September 20
Black Cowboy Photography (2017) & Documentary (9/22)
An exhibition of photographs held in Harlem in 2017, and a documentary film about LA cowboys (upcoming). A quick internet search of “American cowboy” yields a predictable crop of images. Husky men with weathered expressions can be seen galloping on horseback. They’re often dressed in denim or plaid, with a bandana tied ‘round their neck and a cowboy hat perched atop their head. Lassos are likely being swung overhead. And yes, they’re all white.
Contrary to what the homogenous imagery depicted by Hollywood and history books would lead you to believe, cowboys of color have had a substantial presence on the Western frontier since the 1500s. In fact, the word “cowboy” is believed by some to have emerged as a derogatory term used to describe Black cowhands. [more inside]
We have Liftoff
One Small Step is a new animated short about a young girl inspired to follow her dreams by Taiko Studios. It's directed by former Disney animators Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas.
The Billboard Boys
On the Nature of Daylight
Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" has now been turned into a short film. Originally released on the 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, contemporary composter Max Richter's stirring "On the Nature of Daylight" has been featured in a number of films and television shows, including Arrival (spoilers!) and Castle Rock. This summer, on the eve of its fifteenth anniversary, the piece was made into a short video starring Elisabeth Moss.
The dirt is shouting out for us to come back here and rescue our town.
On Sept. 22, 1500 US Museums Open Their Doors for Free
This coming Saturday, September 22, 2018, more than 1,500 museums will open their doors for free as part of Museum Day. Organized by Smithsonian magazine, the annual event includes free admission to museums and cultural institutions in all 50 states. Participating museums range from large, popular institutions like the Zoo Miami to quirky and fascinating specialty museums, like the National Barber Museum in Canal Winchester, Ohio. Visitors are allowed to download one ticket per email address, and each ticket provides free general admission for two people. [more inside]
Cthulhu Rolling
Scientists Gave MDMA to Octopuses—and What Happened Was Profound - "The results of their experiment, in which seven octopuses took MDMA, were 'unbelievable.'" (NPR, NYT, HuffPo, LS, NG, Graun, Vice, WaPo)
An Oral History of 'Rounders'
Going All In: An Oral History of 'Rounders'. How two first-time screenwriters, a guy from Montana, and a pair of up-and-coming movie stars made the greatest poker movie ever.
The Voice and its Village
An alum looks back at the storied alt weekly [The Baffler]: "When I think about my two stints at the now-shuttered Village Voice—for which I freelanced regularly from the late seventies to the late eighties, returning as a staff writer from 1994-1999—one unexpected but apt word that keeps popping to mind is 'fecund.'" THE VILLAGE VOICE (1955–2018) [Art Forum]: "The destruction of the Village Voice—in the spirit of the paper itself, let’s not mince words about the nature of its ending—may not have been a surprise, but it was still a shock to the system." The demise of the Village Voice, previously: "Today is kind of a sucky day."
Liars.
After a nice dinner, selling the Chequers plan is not going terribly well for Theresa May, prefering her own plan to Michel Barnier's (which Jeremy Corbyn isn't fond of either). Donald Tusk says it "will not work". Nicola Sturgeon wants Brexit delayed. Jacob Rees-Mogg wants to 'Chuck Chequers'. Leanne Wood is otherwise occupied, Keir Starmer is pretty negative and Vince Cable will oppose it. Michael Gove thinks it is temporary, Boris Johnson refers to 1066, Lynton Crosby is busy plotting, while Mike Penning refers to the dodo. And Emmanuel Macron exclaims that "those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that it's going to bring a lot of money home, are liars". The clock ticketh.
deconstructing American Evangelical Christianity
The Struggle For A New American Gospel
This past May, I found myself in the packed auditorium of the First United Methodist church in downtown Austin, listening to Bible stories. The creak of the wooden pews and the smell of hymnals summoned a rush of memory. Yet the hundreds of mostly young, tattooed people surrounding me suggested I’d ventured far from the old religion. The tales about Elijah, Mary, and the Roman centurion that evening were part of a live recording of The Liturgists, one of the country’s most popular podcasts on spirituality, with over four million listeners per month. Its creators, Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue, both based in Los Angeles, are former evangelical Christians who had abandoned their faith only to return via the teachings of mystics, and by embracing science, philosophy, and social justice. While they insist their show isn’t explicitly Christian, McHargue told me, “Helping Christians deal with feelings of marginalization, oppression, and alienation is part of our work.” It explains how I came to find them, and why I still felt itchy in the pew. For me, to sit in a church is to be vulnerable, and no passage of time could stop that.[more inside]
Magecart, skimming credit card information online since 2015
Since March 2016, hundreds of thousands, if not more, credit cards and other details have been stolen during payment from dozens of online shops worldwide (ClearSky Cyber Security), due to JavaScript code injections that RiskIQ dubbed Magecart. In June 2018, Ticketmaster UK's credit card processing partner, Inbenta, was compromised and Magecart code injected (Security Week). But this was just a small part of a larger effort. As of July 2018, at least 800 e-commerce sites are said to be affected, after they included code developed by third-party companies and later altered by hackers (ZDnet). [more inside]
Farewell, Racked
After 11 years of intelligent writing about fashion, beauty, shopping and other topics traditionally coded as "female," Racked ceased publication on September 14th. [more inside]
Training Module
“— just a more humane way of killing lobsters.”
