Remembering Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn’s Quiet, Sweeping Influence
The bassist usually doesn’t get much attention. Occasionally, a flashy player hogs the spotlight with slapping, popping, and soloing, but it’s usually just a quiet guy holding down the low end and staying out of the way. For many listeners, Duck Dunn probably seemed like the latter sort of rudimentary player. That’s probably the way he would have had it, too. But it would be a mistake to think of Dunn, who died in his sleep at 70 Sunday, as a background player. In fact, he is probably the most influential bassist of the last 50 years, with an impact in every pop genre save country.
Even if you’ve never heard of Dunn, you’ve heard a lot of his playing. That’s him easing into Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Those are his monster arpeggios chugging along under Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.” It’s his syncopation at the bottom of Sam and Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” And that’s him in The Blues Brothers, too. As a member of Booker T. and the MG’s, the house band at Stax, he played on most of the great Memphis soul hits. […]
But it’s not just the inevitable head-bopping that accompanies the classic Stax sides that makes Dunn an immortal. It’s his influence.
Hackstar Academy - Summer Programming Fellowship for Women
This is awesome!
Why There's No War Between Drivers and Cyclists in the Netherlands - Commute - The Atlantic Cities
This is the kind of transit and urban policy direction we should be going in honestly.
Although we’re more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties—and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook. The links from your close ties, meanwhile, more likely contain information you would have seen elsewhere if a friend hadn’t posted it. These weak ties “are indispensible” to your network, Bakshy says. “They have access to different websites that you’re not necessarily visiting.
Weak ties are again some of our most important and novel connections.
From North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer. The last time North Carolina amended its constitution on marriage, it was to ban interracial marriage.
It is time to stop the politics and address the basic question of fairness, for that is what this is about. We cannot say we are a nation that stands for equality, while in the same breath denying basic rights of happiness, financial parity, and state-recognized companionship to millions. Nor can we any longer trot out the tired notion that civil unions and marriages are the same. For if they were, we would not call them by different names. Separate can never be equal–a lesson we learned during the Civil Rights era that we have yet to apply to the struggle for LGBT rights today.
