• Big barbecue in New York
  I’m a sucker for barbecue. This event in Madison Square Park next weekend promises to be delicious.
  (tags: Travel Food)

• Post Buyouts Come With an Emotional Cost
  Howard Kurtz’s thoughts on 100 of his colleagues taking voluntary redundancy at the Washington Post. “After pondering the offer, I decided: I’ll badly miss the people who are leaving, but I’m staying put.”
  (tags: Media Newspapers)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part One
  Murdoch tells his new employees at the WSJ they will be in direct competition with the NYT within months.
  (tags: Media Newspapers Forbes400)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part Two
  Murdoch thinks ‘rock star’ Obama is “fantastic” and admits to playing a role in NY Post endorsement.
  (tags: Media Politics Forbes400)

Sorry for the pause. I’ve been in the Adirondacks for a few days. While I was away there was a brilliant story in the New York Times about Harvard neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced what she describes as nirvana after suffering a stroke eight years ago.

Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

There’s an incredible video of Jill describing her experience at a TED conference earlier this year. It’s eighteen minutes long. If you can find the time to watch it, I guarantee it will be one of the most interesting things you see this year. (The embedded video seems to take a while to load. If you want to watch it instantly click here.)

Related:
A Superhighway to Bliss (NYT)
My Stroke of Insight (TED video of Jill Bolte Taylor)

• Police Are Out in Force as a Neighborhood Simmers With Tension Again
  Tension mounts between Hasidic and Black communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, scene of riots in 1991.
  (tags: Brooklyn Crown-Heights)
• Man jumps over Grand Canyon
  Amazing photos of a man, apparently drunk, rock-hopping over a ravine at the Grand Canyon
  (tags: Travel Stupidity)

Thanks to Jenna for sending this British comedy sketch “Facebook in Reality.”

Does Lou Dobbs have the whitest teeth in television? This YouTube video really doesn’t do his mouth justice. Today, on the HDTVs at the gym his teeth looked whiter than the stripes of the flag flapping patriotically in the background. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Perhaps it’s a ploy to distract from the bile coming out of his mouth?

UPDATE: A tipster writes, “Dobbs not only had his teeth whitened for HDTV, but also went through a lot of painful orthodontia work. [Rumor is, he has been] complaining about having to have all the work done for the new fancy screens.”

Related
Yellow teeth Lou Dobbs billing Chimpys speech tonight as very important (Democraticunderground.com 2006)
What is happening to Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews? (Democraticunderground.com 2007)
Lou Dobbs’s Smile (Early-retirement.org, 2007)

One of the largest workplace immigration raids in recent US history took place in Iowa last week, not that you would know it from the paucity of national media coverage. Could the lack of interest have anything to do with the fact that the company involved was a kosher meat processing plant called Agriprocessors, rather than say Wal-Mart?

My friend Ben Harris, who reports for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, has been in Iowa covering the fallout from the raid since the weekend. Federal officials had to set up a makeshift courthouse in the small town of Postville, Iowa, (pop: 2,273) in order to try, process and eventually deport almost 400 mainly Latin American illegal immigrants, including almost 20 juveniles, many of whom were being paid just $5 an hour.

Here’s an excerpt from Ben’s latest dispatch:

In recent days, former employees have been painting a picture of a company indifferent to federal laws prohibiting slaughterhouses from employing workers younger than 18 and where workers frequently were pressured to exchange sexual favors for preferred treatment.

[...]The company…has been dogged by allegations of worker mistreatment, environmental offenses, and food and safety violations at its flagship plant.

[...]A girl who would agree to be identified only as Yolanda said she was 15 years old when she left her home in Iztapa, Guatemala, late last year and illegally crossed the U.S. border into Texas. Within weeks she had arrived in Postville, where she found work in the Agriprocessors plant.

Yolanda told JTA that she produced a fake government ID card that showed her to be 18 years old. She pulled 11-hour graveyard shifts bagging chicken breasts and removing turkey feathers — difficult work that she said led to a hand injury from constant use of scissors. Supervisors routinely pressured the workers to move faster, she said.

“They were constantly pushing us and forcing us to work faster,” Yolanda said through a translator. “They were very abusive, screaming a lot.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Agriprocessors has denied any wrongdoing.

UPDATE: Thanks to Arieh for emailing a list of links to media outlets covering the Agriprocessors story, including one piece in the New York Times on May 13 written by a staffer and an AP piece published in the Times on May 17. Though I take Arieh’s point that this story is being covered by a number of news outlets, I am still struck by the fact that the story is still largely confined to local media, as you can see from the Google News results. (Though the Washington Post, to their credit, have followed up with another story today.) I’m actually surprised our friend Lou Dobbs isn’t all over this one. Maybe I missed something.

Related
Immigration Raid Jars a Small Town (WaPo)
As Agriprocessors scrambles to keep plant open, former workers speak out (JTA)
In Iowa, Coping With Raid Fallout (JTA)

A remarkable story in today’s New York Times:

SHIFANG, China — At the moment of greatest despair, Wang Zhijun tried to kill himself by twisting his neck against the debris.

Breathing had become harder as day turned to night. The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.

Then there was the rain, sharp and cold, lashing at them through the cracks.

“I don’t think I can make it,” he told his wife, Li Wanzhi, his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.

She sensed he was giving up. “If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away,” she said. “But since we’re still alive, we must be fated to live.”

And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers’ dormitory 28 hours after last Monday’s earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others.

Their tale of survival is also one of a rekindled love, of two people who might have died had they been trapped alone.

They whispered to each other. They talked of their 14-year-old daughter — who would take care of her? They recalled their life together, the shape of it before and the shape of it to come, all the changes they would make if they ever got out alive.

Related:
In Rubble, Couple Cling to Each Other, And to Life (NYT)