March 30, 2015
Where cameras cannot go
After sketching combat in WWII, Howard Brodie drew the Watergate trial, Klaus Barbie, and Jack Ruby. Bill Robles drew Charles Manson and his followers, Roman Polanski, and the Unabomber. Richard Tomlinson drew "Son of Sam" and John Gotti. Elizabeth Williams illustrated the Central Park Jogger Case, Martha Stewart, the Times Square bomber. Aggie Kenny sketched Oliver North, Angela Davis, and the Gainesville Eight trial. They are all featured on The Illustrated Courtroom blog*, and Kenny and Williams were interviewed about their craft. Their book, The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art, came out last year from CUNY Journalism Press. [more inside]
Unless you are a table.
Comedian Mitch Hedberg died 10 years ago today. He was known for his distinctive style of delivery and short, often absurd jokes. [more inside]
The Road from Westphalia
Jessica T. Matthews reviews Henry Kissinger's "World Order" and Bret Stephen's "America In Retreat":
Almost from the beginning of its history, America has struggled to find a balance in its foreign policy between narrowly promoting its own security and idealistically serving the interests of others; between, as we’ve tended to see it in shorthand, Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick and the ideals of Woodrow Wilson. Just as consistently, the US has gone through periods of embracing a leading international role for itself and times when Americans have done all they could to turn their backs on the rest of the world. Two new books now join this never-ending debate.[more inside]
Choctaw Generosity
Just sixteen years years after the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation collected $710* and sent it to Ireland to help during the potato famine. In 1992, a group of Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the gift. [more inside]
An unappetising look at food choice, flavour and control in US prisons
Kevin Pang, 'What Prisoners Eat': It is within my civic right as a dedicated grocery shopper and keeper of leftovers, imprinted in the Charter of Man, that I am free to eat however much I want, of what I want, when I want.
In prison, that right is stripped away. Craving pizza on a Saturday night? Feel like washing it down with cold beer? It’s not happening. Your right is reduced to eating portion-fixed food dictated by a warden on a set schedule. If you’re hungry after dinner, you’ll go to bed hungry.
Who the heck knows what lurks that deep in the ocean?
Great White Shark Disappears, Hunt for Super Predator Begins Data from a Great White tag plus signs of bleaching (presumably from stomach acid) suggest that the nine foot long Great White to which the tag was attached may have been eaten by a "Super Predator." An obsessive search for information followed the recovery of the tag. [more inside]
Friday Night Meatballs
The Power of Real-Life Friendships
Late in 2013, Sarah Grey, 34, was going stir-crazy as a work-from-home writer and mom in Philadelphia. “We were just collapsing onto the couch at the end of every day to watch TV,” she recalls. “We never saw friends and barely even talked to our neighbors.” So Grey took to Facebook with a post that has since gone viral: “Starting next Friday, we’re cooking up a pot of spaghetti and meatballs every Friday night and sitting down at the dining room table as a family—along with anyone else who’d like to join us. Friends, neighbors, relatives, clients, Facebook friends who’d like to hang out in real life, travelers passing through: you are welcome at our table,” she wrote.[more inside]
Lost in the Holacracy
In 2013, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh announced plans to reorganize the company as a holacracy, or a management structure that replaces job titles and hierarchical relationships with self-organizing units. The move has generated resistance from Zappos employees; so much so that, in a long memo, Hsieh says he is going to "rip the bandaid" and give employees until April 30 to either get on board with holacracy or take a severance package. Meanwhile, Hsieh and his close associates are having difficulty saying what the principles of holacracy even are. Commentary on the memo from Andrew Hill and Kim Nash.
When you have gatekeepers the stories are obviously much more controlled
For much of the 80s, a bona fide movie star
"In the hands of another actor, she could have just been one more detail in Scott’s design scheme, a clothes horse in a coil of cigarette smoke. But Young makes Rachael breathe. It’s a tricky role: she must seem slickly artificial, while hinting all the time at warm humanity. As Harrison Ford’s jaded ex-cop Deckard falls for her, the whole film hinges on us understanding why. That she pulls it off owes a lot to her raw presence – but presence is the lifeblood of movies."
