NPR’s Recent Top 100 List
This isn’t quite important enough to front-page center, but it’s good enough for the sidebar.
Patrick
Patrick is a mid-40 year old geek with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master's degree in Information Systems. Nothing he says here has anything to do with the official position of his employer or any other institution.
January 16, 2014
October 26, 2012
May 21, 2013
[caption id="attachment_361266" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screengrab from WIVB Buffalo Channel 4 News[/caption]
Still a developing story, but what we know so far points to an utterly depraved act of violence at a Buffalo supermarket.
Comment →Ten people were killed and three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were transported to local hospitals after a mass shooting at a supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side Saturday afternoon.
The shooter was an 18-year-old white male who was heavily armed with tactical gear and was live-streaming during the mass shooting, officials said. City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the shooter is not from Buffalo and traveled “hours” from outside the area.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”
The shooter was identified in court Saturday evening as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder without bail.
The 18-year-old will be back in court on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for a felony hearing.
When Gendron exited his vehicle at the supermarket, authorities said, he shot four people in the parking lot. Three of them died and one is in the hospital. The shooter entered the store and opened fire on customers.
Twitch deletes shooter’s live-stream video of Buffalo mass shooting
A retired Buffalo Police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard, shot Gendron but he was unharmed because he was wearing armor, Gramaglia said. The retired officer was shot and killed.A law enforcement source told CBS News that the gunman had a racial slur written on his weapon. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn will not confirm the existence of the shooter’s manifesto. He said they believe there was a “racial component” to the attack but won’t say more.
This attack is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime and as violent extremism.
Police officers could frame people, file bogus charges, conjure evidence out of thin air—and, in most of the U.S., they would still be immune from facing any sort of civil accountability for that malicious prosecution. Until yesterday.
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Yesterday, the highest court in the country struck that requirement down, ruling that Thompson should indeed have a right to sue the officers at the center of his case. "A plaintiff such as Thompson must demonstrate, among other things, that he obtained a favorable termination of the underlying criminal prosecution," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. "We hold that a Fourth Amendment claim…for malicious prosecution does not require the plaintiff to show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence."
From THOMPSON v. CLARK ET AL.:
Held: To demonstrate a favorable termination of a criminal prosecution for purposes of the Fourth Amendment claim under §1983 for malicious prosecution, a plaintiff need not show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence. A plaintiff need only show that his prosecution ended without a conviction.
Thompson has satisfied that requirement here.
Thompson v. Clark was decided 6-3. (Alito wrote the dissent, with Thomas and Gorsuch joining.)
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Recently comments that included the strings "zed" or "doug" were sent immediately to trash. This should be fixed now.
I would think this is exactly the kind of thing that could draw 300 comments in the main page. People love arguing about lists.Report
It’s less about the particular list, which I don’t analyze much, and the meta process of constructing such a list.
I’m still getting a feel for cross-posting stuff. It feels weird.Report
The Stars My Destination–Alfred Bester
Stand on Zanzibar—John Brunner
Dying Inside—Robert Silverberg
Bester in particular is stunning. Also wrote The Demolished Man and some killer short stories. His pages not only sing, they zing!
Brunner, not so much a poet as a stylist, and Zanzibar [1968] is monstrously prophetic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar
Norman Niblock House. House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of the all-powerful corporations. Using his “Afram” (African American) heritage to advance his position, he has risen to vice-president at age twenty-six.
Not bad, esp as the novel’s set in 2010…
As for Silverberg, he had an uncanny run of about 10 exc sci-fi novels c. 1970. He later turned to fantasy, which ain’t my bag, altho his Lord Valentine’s Castle and the ensuing “Majipoor” series is probably what he’s best known for today.
Thought I’d get in an early $0.02.Report
The Stars My Destination is really an awesome book. I haven’t read “Stand”, it’s one of the Hugo winners I haven’t gotten around to yet. “Dying” gets inversion award: usually telepathy stories focus around the telepath getting *stronger*, not vice-versa.
