Camp Dad and Google Reader

Well, I lied about posting more. But I did discover that Google Reader has a cool function where you can share stuff you've read recently on the web (see the right-hand column).

In other news, the school year ended yesterday in Burlington, and today I finished my last meeting on the coordinating committee of Grassoots Global Justice, so this summer will be "camp dad," hanging out with the kids. All the movement work has been a little overwhelming in the last few years, and the kids are growing up, and I figure this may be one of the last summers I get to really hang out with them before they get too cool and teenagerish to hang with their folks.

And maybe — just maybe — I'll be posting more frequently on this blog.

Resolutions and high-profile friends

I kinda sorta made a new year's resolution to "blog more." I'm not sure why, exactly, but it may lead to more writing on here, has already inspired a new design, and will probably mean a new direction and some attempt to attract readers.

If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.

Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.

The wrong side of the Atlantic

We need trade unions who are prepared to unite to defend their members, not to look over their shoulder about whether they're embarassing their friends in goverment.

— Mark Serwotka, general secretary of Britain's Public and Commercial Services Union

This week in France...

We believe in the power of the street. In France, all our social battles were won on the street. It's always been like that and it always will be. This is about the kind of society we want. Do we want liberalism to reign, or do we want a society of social support and equality?

—Adrien Bouzard, 22, second-year anthropology student at Nanterre university

Guardian

Shell beans

Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn't producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings — a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, much less canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.

—Adam Gopnik