April 1
The women who translated the Quran
How Three American Women Translated One of the World’s Most Popular Qurans (inspired by chavenet's recent post) [more inside]
"The biggest deepest iceberg of gaming history I've gone down so far"
Super Bunnyhop (03/28/2025), "Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games": "Napoleon's contribution to game history means getting into gaming's ideological history ... Strategy games are the most immediately obvious example of how games are political." Related: Play Ludus Latrunculorum online. Browse the International Kriegsspiel Society's collection of rules, videos, Tabletop Simulator modules, inclusiveness info, and Discord info. Consider other meanings of miniatures games in Tristram Shandy [PDF]. Discern "The Invisible Men and Women behind H.G. Wells' Little Wars and Floor Games," e.g. novelists Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing or short story author Catherine Wells. Or try "Getting Started with Original Dungeons & Dragons."
It Could Be Much, Much Worse
Last month was the 15-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act being signed into law. Which means that anyone born this century probably has no idea what life was like for anyone with a body before the ACA. So let me tell you!
You'd be a Fool not to share those links
LinkMe, April '25: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Look inside for a round-up from last month. [more inside]
"It is not down on any map: true places never are"
The annual 'Great Lakes Whale Migration 2025 Begins on the Old Mission Peninsula' has begun. [more inside]
Without further ado, let’s enter the Stathamverse
A Working Man left me thinking: Where would Statham single-handedly taking down a human trafficking operation fall on the list of his greatest accomplishments? Obviously, the only way to get to the bottom of this mystery is to blog through it. Join me for a thought exercise that has plagued scientists since the aughts: What is the most impressive thing Jason Statham has ever done? A Quantitative Analysis.
18 Hours And Counting
They might even be Dr. Spock’s backup band!
"I feel like any job, any creative enterprise, that’s the thing you do after the "chore”—you know there’s the thing that’s paying the rent and there’s the thing that just for kicks —those kinds of jobs always have a spirit to them that’s ineffable. It’s just a great, spirited way to work, and you’re just having fun. You can sense it."
John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants discuss highlights of their discography from "small town wierdo music" (part 1) to the Mickey Mouse Club and beyond (part 2) in an AV Club Set List interview. [more inside]
John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants discuss highlights of their discography from "small town wierdo music" (part 1) to the Mickey Mouse Club and beyond (part 2) in an AV Club Set List interview. [more inside]
Welcome to the worst day on the Internet!
"brands and a holiday dedicated to hoaxes are rarely a winning combo." Starting a post to collect "real or not real," well done prank websites, and possible confirmation of what's actually really happening today (sigh). [more inside]
Netherlands Bach Society
This beautiful filming of a performance of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 would be worth watching even with the sound off. But it also features superlative playing by Lucia Swarts of the Netherlands Bach Society. [more inside]
Détournement de fonds, farewell
Marine Le Pen, populist leader of France's National Rally (RN, formerly the National Front or FN), was found guilty on Monday of embezzlement of EU funds and barred from standing for office pending appeal, making it unlikely that she will be able to run for president in 2027. Le Pen was sentenced to a €100,000 fine and four years in prison, with two suspended and two in an electronic bracelet. [more inside]
“Best purchase I’ve made in my life.”
The King’s English
Following the Executive Order of 1 March, President Trump announced today that the English language is to be officially renamed “American”.
“America is a very popular country,” the President said, “when people understand that this is our language, I think you’re going to find a lot more of them are going to want to speak it. A lot.” [more inside]
March 31
"The largest analysis of kidney health in spaceflight so far"
Eric Ralls (3/30/2025) on "Space missions and human kidneys": "These important organs could face more trouble than previously assumed, including a higher risk of stones and lasting damage." Keith Siew et al. (6/11/2024), "Cosmic kidney disease": "spaceflight associated changes in urinary biochemistry favour kidney stone formation" (also, "the kidney is an exquisitely radiation sensitive organ"). Citations. Wikipedia's list of notable stone passers, e.g. Montaigne, cites older work on prevention and possible causes of stone formation in space. Info for the Earth-bound: Calyani Ganesan (7/02/2024), "This Too Shall Pass," on "the pathophysiology, diagnosis and management of kidney stones." Brief study guide. Chattier intro. r/KidneyStones. Previously: Life on Mars; and Scientist carbon dates his own kidney stone. Via File770.
