September 14, 2015
From Crack Den to Urban Farm
René Redzepi Plans to Close Noma, Reopen It as an Urban Farm. Mr. Redzepi, 37, the godfather of the New Nordic movement and the chef at Noma, arguably the world’s most influential restaurant at the moment, was standing outside what looked like an auditorium-size crack den. Used spray-paint cans lay in heaps amid the weeds of an abandoned lot. Street art covered the walls of an empty warehouse; inside, teenagers rumbled around on skateboards. “Welcome to the new Noma,” the chef René Redzepi said on a bright summer day. “This is it.”
Penmenship isn't dead: the vibrant art of well-crafted written forms
Typography design and illustration is still an active artform, and you can get an idea of the skills at play by looking at two rather different young penmen: Seb Lester (previously) and Jake Weidmann. While both started as self-taught artists, Seb designs fonts and draws free-hand typographic art pieces with no formal education in type design, while Jake mentored under calligrapher to the White House, Rick Muffler, and is the youngest of the 14 Master Penmen (one of the few programs where inductees must craft their own certificates). As an introduction to the craft and these artists, here's more of Seb Lester and his craft, and an interview with Master Penman Jake Weidmann, with displays of his works. [more inside]
Test Your Sense of Pitch
אלי אלי למה עזבתני
How Aramaic gained - and lost - its status as the language of Middle East statecraft.
One doesnt build a safety net for a race of predators. One builds a cage
In his latest essay for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates (previously) examines "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration." [more inside]
"I’m Sarah Nyberg, and I Was A Teenage Edgelord."
"I got out, and it’s not too late for you." - Sarah Nyberg on being the subject of an online hate mob. Meanwhile Zoe Quinn talks about sympathy for her abusers, and actions turned out to have consequences for internet troll Joshua Goldberg.
Steady as She Goes
Steve Albini Shows That Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business “If you start from the premise of refusing to be an asshole, then a lot of other decisions kind of make themselves.” - posted at Psychology Today, of all places.
Nobody wants to pay for the internet
Right from the start it was both sexual & social: Ask Isadora sex advice
"Jewish grandma Isadora Alman pioneered the American sex-advice column, then found her work obsolete." - Jonathan Kiefer, Tablet. [Ask Isadora website / essays for Psychology Today]
Master of the Univers
Adrian Frutiger, the Swiss type designer responsible for a number of classic typefaces including Univers, Avenir, OCR-B and the eponymous Frutiger, passed away on Saturday in Bern, aged 87. [more inside]
Giraffe, the little chess engine that ...
Deep Learning Machine Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours, Plays at International Master Level [more inside]
Perry seemed like a serious candidate to our nation’s political experts
How Bespectacled Doofus Rick Perry Fooled Every Dumb Pundit in America
So why is it that after Perry’s embarrassing 2012 campaign, and before his embarrassing 2016 campaign, it became hip, in the political press, to declare that Rick Perry was now a serious man with a legitimate shot at the presidency?
So why is it that after Perry’s embarrassing 2012 campaign, and before his embarrassing 2016 campaign, it became hip, in the political press, to declare that Rick Perry was now a serious man with a legitimate shot at the presidency?
why were they serving soup to people in bed anyway?
Baba Booey Concurs
The 32 Greatest Talk-Show Hosts Ever, as ranked by Vulture
John's Arcade, game collecting and restoration
Here is John's Arcade, a resource about collecting, maintaining and playing classic arcade video and pinball machines. But the real reason I'm posting this is his YouTube channel, which is full of long videos (many over an hour) about arcade repair and maintenance. Like restoring an incredibly rare I, Robot machine, or Computer Space, the first video arcade game, or Quantum, a rare Atari game developed by GCC, programmers of Ms. Pac-Man. Or you can just watch him try to break 300,000 in Donkey Kong over several half-hour videos.
Like Sim City, but without all the fun parts
Open GeoFiction is a user-editable map of a fictional world built on top of the Open StreetMap platform. [more inside]
Usually the author happens to have a map on hand
It’s disturbia out there.
Richard Glossip is scheduled to be executed in 2 days and 4 hours.
The Marshall Project couldn't find any tools providing detailed information on upcoming executions. So they built one. The Next to Die defaults to showing the next scheduled execution in the United States, but users can also browse by specific state (including Missouri, where execution rates are surging) and, from the intro page, view racial and method-of-execution breakdowns for executions to date.
Sainthood Not Just for Italians Anymore
> 200,000 people killed in the four-and-a-half-year Syrian Civil War.
Death in Syria by Karen Yourish, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Derek Watkins [New York Times]
“With each passing day there are fewer safe places in Syria,” Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chairman of the United Nations panel investigating human rights abuses in Syria, wrote in a recent report. “Everyday decisions — whether to visit a neighbor, to go out to buy bread— have become, potentially, decisions about life and death.”
Good ol’ Gregor Brown
Franz Kafka meets Charlie Brown. Revisiting R. Sikoryak’s "Good ol’ Gregor Brown." The 100th Anniversary of The Metamorphosis, previously.
Not really important
There has been a leadership change in the ruling Australian Liberal Government Live blog - Guardian
Y'know what I'm Saiyan?
As Canadian hip-hop artist Sese releases a new, entirely Dragon Ball Z-themed mixtape, and gets hilariously quizzed on his trivia on VICE, Eric Francisco of Inverse ponders the many homages to DBZ in hip hop generally in an interview with Adult Swim creative director Jason DeMarco, who was associate creative director for Toonami at the time that it ran DBZ.
Why Americans dress so casually
The modern market allows us to personalize that style. Casual is the sweet spot between looking like every middle class American and being an individual in the massive wash of options. This idea of the freedom to dress in a way that is meaningful to us as people, and to express various types of identity.
When Pilots Crash (TV Pilots)
Lee Goldberg (previously) is a successful mystery novelist and TV screenwriter who, before he broke in to Hollywood, collected TV trivia... specifically about shows that DIDN'T become series. In 1990, he published "Unsold Television Pilots, 1955-1989", with 800 pages covering over 2000 'stillborn series' and the book became a best-seller and was made into two TV specials on different networks. Now, 25 years later, the 2nd Edition is out (sorry, no more recent shows, but he has cleaned up any embarrassing errors), and another TV screenwriter, Ken Levine (NOT the BioShock guy), has cherry-picked some of the most 'WTF' shows for his blog: Part One, featuring "McClone", "Ethel Is an Elephant", Bette Davis as "Madame Sin" and more... Part Two with Sonny Bono as a singing detective, George Carlin as a ghost detective, William Conrad as NOT a detective in a magical world called "Yazoo", and then some…
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