Links for 2010-05-31

"For Nehemiah, charging 1 percent was shameful usury. The low-interest loans I was championing through our alternative investing still charged more than that.

And the Gospels weren't any help at all. Jesus did not merely reinforce the prohibition against usury, he reached past it -- forbidding lending with the expectation of repayment.

I had studied myself into a bind. On the one hand, I earnestly believed, in that murky, visceral way we evangelicals have, that God had led me to this new job. And the job seemed like an exciting chance to learn a great deal while helping to make the world a better place in meaningful, tangible ways.

But on the other hand there was all that stuff in the Bible.

You may be thinking, well, so what? Who cares what the Bible says? I did. And I do. I'm an evangelical Christian and we take what the Bible has to say very seriously. That's kind of our thing."

"I didn't plan to critique Sex and the City 2 for io9. Indeed, it was just an ancillary interest, as scifi as numismatics and the Cleveland Browns. But after watching this lumbering, 146-minute imbecile colossus of a movie, I realized that the filmmakers have done the greatest genre bait-and-switch since From Dusk Til Dawn. The Sex and the City franchise, which began as a big-city relationship dramedy -- and later (I'd say approximately around mid-Season 6) became the grotesque, hyper-materialist caricature of a big-city relationship dramedy -- somehow metamorphosed into a science fiction with this sequel. A science fiction flick replete with fictional cartographies, temporal recursion, and a wanton, metro-biological god-being that exists both within and without of time and space. Oh, and magic shoes."