Frozen penguin among millions of specimens moved to new home at CSIRO
Frozen penguin among millions of specimens moved to new home at CSIRO's National Collections Building. The collections include 99 per cent of Australia's native birds as well as exotic bird species, skeletons, mammals, reptiles stored in ethanol, eggs and frozen tissue. (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is an Australian Government agency that is responsible for scientific research and its commercial and industrial applications.)
I would prefer not to... write with anything else!
Two $%$# homeruns by %^@# Steve Jeltz!
One of the best baseball videos our friends Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein (of Secret Base) ever made is "How to Score 10 Runs in the First Inning and Lose". It explores what happens when a team gets blown out in the first inning but pulls out a commanding win via their (arguably) worst player having the game of his life. [more inside]
Damn the Yankee Torpedoes!
The bats look funny. And they definitely look weird. In fact, some players didn't even think that they were real, at least on first glance.
"So... You are a musican?"
When Patrick Stewart met Sting (SLYT) This is short. Happy Monday, everyone!
"I always hated 'realistic' fiction."
Anton Solomonik (LitHub, 03/21/2025), "Realistic Fiction": "What I mean is slice-of-life type writing in which it's just people's feelings and observations and no one does anything, there's no plot, no conflict ... My father was a scientist ... he liked to read police and spy novels." And in the Evergreen Review (Spring / Summer 2025), "The Most Dangerous Game": "Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game with attractive, fantasy-themed cards and a complex, evolving framework of rules." Solomonik is also co-host of "a panel discussion and open mic for trans writers" with past presentations on Twitch and more info at t4t.club.
Quantum Idealist? Historical Catastrophist? Pragmatic Instrumentalist?
What are your beliefs about the nature of reality? Take this quiz to find out (It's a Substack post, so not the greatest format, but a good survey of possibilities)
"You must try to swallow the world while it's on fire"
It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy.
Victory of any human over nature is almost always a momentary illusion
The origins of many technologies have a somewhat spiritual dimension, and so it is with the Vermont-born industrialist Robert G. LeTourneau, who had the greatest impact on the development of the bulldozer. LeTourneau was an eccentric evangelical Christian who believed that he created his machines in collaboration with God. “God,” he declared, “is the chairman of my board.” A gifted engineer, he was responsible for hundreds of innovative advances in bulldozer design. from The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer [Noema]
Why tf is it still March? Your Free Thread in this endless winter.
There seems to be 3,187 days between Christmas and Easter holidays this year - but the calendar says there are just 116. Is the calendar wrong? Does time seem just ... the same? Or does it seem non-linear, stretched or compressed? Have there been instances in your life where your sense of time has become warped, unreal, never-ending or accelerated? Or talk about what's happening in your life (tho' perhaps leave the politics to the billion active political threads elsewhere on the blue). Alternate question: any good food recently, or in planning?
March 30
Vulnerable bird builds ingenious nests to survive bushfires
Vulnerable bird builds ingenious nests to survive bushfires.
A vulnerable population of ground-dwelling malleefowl survived bushfires that tore through one of its few remaining refuges in Victoria, but the remaining hatchlings now face a new challenge.
Elaine May's "Mikey and Nicky"
"Elaine May set out to use her genius and the overlapping brilliance of Cassavetes and Falk to articulate brutal, profound truths about the joy, horror, and complexities of human experience, as illuminated by the strange codes of a certain subset of insecure, violently overcompensating, crime-prone American men, and a tortured conception of friendship as a messy combination of hatred, love, and everything in between. She succeeded spectacularly, and Mikey and Nicky is an essential reminder that great, deeply personal art endures long after commercial considerations have been rightfully consigned to history." - Nathan Rabin, The Criterion Collection [more inside]
MODERN MAGIC UNLOCKS MERLIN’S MEDIEVAL SECRETS
Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from c. 1300 have been discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library. A fragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur.
