing up. I still love looking at them, and all of them are shared in the post.
Alice Munro has another gem in the November 28 issue of the New Yorker: Leaving Maverley. I don’t know anyone else as good at capturing the sweep of a lifetime in such little space.
“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”
As the New York Times shares, for profit-education looks like the next big scam. I’m sure everyone will be suitably chastened when the bubble blows up in seven years.
The new installment of Mushroom Madness doesn’t deviate much from its predecessor. It’s found a formula that works—squish, shoot, electrocute and even nuke the forest critters trying to steal your mushrooms—and it’s sticking to it.
Which is great, in a way. It’s still satisfying to squish the little buggers as they make their way out of the woods. And it can still get frantic near the end of a level, when a giant hedgehog is making off with a whole grove as a bird darts off in another direction with another one of your choice morels.
But the difficulty curve seems to have gone limp after Mushroom Madness 2. The last game called for plenty of frantic replays to get close to a full slate of accomplishments. Here most of the boards are done in one, with the animals posing little threat as they march to the slaughter.
I doubt my quick-twitch abilities have improved that much. Instead, it seems the upgrades let you outclass the competition too quickly. The game is still fun, but the last one provided a more memorable experience.
But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
I really enjoyed Obama’s speech in Kansas tonight. It seems like such a plain-spoken review of the problems our country is facing that it’s amazing to see how it will be recast as Marxist, unAmerican dogma