nprfreshair:

On the show today, we excerpted Martin Scorsese’s 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Jefferson Lecture, titled “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.” He shares his wide knowledge of film history (including Eadweard Muybridge’s images of moving animals from the 1870s and 1880s) and speaks movingly and eloquently about falling in love with the movies as a kid:

My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time because I was always sick with asthma since I was 3 years old and I apparently couldn’t do any sports. Or that’s what they told me. But really my mother and father did love the movies. They weren’t in the habit of reading — that didn’t’ really exist where I came from — and so we connected through the movies and, over the years, I know now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images up on the screen gave me something very precious because we were experiencing something fundamental together: We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form. … Sometimes they were expressed in small things — gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. I mean, we experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our own lives, and that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy or make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema.

Image by Eadweard Muybridge

poptech:

ilovecharts:

via cakostopoulos

Uh oh. 

ncpssm:

ICYMI

We loved this graphic so much, we needed to post it again. The Progressive Caucus created it and we were shocked by the stats.

We ask you, which is the true crisis – airline delays or homebound seniors losing access to meals? Sequestration is hitting average Americans in every state but Congress doesn’t seem to notice (unless their flights are delayed, that is).

Read more here.

(via greenpeace)

mercycorps:

See what a girl can do.

nprfreshair:

Sandra Day O’Connor tells Terry Gross about getting the call from President Reagan that would change her life:

I was working in my office on the Arizona Court of Appeals. I was at the court in my chambers when the telephone rang and it was the White House calling for me, and I was told that the President was waiting to speak to me. That was quite a shock but I accepted the phone call and it was President Reagan, and he said, ‘Sandra?’ ‘Yes, Mr. President?’ ‘Sandra, I’d like to announce your nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow. Is that all right with you?’ Well, now, that’s kind of a shock wouldn’t you say?”

Image via AspenInstitute-Internal/Flickr