Is there a humane way to boil lobsters alive? One woman thinks it’s by getting them high. [Vox] “Charlotte Gill, the owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, Maine, is getting lobsters high before boiling them alive, according to a report by the Mount Desert Islander. “I feel bad that when lobsters come here there is no exit strategy,” Gill, who has a state-issued medical marijuana license, told the publication. “It’s a unique place and you get to do such unique things but at the expense of this little creature. I’ve really been trying to figure out how to make it feel better.”” [more inside]
What if the doctors had listened to her?
We just passed the four-month anniversary of her death. It was a loss we all saw coming, but grief exploded through us anyway. It is a powerful, relentless thing. It is wrong to wake up in a world where she no longer exists. It is wrong to watch our mother bend over her grave, our father talk about her in the past tense. It is wrong that we were four sisters, and now we are three. Her death is a hole in our bodies because a piece of us is gone. We are sad, heartbroken, and angry that she is gone — yes, angry too, because there was more that could have been done, and because we are not alone. [tw: cancer, death]
The summer wind came blowin' in from across the sea
My Way is the sixty-eighth studio album by Willie Nelson. It was released on September 14, 2018, by Legacy Recordings. The album is a tribute to Frank Sinatra, who was a close friend of Nelson's
A chilly response to a Hotlanta Super Bowl halftime show
Adam Levine and the boys from Maroon 5 have reportedly been named as the headline act for the Super Bowl LIII halftime show. Music fans aren't thrilled, with many pointing out that a Super Bowl in Atlanta would be the perfect opportunity to highlight local talent. All of which provides a great reason to revisit Sports Illustrated's Mark Bechtel epic recasting of every Super Bowl halftime show, featuring an era-appropriate roster of superstars.
Kings of Karachi
The horses of Imam Hussain. As Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Hussain, the Prophet's grandson, the white horses that form part of the Ashura procession in many Shiite commuities in South Asia take their rightful place.
How Maya Rudolph Became the Master of Impressions
Nvidia release new GPUs
In the industry of graphics accelerators, Nvidia enjoys market dominance. Today, their latest GPU microarchitecture, Turing, is available to the public in their RTX series of implementations of the new chip. Benchmarks show modest improvements over their predecessors, while new features supporting ray-tracing and deep learning offer innovation in the way real-time computer graphics are created.
"I’m not going to be put out, I’m not going anywhere.”
Manitoba Indigenous Doula Initiative Empowers Women, Helps Keep Kids Out of Welfare System. [more inside]
A roving, free-range freak
The U.S. Agriculture Department scientists who gave us the Bradford pear thought they were improving our world. Instead, they left an environmental time bomb that has now exploded. [more inside]
little apples
Somewhere in the Yarra Valley, a secretive orchardist has developed a little apple-but now needs to find a way to pass this on. [more inside]
Love in a time of Roe v. Wade
Jeanne Safer and Richard Brookhiser have been deeply in love for almost 40 years while being passionately committed to opposite sides of the abortion debate. [SLSlate]
"And then I said to Werner, 'See?! Someone wants a close-up!'"
We bought a zoo
When the Tweedys bought a zoo in Borth, west Wales, it was a dream come true. But it soon turned into a nightmare of escaped animals, deaths and family feuding
Typewriters, Cash Registers, and Calculators
Picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don’t worry if you can’t recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator’s inverted key sequence.
September 19
The Most Perfect Album
We invited some of the best musicians in the world to create songs inspired by each of the 27 amendments; a kind of “Schoolhouse Rock!” for the 21st Century. [more inside]
Even Holofernes’ headless corpse is like mehhhhhhhhhhhh
Toronto racoons are at it again
Toronto resident Jenny Serwylo had enjoyed a quiet evening at home Tuesday and had gone to bed when she was startled awake by noises coming from her kitchen. [more inside]
Learning From Bob
Robert Venturi, famed-postmodernist and icon of American architecture, passed away Tuesday at the age of 93. [more inside]
The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed
The online reader reviews I found varied between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claimed he had given a copy of the 1198-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he wrote.
At Least That's What He Wants You To Think
Alan Abel, notorious hoaxer and director of Is There Sex After Death? is dead ...again, this time at 94. Previously, previouslier
Chevy Chase can’t change
The 74-year-old comedy star is sober and ready to work. The problem is nobody wants to work with him. [Washington Post]
"Chase can be arrogant, unpredictable and mean. He is a masterful put-down artist. He can be blunt or tone-deaf, depending on what he fesses up to, and he doesn’t always seem to understand the fine line between comic provocation and publicity disaster.
