April 29, 2014
What We Left Behind
I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it
A tribute to Breaking Bad, or rather to WW's implosion, by Alexandre Gasulla, part of his Tribute Series
Tiny Hamsters Eating Tiny Burritos
Mixing Memory and Desire: Music, Poetry, Sound, and Remembrance
Songwriter, singer, poet, memoirist, artist, icon Patti Smith performs in WNYC's The Greene Space. In a program of songs and poetry coordinated by her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, Patti Smith performs with Tree Laboratory (Jesse Paris Smith and Eric Hoegemeyer) and her long-time collaborator guitarist Lenny Kaye. They titled the event "Mixing Memory and Desire: An Evening of Music, Poetry, Sound, and Remembrance," celebrating the "chaos and transformation of spring." [~1h30m, scroll down for video] [more inside]
The Prodigy, still raving after 20 years
Twenty years after originally forming, the English electronic/ rave/ big beat group The Prodigy were back on tour for their fifth studio album, Invaders Must Die. On July 24, 2010, the "40-somethings bounce around a stage like men half their age, owning festival-sized audiences" like rising dance stars wish they could. The performance was recorded and released the next year, and you can see the hour plus of World's On Fire in full on Vimeo. (NOTE: NSFW lyrics) [more inside]
Two Muddy Pills
On the 10th anniversary of his wildly popular blog, Joe.My.God published Two Muddy Pills, a previously unpublished true story.
Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research
Jeffrey Mogil’s students suspected there was something fishy going on with their experiments. They were injecting an irritant into the feet of mice to test their pain response, but the rodents didn’t seem to feel anything. “We thought there was something wrong with the injection,” says Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The real culprit was far more surprising: The mice that didn’t feel pain had been handled by male students. Mogil’s group discovered that this gender distinction alone was enough to throw off their whole experiment—and likely influences the work of other researchers as well. [more inside]
The secret ingredient is the shame
"If the accessories are not expensive, the customer is not worth the effort of even a simple hello" In a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Sauder marketing professor Darren Dahl lays out the findings of his research, where he looked at the correlation between the quality of customer service that a shopper receives in a store with their likelihood to return to make more purchases in the future. [more inside]
I will love him and squeeze him and call him George.
Cute things are made for squeezing. Scientists study why we want to squeeze, squish, pinch, and eat cute things. "Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted. When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively."
The movie opens worldwide on December 18, 2015.
"like I’m putting cartoons in bottles and pushing them out to sea"
Jen Sorenson is the first female winner of the Herblock Prize for political cartooning. Among the work that won her the prize were her cartoons on gentrification and paycheck debit cards. Don't miss the Comparison between Janet Yellen and Larry Summers, and so much great commentary on the Affordable Care Act.
The devourer and the devoured
"Nobody would believe how difficult it is to be the mother of a Wunderkind. Everything I do is wrong; everything the child does is “for effect”; everything we say is utterly untrue. If Vivien runs up to me and kisses me, I hear it murmured that she is trained to do so. (“Whipped to be affectionate in public!”) So I tell her never to do it again. Immediately people remark how cold I am to the child; how the poor little creature evidently fears me and prefers Fräulein Muller.
We take her with her hoop and skipping-rope to play in the park? It is said we make her pretend to be infantine, force her to act the “happy child” when people are looking on! So we take her toys from her and conduct her for prim walks between us. “Poor little unnatural creature!” say our friends: “she has no child-life at all.”
The Devourer and the Devoured is a long essay by Emily Hogstad about the intertwined lives of the novelist Annie Vivanti and her daughter Vivien Chartres, a world-famous violin prodigy, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
“What’s been the biggest challenge? Every single thing,” he said.
Twenty-eight years on, the struggle to build a permanent containment building at Chernobyl.
Whither Geoff Peterson and Secretariat?
Craig Ferguson is moving on. "The CBS latenight host also is resigned to the fact that few people will believe his assertion that he began thinking about ending his run on the show as long as two years ago, but he re-upped after CBS persuaded him to stick around a little longer. Early this year, he began laying the groundwork for his exit, before he had any idea that Letterman was preparing to announce his plan to retire in 2015." [more inside]
Continue petting it assiduously.
For the love of (someone else playing) the game
"Draft Day," "Moneyball," and the rise of the sports management movie. There’s a new breed of sports movie in town, one that does away with all that pesky team building and ersatz democracy. These films celebrate the real heroes of sports, the real heroes of any workplace: the bosses.
Contemplate the marvel that is existence
Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same. [more inside]
Fake war is the state's killer app
Politically speaking, "the most anticipated game was the Left Party who faced their arch rivals the Sweden Democrats." This was actually the first pairing of the tournament and pitted the Left's Prospect against the Sweden Democrats' Zaki. "It was truly a grudge match between the right and the left and it did not leave anybody disappointed." -- Reasoned debate is boring; in Sweden politicians settle their differences through Starcraft II battles.
In the future, every author will be in the public domain for 15 minutes
The non-profit digital library of Marxist texts, The Marxist Internet Archive, has received a copyright take-down request from the radical publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, asking that all material from the Marx and Engels Collected Works be removed from the site by May 1 2014. [more inside]
A- Z of Dance in 3 Min 33 Seconds (SYTL or S-VimeoLink)
Exactly what the title says. A celebration of 26 ways to rhythmically move one's body Although the video is a project that was sponsored by i-D and Diesel clothing, the corporate sponsorship in no way impacts the dancing.
Vimeo here: Vimeo link here.
If you prefer youtube there here is an alternative link. [more inside]
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