Extra Credits: Weekend Reading List
Here are some good reads from the last week or so that you may have missed. I tweet these through the week and collect them in a post every Friday. Follow The Syllabi on Twitter if you prefer the trickle feed. Open this in your browser to see Read Later buttons.
Vanity Fair on the recent history and uncertain future of NPR (with a wonderful title)
Vanity Fair interviewed dozens of people associated with Guantanamo and tells an oral history of Guantanamo Bay (more on that in my Guantanamo post here)
How John Rabe helped Chinese survive Japan’s horrific World War II invasion and became “the living Buddha of Nanking”
Here’s an extract from Nick Cohen’s book You Can’t Read This Book on how the English legal system helps the wealthy and powerful suppress inconvenient truths
Vice on how cruise companies cover up crimes that occur aboard cruse ships
Great article from The Atlantic on the history of torture, starting with the medieval Roman Catholic Church
The Guardian has a nice mini-series of articles exploring the power of memory
When doctors die, they don’t die like the rest of us. They know exactly what’s going to happen and they know the limits of the various treatment options available and, as a result, usually get much less treatment than the rest of us, without resorting to what they call “futile care.”
Last week I made a post about a study regarding violinists’ ability to differentiate modern guitars from Strads. Here’s another feature on the study
The Guardian goes behind the scenes at Britain’s biggest forensics lab
A two part blog post on the narrative limits of anthropomorphic machines in The Thoms The Tank Engine universe and Pixar’s Cars universe