But Chase can also be hilarious, sensitive and surprisingly supportive. Sometimes, he’s all of these things at once."
"'Accepting charity is an ugly business'"
"My return to the refugee camps, 30 years on": Dina Nayeri was eight when she and her family fled Iran. Are today’s refugees treated with more dignity? (SLGuardian)
The last area of medicine where we prescribe tough love
The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one. [more inside]
I’ll make $0 off of all of this by the way.
WorkMarket is a "payment processor" that Huffington Post, Yahoo, and many other media companies use to pay freelancers. WM offers a super-convenient feature called "FastFunds" that gives those freelancers the "opportunity" to be paid immediately, rather than after the usual few weeks that a megacorp will make a freelancer wait, in return for an 8% cut, which works out to about a 200% APR. They won't call it a payday loan, though. [CW: Pointless picture of injured bird at top of article]
Drawings of golf courses leads to man's freedom
Ghost Plants (not greenery)
Reusing huge abandoned Sears buildings across urban America. A few years back, I [author] moved into a Sears building — no, not that famous skyscraper in Chicago, or one of those department stores in the suburbs, but a city block-sized brick behemoth just south of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Formerly known as the “Sears, Roebuck and Company Mail-Order Warehouse and Retail Store,” it was a distribution center for an empire that revolutionized commerce in the 20th century. Today, it plays a new role in the post-industrial age, as do a series of similar-looking Sears “plants” in cities around the United States. [more inside]
This Is Just To Say
Seeing the face of Harriet Tubman staring back at you from a $20 bill
"I was inspired by the news that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, and subsequently saddened by the news that the Trump administration was walking back that plan. So I created a stamp to convert Jacksons into Tubmans myself. I have been stamping $20 bills and entering them into circulation for the last year, and gifting stamps to friends to do the same." [more inside]
"I like how y'all literally gained a crowd in seconds"
Get your KPOP dose for the day with the KPOP IN PUBLIC challenge, including my fave Taiwan. Need more?
The Seoul Shinmun sponsored a 2018 K-POP Cover Dance Festival in June 2018. The video of the finals include groups from MEXICO | UNITED STATES | RUSSIA | INDONESIA | THAILAND | PHILIPPINES | JAPAN [more inside]
The Seoul Shinmun sponsored a 2018 K-POP Cover Dance Festival in June 2018. The video of the finals include groups from MEXICO | UNITED STATES | RUSSIA | INDONESIA | THAILAND | PHILIPPINES | JAPAN [more inside]
Bad medicine sings false
Musical instrument goes flat in presence of adulterated medicine (Ars Technica). Heran C. Bhakta, Vamsi K. Choday, and William H. Grover at the Grover Lab in the Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside have figured out a way to modify an mbira to turn the instrument into or allow people to make an inexpensive sensor, when paired with a digital audio recorder, such as an iOS or Android phone, and the lab's online sound analysis tool. Full description in their paper Musical Instruments As Sensors (ACS Omega, 2018, DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01673). [more inside]
I'm not on the menu: McDonald's workers strike against sex harassment
The Guardian: Workers at McDonald’s restaurants in 10 cities [across the United States] walked off the job on Tuesday to demand that the company address sexual abuse and harassment....Organizers said this was the first nationwide strike ever called specifically to protest sexual harassment. According to a 2016 survey, at least 40% of American women in the fast food industry have been sexually harassed on the job, and 20% of these women experienced retaliation from supervisors after reporting the harassment--higher for women of colour. In May 2018, the national US labour organization Fight For $15 backed ten women from different American cities who filed a federal suit against McDonald's for failing to respond to harassment or retaliating after a harassment complaint.
Steam men
all that is solid melts into air
The Dirty Secret Of The World's Plan To Avert Climate Disaster - Abby Rabinowitz and Amanda Simpson, WIRED.
The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”... Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?[more inside]
2018 surplus of $45 billion, with a B.
“Apple’s revenues come from purchases made by consumers across the entire wealth distribution, but the moment that money hits Apple’s ledger it comes under the control of the elite: most shares of Apple, like most shares of stock in general, are owned by the wealthy. While stock markets have reached record highs in recent years, fewer Americans own stock than ever before, with the top 10 percent of the wealthiest households owning 84 percent of all stock in 2016. (According to economist Edward Wolff, this is up from 77 percent in 2001.) The bottom 80 percent of households, by contrast, own just 7 percent of stocks. The preponderance of Apple’s income is transferred to shareholders, who largely fall into the upper echelon of the economy. - Apple redistributes more wealth upward than any corporation or country on the planet.“ Think Different ( Boston Review)
Canon Fodder
Where's the country music on Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 1980s?
"I didn't want to be the last person to look away"
I reviewed police documents, interviewed witnesses and experts, and made several pilgrimages home to Texas to try to understand what exactly happened to Wyatt — not just on that night, but in the days and months and years that followed. Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we’ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there — even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.