Archive for the 'unitedstates' Category
"Whatever it's background, the tape contains no less than 547 of what it calls “Typical American Expressions”, each with an explanation and an example...read by this rather humorless and mechanical sounding announcer."
Visualized history of the colored alert system of the Department of Homeland Security. Demonstrates that in the history of the color alert system, there has never been a day when the alert has been Green or Blue.
DoS document detailing the history of the Great Seal and its uses and associated protocols.
Official Presidential portrait of Barack Obama. First presidential portrait taken with a digital camera.
Nice chart from Good Magazine comparing the first 100 days of the last 12 US presidents.
Žižek on the presidential election and what the election of Obama means.
History of voting. Secret ballots are an Australian invention, only adopted at the tail end of the 19th century in the United States.
Rather than reading this story, I listened to it on a Consider the Lobster audiobook, read by DFW himself. He sounded dry, and earnest, and worried, in the way that his writing is all of those things. All footnotes were read in a slightly different tone of voice. Still one of the more thoughtful (and therefore better) pieces I've read on the immediate domestic impact of September 11th outside of the bounds of New York City.
The result seems to be essentially meaningless, I think because the sample size is underwhelming. Might make more sense divided into pre-tv and post-tv. Notes: Carter's little interpolated grin is charming, G. W. Bush's hook hands less so; Madison was really small, and Taft was not.
Visual distribution of electoral votes for every single presidential election in US history.
"One person wrote about the Hummer all-terrain vehicle. This is not technically a human, but I could see her point."
"...is a large-format publication about 300 pages long and containing almost 800 maps. Data from decennial censuses prior to 2000 support nearly 150 maps and figures, providing context and an historical perspective for many of the topics presented."
"Due to the length of this list, it has been divided into the following sections..."
Nice longish read about the history of the US's war on drugs. For fans of Traffik/c and The Wire.
An image library of all presidential signatures.
"[The United States] isn't a unified system of territoriality, but a hodgepodge of different attitudes toward the land and its inhabitants. Different areas under U.S. control have very different relationships to government..."
