The Everyday Sexism Project collects user-submitted reports from women to document their day-to-day experiences with normalized sexism, including sexual harassment and job discrimination. Entries can be submitted at the site, in an email to founder Laura Bates or to their
twitter account.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 20, 2013 -
200 comments
In the wake of their grunge-y breakout hit
"Creep" and the success of sophomore record
The Bends, Thom Yorke and the rest of
Radiohead were under pressure to deliver once more.
So they shut themselves away inside the echoing halls of
a secluded 16th century manor and got to work.
What emerged from that crumbling Elizabethan castle fifteen years ago today was a shockingly ambitious masterpiece of progressive rock, a visionary concept album that explored
the "fridge buzz" of modernity -- alienation, social disconnection, existential dread,
the impersonal hum of technology -- through a mosaic of
challenging,
innovative,
eerily beautiful music unlike anything else at the time.
Tentatively called
Ones and Zeroes, then
Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments, the band finally settled on
OK Computer, an appropriately enigmatic title for this
acclaimed harbinger of millennial angst. For more, you can watch the retrospective
OK Computer: A Classic Album Under Review for a track-by-track rundown, or the unsettling documentary
Meeting People is Easy for a look at how the album's whirlwind tour nearly gave Yorke
a nervous breakdown. Or look inside for more details and cool interpretations of all the tracks -- including
an upcoming MeFi Music Challenge! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 16, 2012 -
66 comments
Roxy Freeman was born into an Gypsy family. For years, her family travelled around Ireland in a horsedrawn wagon, without electricity or formal schooling, getting by on picking fruit and selling horses they bred, before settling in Norfolk. Roxy taught herself to read, devoured books, and, after travelling the world for a number of years, decided to go to university, a move which would require her to completely change her way of life. Living in a flat in Brighton, a way of life which she finds bizarre and alien, she
has written about her childhood, her family's culture and the difficulties and prejudices she encountered, for the Guardian.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Sep 7, 2009 -
14 comments
Edinburgh author
Iain M. Banks, creator of the post capitalist space faring society
The Culture and it's
oddly named ships, has long been the UKs top science fiction writer, but has never had
more than a toehold in the US (in part through lack of availability, in part due to lack of promotion and in part due to some pretty
awful covers. That could change:
Matter, his latest, has been heavily promoted in the US and sports a cover nearly identical to the UK edition. This week
Orbit are releasing US editions of the two earliest Culture novels, with the third following in July, which could mean a complete release of all the novels in the US in order.
[more inside]
posted by Artw
on Mar 23, 2008 -
160 comments
Plant Cultures - central aim ... is to convey the richness and complexity of links
between Britain and South Asia, through the story of plants and people
posted by Gyan
on Nov 12, 2005 -
2 comments
For Westerners, the index case of subculture has to be the
1960s UK conflict between the razor-sharp, tailored
mods and their mortal enemies, the greasy
rockers.
Difference was critical to these first self-identified youth subcultures: difference in dress, in music, in drug of choice, in the favored
mode of
transport...everything. This obsessive focus on not just standing out, but standing out
just so - on showing the world precisely the right angle of a hat, length of a coat, shortness of hair - has defined many a subculture since. We recognize
b-boys,
ganguro girls, and
straightedge punks by such deployments, among many, many other identifiable groups. (It's not just a youth thing, either:
leathermen and the
delightfully recrudescent roller derby culture are largely adult phenomena.)
To a devotee of a given subculture, such matters, far from being a "narcissism of small differences," are a matter of pivotal import in framing how one presents oneself to the world:
how we want to be seen, how we want others to understand us. But I'm getting older now, and further out of the loop, and I realize that just maybe I'm losing the ability to discern these differences in the people I pass walking down the street. I find myself asking, who and where are the new subcultures? And how do they choose to present themselves to us?
posted by adamgreenfield
on Sep 25, 2004 -
17 comments
Take This Honour And Shove It Up Your Arse: Some, like
JG Ballard and
Benjamin Zephaniah, want the UK Honours System abolished; others want it
reformed;
diehards want it left as it is. The
recent leaking of a distinguished list of refuseniks, coming just after Sir Mick Jagger
got his ya-yas out in Buckingham Palace, reminds us of
Groucho Marx's famous comment that he'd never join a club that would take members like him. It's certainly an archaic and
complicated system but, it seems to me, no more open to abuse than other countries' systems. And, arguably, no less ridiculous or hypocritical either. But is it (symbolically, culturally, whatever) useful enough nowadays, simple political expediency apart, to be worth hanging on to?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Dec 22, 2003 -
17 comments
The BBC is asking visitors of its news site to
vote from a shortlist of the ten most embarrassing political moments. Visitors can watch a
short film [real media] which shows all ten nominated moments (forgive the home-video moments style background muzak). There's some variety here: Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock in moments exhibiting a baffling degree of misguidedness, George W Bush and Kenneth Clarke in tight spots (figuratively and literally), while Charles Kennedy and John Prescott probably coming out of their situations looking better than they did beforehand. For me the most cringe-inducing clip is that of John Redwood, the then newly appointed Secretary of State for Wales, attempting to mime the Welsh national anthem. Genuinely difficult to watch.
posted by nthdegx
on Dec 5, 2003 -
31 comments
