Most Favorited Posts in the Past 24 Hours (7 days, 30 days, 12 months, all time)
Here's a quick guide to what the numbers mean. Subscribe
"I didn’t realize how important it is not to tell the truth"
The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members. [more inside]
Chicago photography
Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport. I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.
The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts
Joshua Charow is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NYC. He spent the past couple years ringing doorbells to find and interview over 30 artists who are living under the protection of the Loft Law to create his first photography book, 'Loft Law. The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts'. [more inside]
"This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work."
As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.
Social History Of The Cardboard Box
“It’s really a strange town.”
There was allure beyond negation. Branson’s geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O’Neill has termed Primordial America, the “buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.” “Wherever they hail from,” 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer went on, “they feel they are the Heartland.” No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]
The Car You Never Expected (to disappear)
Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was “so uncool, it was cool,” declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn’t enough to keep the car off GM’s chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they’re less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]
You're not supposed to actually read it
A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.
I've Worked With Better, But Not Many
How did Ghostbusters II create the talking Vigo the Carpathian painting? Glen Eytchison was deep in the planning stages of his next theatrical production when he got a phone call from Industrial Light & Magic. It was early 1989, and employees at George Lucas’s famed visual effects house needed to create a painting of a 16th-century Carpathian warlord that could come to life for director Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters sequel. They had to do it fast: The movie was due to come out in June. Could Eytchison help them? [more inside]
30,000 rare oysters being reintroduced to Firth of Forth
30,000 rare oysters are being reintroduced to Firth of Forth. (The Firth of Forth is in Scotland, it is a body of water just North of Edinburgh.)
“Bert, one step into animorphing into Ernie.”
Bobby Fingers Plays Fowl...Fabio-usly
Greatest human alive today, Bobby Fingers, has released another video, researching and creating a diorama of the 1999 incident where heartthrob Fabio came back bloodied after participating in the inaugural ride of the "Apollo's Chariot" roller coaster at Busch Gardens. [more inside]
New Yorker on Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?
The New Yorker takes on the dubious evidence that led to Letby's conviction and the bizarre UK media restrictions that governed coverage of the case. [CW: infanticide] Rachel Aviv's article paints a picture of a neonatal intensive care unit undergoing the same catastrophic deterioration as the rest of the National Health Service—a topic the magazine has covered recently—and how an especially competent and determined nurse might just end up at the scene of several patients' deaths because she was called in to help on virtually all difficult cases. [more inside]
It becomes apparent there were at least three versions of the dough
Let’s go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]
Smoking is Awesome
"The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means some lose, like, 5 years and some lose like 25. You don't know which one will be you." Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt and How "Anti-Vaping" Ads Trick You Into Vaping by Maggie Mae Fish are two sides of a coin: Maggie Mae Fish explains the media literacy needed to determine what makes effective anti-smoking ads and how tobacco (and now vaping) companies direct policy towards ineffective anti-smoking ads. Kurzgesagt has an informative and effective anti-smoking video.
tree of life of trees (flowers, really)
Old and improved, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew recently released a lovely tree of life of... well, plants [pdf]. [more inside]
Charles The Carpathian
Buckingham Palace has revealed King Charles III's first official post-coronation portrait, and the work by artist Jonathan Yeo has proven to be...divisive in its design. [more inside]
The dove ascending breaks the air...
Thinking Big - Thinking Land Stewardship
Can sustainable farming and land use practices really scale to meet the challenges of our planet - or are they just niche hobby projects? Learn about how acquifers work and are recharged. Find out how the Pani Foundation water cup inspired Indian farmers to compete in building water retention structures for their villages. Learn about a Mesoamerican farming technology originally scaled up by the Aztecs. Hear American regenerative agriculture pioneer Gabe Brown, telling his story to the farmers who supply a major British supermarket chain as they move towards regenerative practices. Learn how a British city council responded to a major flood event by investing in beautiful sustainable urban drainage across the city and its suburbs (a presenter's connection drops out near the start of their video but it's worth skipping past it!)
History Doesn't Repeat But It Sometimes Rhymes
Slovakia’s populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP] [more inside]