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"If you stand before a Van Gogh painting, its meaning is not self-evident; maybe the shoes on the floor are the point, maybe the angle of perspective is the point, maybe something about the market for yellow pigment is the point, and so we have to process what is before us. If you stand in a yoga pose at the Immersive Van Gogh Morning Class, contemplation isn’t the goal; total sensory fusion is. This shift from contemplation to intense experience is sold as liberating, but it parallels other social and economic shifts that aren’t so great."
A Jacobin interview with Anna Kornbluh, author of
Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism.
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The Achilles Trap doubles as a surprisingly sympathetic study of a man who, as his powers slipped away, spent the last decade of his life jerry-rigging monuments of his own magnificence. Coll draws much of his material from extensive interviews with retired American intelligence officers and former members of Saddam’s bureaucracy, as well as from a previously unavailable archive of audio tapes from Saddam’s own state offices. What emerges is a portrait of Saddam as an eccentric in the mold of G.K. Chesterton—if Chesterton were bloodthirsty, paranoid, and power-mad—a man driven ultimately by deep reverence for the sense that hides beneath nonsense. from
Saddam’s Secret Weapon, a review of
The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll [The American Conservative]
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How many days are in a week?
The debate began on 2008, on
the forums of bodybuilding.com, when a user asks ‘ Is it safe to do a full body workout every other day?’ The answer is yes…the question is, if you do that, how many times a week are you working out? (Trigger warning for words some people thought it was ok to use in 2008, and fatphobia).
[more inside]
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Zoe, The Leftist Prepper, on supporting one another after disaster. From the Struggle Care podcast, with an auto-generated transcript.
It's this rugged individualism that I think combined with gun love, because they are in my comments every single day... 'Oh, I'm gonna come to the blue state when the apocalypse hits and just take all your stuff.' And it baffles me... like, don't you care about the old granny next door who may need help opening her cans? I just, I don't get it. [more inside]
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It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from
What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB,
ungated]
[more inside]
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GeriPal podcast has over 300 episodes on geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care (with transcripts!) that are accessible to the layperson and feature a wide range of interviewees. One standout episode is
The Language of Serious Illness with Sunita Puri, Bob Arnold, and Jacqueline Kruser: "[doctors] just offer options without context. And given that the culture of medicine is always to do more, the context will always push people to try something."
[more inside]
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The European Commission opened
non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's 'pay or consent model, as well as Amazon self-preferencing own branded products in searches -- all in violation of the requirements of the DMA.
[more inside]
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The 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge opened in 1977 as an outer crossing of Baltimore Harbor, over the Patapsco River, according to the Maryland Transportation Authority, its operator.
It was struck around 1:30 am EDT by a container ship on its way out to sea. “What’s been indicated is the vessel lost power, and when you lose power you lose steering,” Cardin said. “But they’re doing a full investigation.”
[more inside]
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According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.” ... A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.” from
Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control [NY Magazine;
ungated] [CW: abuse & manipulation]
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Who was
Jack Lord. "When
Jack Lord died, he left 40 million dollars to charities in Hawaii. There is
Jack Lord's Special Memory of Elvis.' 'Stoney Burke' fan?
Jack Lord has a collection of selected works. "This is a critical lesson for any young writer. We want our characters to be “real.” We want our heroes to be “relatable.” But characters are not real and heroes are not normal. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t be heroes." 'The
Jack Lord Rule'
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[newsroom.wcs.org] "The identified herpesvirus can be carried by healthy pigeons but may cause fatal disease in birds of prey including owls infected by eating pigeons. This virus has been previously found in New York City pigeons and owls. In Flaco’s case, the viral infection caused severe tissue damage and inflammation in many organs, including the spleen, liver, gastrointestinal tract, bone marrow, and brain. [...] Toxicology testing also revealed trace amounts of DDE, a breakdown product of the pesticide DDT, but the levels detected in Flaco were not clinically significant and did not contribute to his death. Although DDT has been banned in the United States since the early 1970s, it and its breakdown products are remarkably persistent in the environment, and this finding is reminder of the long legacy of DDT and its dire effects on wild bird populations."
Previously and
previously.
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"You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us. If I had to send you on your way with some minimally sufficient quantity of Zola, let me propose the following, which to me are the greatest examples of Zola’s art..." Brandon Taylor in the LRB, on his two-year project of reviewing Zola's cycle of novels:
Is It Even Good?
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"I was at a party in space with creatures of all kinds and shapes you can imagine, and this was the music playing, the vibe was unbelievable. Influenced by the 1970s space disco, with its synthesizers, funky grooves, and a certain psychedelia, the space DJs know what they're doing, it's time to listen to the voice that comes from beyond, or rather, from the infinite and beyond."
COSMIC GROOVES - A Funky, Disco & House Grooves MIX from Outer Space [2h]
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Freediving is a style of underwater experience gated by breath-holding. Do you swim? Do you dive? How low? Or talk about anything you like!
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"
Dune - Melange Spice" is about attempting to create a spice blend mimicking the flavor of the geriatric spice described in Frank Herbert's
Dune. It discusses flavor profile, descriptions in the novel, and coloration: "There are accounts in Herbert’s later novels of the spice giving off a blue glow, or of the sand where a spice eruption had taken place being a deep purple color. I really like the idea of that, visually, but as it’s complicated enough to get the flavor right, let’s just focus on that for the time being." It's from The Inn at the Crossroads, the noted fantasy cookery website (
previously).
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The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities. from
The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled [Atlas Obscura]
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In the film, one of the representatives of the AI, the villainous Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, tells Morpheus that the false reality of the Matrix is set in 1999 because that year was “the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.”
Indeed, not long after “The Matrix” premiered, humanity hooked itself up to a matrix of its own. There is no denying that our lives have become better in many ways thanks to the internet and smartphones. But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making.
25 Years Later, We’re All Trapped in ‘The Matrix’ [more inside]
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The Tapa Room Tapes are a collection of recorded performances by various Hawaiian artists (includingi Alfred Apaka and Jules Ah See) from the Tapa Room of the Hawaiian Village in the late 1950s. Originally uploaded by British steel guitarist Basil Henriques. The sound quality can be variable, but the music is hot Hawaiian swing with plenty of steel guitar.
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A Bronx Teacher Asked Tommy Orange to Visit His Class. “In our 12th-grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in an under-resourced but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you’re our rock star. Our more than rock star. You’re our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness.”
[more inside]
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But the underlying online vs. real life opposition is harder to dispel. Here it is attached to consumerist identities, like an exploded version of the chain stores vs. mom-and-pop stores opposition from the No Logo era. There is a genuine, authentic way to make a spectacle of the self, but it needs to tap into a rooted habitus and recondite practice (a “context”), and not simply reflect haphazard free play with readily available cultural signifiers (mere “content”). That is, the correct and real self is rooted in distinction (in Bordieu’s sense) and not differentiation. The internet is supposedly undermining the kind of distinction that should matter and proliferating the kinds of differences that are superficial rather than culturally binding. from
Spacing the cans by
Rob Horning
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