poetryeater:

Detonate the hearts of babes

the smart hearts of babes

detonate the hearts of cellphones

of tungsten—

detonate the apartments, carports, bridges

the birds above the marshes

detonate the lovers in their beds

their coffee cups in the early hours

detonate subways & railways & shopping carts

the land mass, the land rovers, the monster

traffic jams

scribnerbooks:

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway’s colleagues bet him that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. His rebuttal?

 

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

 

They paid up. Hemingway is said to have considered it his best work.

Today I got an info request on the increase of people who report multi-race between 2000 and 2010. This brought a little collection of things to mind.

From an email to a reporter several months back:

“-Race is self-reported in the 2000 and 2010 Censuses, so to the degree that respondents change how they report their own race from one census to the next, there will may be problems in comparison of the 2000 and 2010 data.
“-Respondents may report multiple races in the Census, and, following the national trend, there is an increase the proportion of Alaskans who report more than one race for themselves between 2000 and 2010.”

I’d say the increase in multi-race is likely from increase in interracial births (and indeed you can see more multi-race at younger ages, which correlates with this) (partly just to do with the increasing diversity of the country) and perhaps changes in how people report their race (though I don’t have any research to point to on that (anybody know some?)—in 2000 there was a Census report on multi-race change, but of course the census question had fundamentally changed between 1990 and 2000 too—I haven’t seen one specific to multi-race population change for 2010 (though they’ve provided a lot of great stuff for each race group.)

Here’s an interesting paper from 2002—who knows how it holds up though:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447362/

A chunk from it: “The large increase in interracial births in the United States has generally corresponded with trends in multiple-race reporting. However, multiple-race reporting falls off steeply as age increases. In addition, this analysis suggests that not all offspring of interracial parents identify strongly enough with 2 race groups to report both groups when responding to a national survey. This inconsistency between the percentages of interracial births and multiple-race reporting, especially the lower percentages observed in the NHIS for the Black–White and API–White groups, is congruous with a previous NHIS study that found that only half of all children with interracial parents are reported as multiple race.13 Many of the observations in the NHIS are for children whose race groups were reported by proxy; how a parent’s reporting of a child’s race affects the latter’s reporting in adulthood is unknown…”

Actually President Obama reported just Black—there’s a precedent from the president on how a person may report, and an example of how self identifying is a personal exercise.

And actually last week I got a call from someone who recently discovered he is a different race than he thought, and he wanted to know how he should report race on an application— that was sort of fun to think about with him.

Unauthorized immigrant population estimates:

Department of Homeland Security (Hoefer, Rytina and Baker)

Pew (Passel and Cohn)

Warren and Warren

In my head at work— so cool:

“In spite of all the time that we spent on it
On one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet
While outside, the wild boars root
Without bending a bough underfoot
Oh it breaks my heart, I don’t know how they do it
So don’t ask me!”

-Inflammatory Writ (Joanna Newsom)

Beautiful couple days! Sunburn!