The Quran’s command to read has a direction
To command an unlettered man to Read unsettles the essential pillar that reading is largely, or exclusively, the one dimensional act of decoding printed symbols. The Arabic word, “Iqra,” often translated as to “read” contains a curious ambiguity — it simultaneously means “to read” and “to recite.” To recite is to engage in a primarily oral act, externally expressive. To read is to engage in something more private and solitary, internally reflective. from The Lost Art of Research as Leisure [Kasurian]
improvised and experimental, without pre-existent theories of any kind
An international regime being lowered into the ground, or rising anew like Lazarus? Perry Anderson (previously) ponders what happens next with neoliberalism.
Richard Chamberlain of ‘Dr. Kildare,’ ‘Shogun’ dies
Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen: "Boogie Blues Study", Ronnie Scott's, London, 1974
Ceasefire groundhog day
Hamas agrees to a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar, and Israel provides a counter-proposal with full backing from the US. Meanwhile Israel continues to attack Gaza north to south as Palestinians mark Eid-al-Fitr. As of 3/29, Israel killed 24 people in Gaza, medical sources say. Israel admits to firing at ambulances after Palestinians say rescuers missing in Rafah. DropSiteNews reports that six rescuers went to help the wounded went missing and the team leader's body was found, and their vehicles destroyed. An Israeli soldier admits to CBS News he was ordered to use Palestinians as human shields in Gaza. [more inside]
“What you see is based on your own expectations and biases.”
I can’t precisely date this memory, but I was somewhere around the age of 13 when I became unable to tolerate the sound of other people’s mouths. In a world in which everyone eats, my day to day became an obstacle course. I learned to contract the tensor tympani muscle in my middle ear to dampen sounds. In moments of silence, I was sensitive enough that even the subtle parting of lips could trigger in me the urge to flee. There wasn’t logic to what I felt. I knew that. It changed nothing. In my worst moments I started fights, especially with my family, among whom the condition, whatever it was, felt orders of magnitude more severe. from The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing [Asterisk]
March 29
Hello Mister Chips
Giant sunfish washes up on WA's southern coast
Giant sunfish washes up on WA's southern coast. Rarely found in the Southern Ocean, a 2.5-metre sunfish washed up on Western Australia's Lowlands Beach between Denmark and Albany could be a sign of a warm current moving south, a marine ecologist says.
Auroral Sounds
There is folklore about the sounds of auroras, but auroras occur about 80-100km above the surface of the earth, too high for any sound to reach the ground. Finnish Aalto University Professor Unto K. Laine has determined that there are auroral sounds, but their source is only 70m above the ground. His paper: Sound producing mechanism in the temperature inversion layer and its sensitivity to geomagnetic activity. [more inside]
Requeering Oscar Wilde
Ellmann saw Wilde’s shift from female to male lovers as a ‘reorientation’. I would argue that a more accurate term to describe Wilde’s sexuality was that he was bisexual. Interviewed in Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa (1995), the academic Jonathan Dollimore reflected similarly: ‘My feeling about Oscar Wilde is that he was certainly bisexual, and there is a sense in which I do deplore that representation of Wilde as living entirely in bad faith in relation to his wife.’ However, gay theorists have resisted this more complex and nuanced examination of Wilde’s sexuality. Take these words from the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, interviewed in Outweek magazine in 1991: ‘I’m not sure that because there are people who identify as bisexual there is a bisexual identity …’ The interviewer goes on to summarise that: ‘In questioning whether bisexuality is a potent identity, Sedgwick points to historical figures the gay and lesbian community claims as lesbian and gay (Cole Porter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde) – who would actually be classified as bisexual,’ to which Sedgwick concludes: ‘But the gay and lesbian movement isn’t interested in drawing that line.’
It happens one night. Sooner than you imagined it would.
“Is there another part of the bar I don’t know about—a V.I.P. section?” you ask, hearing your sadly engrained millennial thirst for hierarchy and ostracism.