You should check out the post, TvD.Report
Oh, Pat, I did check the list—Those are my noted and notable lacunae [word of the day].
BTW, I picked these for their stature in Sci-Fi history as well: Zanzibar won the Hugo in 1968 and is called “a little-acknowledged forerunner of cyberpunk”; Dying Inside I took to be Silverberg’s best-known and most acclaimed sci-fi, but I see he won the Hugo for Time of Changes, which I prefer and even had him autograph.
As for Alfred Bester, there was a time when no top sci-fi author could speak of the greats without speaking of Bester as the ne plus ultra of the craft and among their influences. Wiki says even Stephen King “references The Stars My Destination in several works.” I see also the psychic cop in Babylon 5 is named “Baster” in tribute [per “The Demolished Man”].
And yeah, sure, I also like these books. 😉
Another interesting list—Bester is mentioned by 2 different modern authors, Not bad for a guy who did his best work c. 1960, before “the modern age”:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choiceReport
> I see he won the Hugo for Time of Changes,
> which I prefer and even had him autograph.
Hey, put me down in the will for that one, would you?Report
PatC: You gotta buy me that beer first. Sheesh.Report
Fair ’nuff.Report
Norman Niblock House and Barack Hussein Obama: each name, same number of letters. Not as eerie as Nostradamus warning us of “Hister,” but still pretty cool.
House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of the all-powerful corporations. Using his “Afram” (African American) heritage to advance his position, he has risen to vice-president at age twenty-six.Report
And they both like to sleep with white women.Report
The world has come to an end, because I agree that these three are all magnificent.Report
Lists like this are hard to do. For example, I agree with Patrick that in addition to be good, you need to have had an impact to make it too a list like this.
But I’d still have to put Towing Jehovah by James Morrow in my top 10, maybe even top 5, even though I have yet to meet anyone who has read it.Report
There’s a reason why I give the most points to, “Hey, did *I* like the fishing thing, or not??”
Otherwise, you’re not admitting that the list is really about your preference. Pure objectivism is a silly endeavor, here.Report
The problem with popularity contests like this is they are most effective at measuring the current milieu’s temperature. Great works of literature such as you mentioned in the other OP that have clearly stood the test of time may not even make the next 100 list at all, squeezed out by the currently popular.
Compare it to music. Asked to name your top 10 works of music, would anything classical even make it? Yet it is “classic” /because/ it has stood the test of time. My brother went to Julliard, I assure you there are tons of obscure composers and works out there that only a music major would ever see, and for good reason. Not everyone is a Bach, but I’d sure hate to see Bach pushed out by Britney.
I overheard some kids talking about how John Stockton shouldn’t even be on the list of top 50 basketball players. Thanks to one of their iPhone’s, I was able to quickly show that Stockton owns not one but TWO unbreakable records and is pretty damn high up there in a bunch of other categories. But being kids and captives of modern media, they were unaware of the “old guy’s” accomplishments.Report
Kids these days. They have no appreciation for the finer things.
As a Laker fan, I *hated* John Stockton, but as a basketball fan, I thought the guy was freakin’ amazing.Report
Are you kidding? The first movement of the 5th Brandenburg is the best thing ever written.Report
The short story vs epic saga thing is the first thing I thought of when perusing the list before reading the post. (when I got to Flowers for Algernon, possibly the best short fiction of all time. Dune, also, which as you and others have said, stands alone)
Poul Anderson continues to be a vastly underheralded and underrecognized science fiction writer.
The order of the Heinlein books is completely backwards.
The only other thing to add is that if they could get King and Piers Anthony(!) (although at 99) (and Conan!) on this list, they could have got Michael Crichton.Report
I though Jurassic Park or The Lost World (my favourite of Crichton’s works) should have been on there. But most people are probably only familiar with the movies.Report
I have problems with Crichton. I could probably write a whole post about him.Report