Musical Inventiveness and Electronic Sophistication
Children's music composer Ruth White is better known for her early work with the Moog synthesizer - including an album based off the poetry of Baudelaire. [more inside]
Some Squee For Your Monday
British Girls' Comics
Girls' Comics of Yesterday From the 1950s to the turn of the 21st century, generations of British girls enjoyed weekly comics full of text and picture stories, about an astonishing range of topics: ballerinas, aliens, ghosts, Victorian serving-girls, magic mirrors, wicked stepparents, boarding schools, horse riding, sci-fi dystopias, boys, plucky heroines solving mysteries, and really anything you could imagine ... although to be honest, there were a lot of ballerinas. [more inside]
For days, the only thing on state TV was a continuous loop of Swan Lake.
"The response has been absolutely incredible"
One of the core tenets of UX is that you've got to design like "the user is drunk." Any feature of your site has to be able to be used by someone who could be drunk - because, invariably, the user will mess it up otherwise. Wonderful idea. The thing is, it is hard to test. I and a lot of beer will test this for you.
Review of Mathbreakers. Review of Gizmodo.
Related Gizmodo article
Review of Mathbreakers. Review of Gizmodo.
Related Gizmodo article
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH
The Heroic and Visionary Women of Passover, a short essay by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. [more inside]
Unicorn Thieves
Trans 100 2015
The Trans 100 (pdf) is not an award ceremony. It is not a list of the “Best” or the “Most Important” trans people. It is not a popularity contest and there are many individuals absent from the list who are doing excellent work. More are no longer with us.
To quote The Trans 100 Co-Founder Jen Richards, The Trans 100 “is an intentionally curated list of out trans people who are working on trans issues in the United States and having a positive impact.” [more inside]
crunchy, crispy, meaty sailboats of spicy chemical flavor
[E]ven though the restaurant's cartoonish decor bordered on offensive, it was still a temple to a people and a cuisine that America couldn't ignore. Taco Bells were everywhere. In every strip mall. Off every highway exit. Even the racists, the immigrant-haters, the people who'd laugh at my elementary-school stand-up comedy routine would run for the border.John DeVore writes about finding the "unexpected, self-affirming solace" of home... at Taco Bell. [more inside]
You can laugh or sneer at Taco Bell. Shake your head at its high fat and salt content. Go ahead and lecture on what true Mexican food is. My mom would probably just roll her eyes at you, and take a broken yellow shard of crispy taco shell and use it to scoop up the pintos, cheese, and salsa.
It's a Hard Life
In which we enter the subconscious of Freddie Mercury and find ourselves in the midst of an amazing costume party. (SLV)
Responsive web design + accordions / cats = the Catcordian
The Catcordion is a web-based accordion constructed from famous Internet cats. It will destroy your productivity.
Criticism vs. Attack?
Last week, two critiques of Kevin Carey's new book, The End of College, coincidentally appeared on the same day in Inside Higher Ed: one by Joshua Kim and the other by Audrey Watters and Sara Goldrick-Rab. [more inside]
The King is dead(ish), long live the King!
Trevor Noah, a South African comedian who has appeared on TDS three times, has been chosen to replace Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show.
Many bananas died to give us this protection
Adweek points to Groupon as the current reigning monarch of social media. Someone/s at Groupon have been killing it with jokes on Facebook, responding to questions about a deal they offered for the Banana Bunker, a product that is apparently a real thing. Previously.
Nebula with gas streams – cat fur, garlic powder, salt, flour, cumin...
Artist Creates Artificial Space Images Using Food Supplies
Brooklyn-based artist, Navid Baraty’s latest project “WANDER Space Probe” creates a fictional universe constructed from food and home supplies. Partially edible, Baraty’s photographs are made by arranging household items on a scanner. With the help of a pinch of sugar, cinnamon, flour, and a glass of coffee, Baraty produces stunning images of an alternate galaxy.
Will Scunthorpe be safe this time?
Mangling an author's text is a clear violation of the author's Moral rights, an element of copyright which is very weak in the United States and very strong elsewhere (primarily in civil law jurisdictions). (The moral right is the right of an author to be identified as the creator of a work, and for the work represented as their creation to be unaltered by other hands, so that the relationship between creator and created work is clear.)Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow argue about the legality if not morality/desirability of the Clean Reader app, that strips swearwords from ebooks.
[...]
The doctrine of Moral Rights varies from territory to territory, but it's a heck of a stretch to extend it to this activity. It's one thing for a publisher or retailer to send out copies of your books in which words are changed around without your permission. It's another thing altogether for the reader themself to decide to read their legally acquired books in such a way as to change the text.
More clichés than you can shake a stick at. (stick not included)
"Confessions of an Idiom" a 2½ minute animated film depicting a confrontation between the elephant in the room and the skeleton in the closet. Many turns of phrase and one plot twist.
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