“Oh, yes,” he replies. “Your party is right this way.” from The Millennial Exit [The New Yorker; ungated] by Laura Steinel
Wes Montgomery
"Blues drenched and rhythmically compelling, Wes Montgomery’s approach has attracted me ever since I first heard The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery in 1960. Using his right thumb rather than a pick, he generated a unique sound and almost always employed octaves in his solos. He also incorporated harmonic modifications that beautifully complemented his conception." - Noal Cohen [more inside]
making room to talk about antisemitism
[Original post removed at poster's request. Topic was: https://forward.com/culture/707599/bintel-brief-advice-antisemitism-gaza-war-israel/Advice column "A Bintel Brief" responds to a Jewish student worried about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus] [more inside]
Least I Have You, CocoRosie!
CocoRosie have released their 8th studio album, Little Death Wishes Comprised of sisters Sierra Rose "Rosie" and Bianca Leilani "Coco" Casady, their music is a heady mix of lo-fi avant-pop, freak folk and hip-hop with an often strident political, radical feminist messaging. [more inside]
Joan Didion, unsurprisingly, took a lot of notes
This extraordinary little looseleaf binder — undated, though one page makes reference to 1965 — may be among the the most revealing items in the collection. It’s a (seemingly but not really) random collection of quotes, thoughts, observations, and other bits of prose, mostly likely just Didion’s “I might want to use this” file. (They’re mostly typewritten, though one bears the handwritten addition “what am I saying here.”) Mann remarked to me that it’s a lot like the “commonplace books” that many 19th- and early 20th-century authors kept. from A First Look Into the Joan Didion Archives [Vulture; ungated]
March 28
The Encampments
The trailer for the Encampments - a documentary produced by Watermelon Pictures and Breakthrough News, following student organizers at elite universities as they take a historic stand against their institutions' investments in the Gaza genocide. The documentary features currently detained activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently facing deportation. Hip hop star Macklemore is executive producer, and he explains to Democracy Now! why he got involved. They also spoke with Atalla; Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student and fellow campus negotiator with Khalil; and Grant Miner, a former Columbia graduate student and president of the student workers' union who was expelled from the school over his participation in the protests. [more inside]
Sharks recorded making sounds underwater
"Like electric sparks": Sharks recorded making sounds underwater. Sharks were thought to be silent, but scientists have recorded a New Zealand species making a clicking noise.
Werner Herzog's "God's Angry Man"
God's Angry Man is a 1981 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog about Gene Scott, a U.S. pastor and Stanford PhD who served for almost fifty years as an ordained minister and religious broadcaster in Los Angeles.*
tv.garden
What radio.garden did for radio, tv.garden is doing for... yes, tv. That is: Freely stream live tv stations from around the world!
The First Female Anglo-Saxonist
"Elizabeth Elstob left behind no family and few mourners, just some rooms full of ‘books and dirtiness’, as one visitor described them. Yet Elizabeth was a pioneer of medieval studies in England". Article by Yvonne Seale in History Today about Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756).
Joni and James Taylor on the Beeb
Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, on stage, October 1970, London (audio only). Recorded either at the Paris Theater or the Royal Albert Hall. Playlist and a little more info at Beehive Candy. Also available, split into two MP3 files and zipped at the Internet Archive (but their playlist is wrong). [more inside]
If the giant lobster is inedible, it doesn't count
Sarah Anne Stubbs (Nighttide, 03/28/2025), "Creatures From The Kitchen: Gastro Creature Features": "Since Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, we have been gifted ... with a variety of sentient foods ... When I wrote my essay for Creepy Bitches [Essays On Horror From Women In Horror] ... I didn’t realize how many more Gastro Creature Features were out there and how many more would be made." Stubbs's Gastro Horror: A Guide gathers up food-related horror resources, including her podcast Final Girls Feast and her Letterboxd lists (e.g. Pizza in Horror, Don't Look Behind the Refrigerator Door!, or Vineyards in Horror). Stubbs also administers the 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days challenge.