November 23, 2013
Fly Aweigh My Pretties
Luigi Prina: The Ships That Sail Through The Clouds — Italian architect creates beautiful flying air ships.
Fun Home (the musical)
Fun Home: Is America Ready for a Musical About a Butch Lesbian?
YouTube montage
Q&A from Alison Bechdel
Watching Sondheim Watch Fun Home
More reviews
YouTube montage
Q&A from Alison Bechdel
Watching Sondheim Watch Fun Home
More reviews
Two Gunshots on a Summer Night
The New York Times (Two Gunshots on a Summer Night) and Frontline (A Death in St. Augustine) collaborate to present the story of the death of Michelle O'Connell, who died of a gunshot wound on September 2, 2010. O'Connell was the girlfriend of St. John's County Sheriff's Deputy Jeremy Banks. She was shot with Deputy Banks' county-issued handgun. Her death was quickly ruled a suicide. [more inside]
50 Years of Dr. Who
Well, most of the world has now seen the 50th Anniversary special of Dr. Who. And the reviews are starting to trickle in across the world. (Warning: Spoilers may be contained within reviews.) What was your take on this epic episode? [more inside]
“Emergent UI Features Team”
One more drink and I'd have been under the nymphet
Edmund Wilson was a friend [Vladimir] Nabokov shared with many people in American literary circles—including Dorothy Parker. Wilson had first learned about Nabokov's Lolita in the summer of 1953, when he was contemplating an article about Nabokov and asked the novelist whether he had a new project in the works.... A year later, Nabokov offered to let Wilson read his new novel, which he said he considered "to be my best thing in English."
In November, while in New York talking to Straus about his own projects, Wilson got the Lolita manuscript and was a bit less discreet than Nabokov would have wanted.
--How Edmund Wilson may have leaked the plot of Nabokov's Lolita to Dorothy Parker, who then published in the New Yorker a story titled "Lolita," about a middle-aged man in love with a teenage girl, three weeks before the novel came out.
In November, while in New York talking to Straus about his own projects, Wilson got the Lolita manuscript and was a bit less discreet than Nabokov would have wanted.
--How Edmund Wilson may have leaked the plot of Nabokov's Lolita to Dorothy Parker, who then published in the New Yorker a story titled "Lolita," about a middle-aged man in love with a teenage girl, three weeks before the novel came out.
ELECTRICAL ELUCIDATION OF THE THRICE-CURSED SEPULCHRAL IDIOM
Wanda Coleman RIP
I have no fine motor skills, and I must laugh.
Gotta fight for your right...
Toy-startup GoldieBlox (previously) had already proven their marketing savvy - then their new commercial went viral, and might even earn them an on-air spot during the Superbowl.
But now they've got a lawsuit on their hands - brought by the Beastie Boys. [more inside]
Please defeat Wart and return Subcon to its natural state
I write about Super Mario Bros. 2 a lot, I realize, especially considering that the game is now twenty-five years old. I suppose that results from the combination of it being especially surreal, even by Super Mario standards, and me having encountered it at the perfect age to be asking “Hey, why is that?” I actually still ask “Why is that?” fairly often. One of the things that had always bugged me about the game is its level structure. Super Mario Bros. makes sense: four sets of levels each composing a world, and eight world altogether. It’s all tidy and even. Super Mario Bros. 2 isn’t so easy: It has seven worlds, but an irregular number of stages.
“Hey, why is that?” [more inside]
“Hey, why is that?” [more inside]
The Troll’s Wager
[T]he parrhesia in social media may set individuals against one another in pointless struggles for authenticity while precluding them from uniting politically to fight for shared goals against those remote elites. The satisfaction of those games, the “self” and “truth” that emerges from those compulsions [...] make the present tolerable or even pleasurable while altering nothing about a general condition that makes people feel overburdened, depressed, precarious, excluded, humiliated. There is a pale satisfaction in making a limited truth in the moment, even if it has no effect on the distribution of power or the way one is known by society.In a series of recent posts at The New Inquiry, Rob Horning writes about the construction of the self in social media as novelistic pleasure, ego depletion, and Foucauldian truth game.
"Find someone who disagrees and invite them to your table."
A "KKK Member Walks up to Black Musician in Bar-but It’s Not a Joke." Daryl Davis (his website here) is a black musician who has made friends with KKK members, many of whom have not only quit the KKK, but given Daryl their robes and hoods. [more inside]
50 symphonies that changed classical music
Pokeman Hopefully Crossing
Awkward Sign Generator. Inspired by the awkward phrasing of Automatic Caution Door signs [via mefi projects]
Little Big Man on Campus
Unaccountable
Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year. -- Reuters journalist Scot J. Paltrow investigates how the US military's bad accounting not only wastes taxpayers money, but helps ruin the life of ordinary soldiers and veterans. [more inside]
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