February 20, 2015
What is the sound of one hand smashing?
"Black, queer, feminist, erased from history"
Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is this Supreme Court's liberal hero, but her work sits on the shoulders of Dr. Pauli Murray [more inside]
HOT NEW TRENDS FOR 2015
Dr. Dre's Secret (Sequined) History
Dr. Dre's Secret (Sequined) History; or, that show in 1983 that widened Dr. Dre's horizons.
"You blew it, and you blew it big!"
Mayweather - Pacquiao
The most anticipated boxing match of the decade - rumored to involve a quarter-of-a-billion dollar deal - is finally set to happen, after a number of false starts. If you pay any attention to boxing, you already know who these two fighters are. But what if you don't? Perhaps a review of their nicknames is in order. [more inside]
Feral Gardens
Danny Cooke’s Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl summons a lost history of familiar and alien dreams. The drone-mounted camera glides deliberately through the spaces within and above the empty city. The soundtrack is haunting, or “haunting.” We think of drones moving relentlessly forward: into the hidden terrain of surveillance, into the kill zone, into the future. Yet many of the shots point the lens in reverse, effectively pulling back to show first a figure and only then its surroundings. A diving platform with paint peeled away, then the empty pool. A circular emblem, large and sculptural, then the great apartment block on whose roof it sits, visible for miles. Not all shots follow this rule, and not all are taken by drone, but this is the general approach of Danny Cooke’s Postcards From Pripyat, Chernobyl, a three-minute video from last year. It’s quite beautiful. [more inside]
Every Breaking Wave - A Film By Aoife McArdle
Every Breaking Wave [13m17s] is a short film set in 1980s Belfast during The Troubles. Directed by Aoife McArdle [Vimeo], using music by U2, as part of Vice's The Creators Project.
I prefer to be called a hacker.
Even among her fellow female commandos, she cut a striking figure
‘Why Not Us Women?’ “Men fight,” she told Brown. “Why not us women? I love our country. You have to love your country to sleep outside, live under the sun and rains, cross rivers and forests when you know that many people don’t care — they’re enjoying their lives while you’re on the front lines.”
Tomatan
Tomatan: a wearable robot that feeds you tomatoes as you run.
"A deep, innate animal drive..."
Dan Laidler, ex of indie art rockers Tiger, ponders the drive and effect of the human pursuit of glamour.
Who's in charge here?
Robot tweets "I seriously want to kill people", prompts police response. Who is responsible when a bot randomly tweets something that alarms the authorities?
Pearl and The Beard (SLYT)
Pearl and The Beard are awesome Blending folk, gospel, pop, and Americana, eclectic Brooklyn-based trio Pearl & the Beard formed in the late 2000s around multi-instrumentalists Jeremy Styles, Jocelyn Mackenzie, and Emily Hope Price.
Employing an arsenal that includes glockenspiel, guitar, cello, accordion, melodica, and pitch-perfect three-part harmonies, the band's skillful and soulful brand of acoustic art pop has drawn comparisons to artists like Andrew Bird, Beirut, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Low Anthem.
The devil you know. (Or *do* you?)
Vincent Price is theologically significant. Price wore a devilish goatee that made him look like Satan. How do we know that’s what Satan looks like? We learned it from Vincent Price — and from a thousand other pop-culture and folk-culture figures preceding him. Price carries a pitchfork — a red one, of course. That tells the audience that he’s the devil. What does a pitchfork have to do with the devil? Simple: It’s what we always see him carrying in movies. The pitchfork simultaneously references those folk traditions and reinforces them for future audiences.[more inside]
But these pop-culture portrayals also reference and reinforce our “theology” of the devil. Sure, most Christians realize that the pitchfork and goatee don’t come from the Bible. But the devilish stuff that most Christians think does come from the Bible cannot be found there either. [Fred Clark, The Slacktivist]
The Case of the Lost Sherlock Holmes Tale
Half a century ago, a Selkirk historian received, then forgot about, and only now remembered, a 1904 charity pamphlet that may contain a lost Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The anonymous story entitled "Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar" revolves around Holmes deducing Watson's upcoming visit to Selkirk, which coincides with Conan Doyle's real-life one as a guest of honour to help the Border town raise funds to build a new bridge.
But if it's not by him, then who wrote it?
Scoby Do
Meet the tweet-deleters
Like most media workers, Matthew Lazin-Ryder, a Vancouver-based producer with CBC Radio, spends a fair amount of time on Twitter. When he tweets, his messages are seen by some percentage of his 3,470 followers. They retweet, favorite, write pithy replies. And then, a week later, his tweets disappear.
> > > >
Random House announced today that a never-before-published Dr. Seuss book titled What Pet Should I Get? will appear on bookshelves this July. The book, a spinoff of Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, centers on two young children attempting to choose a pet. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, discovered the manuscript in 2013. RH said that two or more books derived from the found work will be released, as well, with publication information to follow.
Jose Mourinho 46 Minute Documentary
Football/Soccerfilter. Jose Mourinho is a football manager. But he is more. He is The Special One. A few years ago a short documentary came out about him. Bonus: Mourinho on Mario Balotelli.
Ha ha ha “Security to be Free” ha ha ha
The Great SIM Heist
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year.
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year.
The Sun sets on "Fox News of the North."
As of 5 am last Friday morning, Sun News went off the air. Unable to find a buyer, the controversial news network is no more. Ratings were falling, Ezra Levant kept doing stupid things, and briefly, the network gave a show to the Ford brothers (but it didn't work out).
Defensive Architecture Keeping Poverty Unseen
The spikes installed outside Selfridges in Manchester are the latest front in the spread of ‘defensive architecture’. Is such open hostility towards the destitute making all our lives uglier?
"John Williams’s resurrection from the boneyard of obscurity"
In 2010 Alan Prendergast wrote a long article about the life of novelist John Williams and how he was beginning, at long last, to find a sizable audience. How true that turned out to be, as Williams' 1965 novel Stoner subsequently became a bestseller all over Europe, first in French translation, but later elsewhere in Europe, and it has begun to get glowing notices in his native US. Williams is not around to enjoy the success, as he passed away in 1994. Now another of his novels, Augustus, has also begun its rise from obscurity. The New York Review of Books republished it last year on the occasion of the 2000th anniversary of the first Roman Emperor's death. On the NYRB website you can read Daniel Mendelsohn's fine introduction to the book.
It’s like living your life as a job interview. Forever.
"Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel"
How will strengthened Title IX enforcement at colleges handle the "hard cases"? Janet Halley, Professor at the Harvard School of law, relates some interesting anecdotes as potentially recurring situations to which there is no straightforward solution. There is the "young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away. He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that."
Not yet streaming: A goldfish writing perl
Watch People Code is a site where you can watch livestreams, as well as browse an archive, of people programming in real time. [more inside]
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