April 29, 2019
“[I]t was very important to me to show that women are gross.”
Tuca and Bertie is a new Netflix show about two bird women in their thirties living in the big city! You might recognize its general vibe thanks to creator Lisa Hanawalt, just profiled in The New York Times by Amanda Hess.
Hanawalt is probably best known as the artist who makes Bojack Horseman look deceptively cute and fills it with puns, but she’s also a co-host of the Baby Geniuses podcast, the author of two comics collections (Hot Dog Taste Test and My Dirty Dumb Eyes, in which Tuca and Bertie first show up) and the graphic novel Coyote Doggirl, and a former member of the now-defunct Brooklyn-based Pizza Island art studio.
Hanawalt is probably best known as the artist who makes Bojack Horseman look deceptively cute and fills it with puns, but she’s also a co-host of the Baby Geniuses podcast, the author of two comics collections (Hot Dog Taste Test and My Dirty Dumb Eyes, in which Tuca and Bertie first show up) and the graphic novel Coyote Doggirl, and a former member of the now-defunct Brooklyn-based Pizza Island art studio.
A field guide to cereal
Evan Lorenzen creates art. He creates tiny books, such as Big Changes, or Life's Lil Pleasures. He has other books, too. He also has paintings and miniatures. I like his tiny art. Maybe you will too.
Tom Ellis, Boston Anchorman, 1932-2019
Legendary Boston Anchorman Tom Ellis has died at the age of 86. He was a very familiar, constant face on local Boston television news, from the 1970's through the 2000's—a fast-shifting era in the history of TV journalism. [more inside]
“Brooks, is this book about humping?”
David Brooks’s Conversion Story: In recent years, the conservative columnist has divorced, remarried, broken with Republicans over Trump, and explored Christianity. How deep was his transformation? (SLNewYorker By Benjamin Wallace-Wells)
The insulin pump hacking underground.
Obviously, you can’t just call up Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. The security issue doesn’t bother Boss, whose day job is in IT. There’s a tiny, theoretical risk that someone who knows his pump’s serial number and gets physically close can take over. But, he says, “if I drink coffee in the morning and forget to enter it into my phone, my blood sugar is going to be higher than normal.” The everyday risk of making such a mistake outweighs the remote risk of someone else hacking his pump.
Militarized cetaceans - Russian reconnaissance and more
Evidence suggests that the Russian Navy has been looking for new ways to leverage what amounts to the original underwater "drone"—militarized cetaceans. Norwegian fishermen discovered a friendly beluga whale in the Barents Sea off the northeast coast of Norway on April 25. Belugas are native to the Barents, so the whale's presence wasn't the surprise—the surprise was that it was fitted with a camera harness with Russian markings. (YouTube) Ars Technica coverage, with more stories of Russian and Soviet military use of whales and dolphins, and a reference to the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.
Hail, Columbia!
When America Was Female: Uncle Sam's older, classier sister Columbia fell out of favor after women got the vote. Maybe it's time to bring her back. Columbia is the feminine historic personification of the United States of America, and was prevalent throughout America until the 1920s. The figure was recently portrayed by Laura Bell Bundy on American Gods. [more inside]
The Bob Emergency
In a brand new Chart Party Internet sports statistical bard Jon Bois discusses an unnoticed crisis in the world of sport: the decline of the number of people named Bob. (SLYT) [more inside]
A People's History of Shade
Shade is often understood as a luxury amenity, lending calm to courtyards and tree-lined boulevards, cooling and obscuring jewel boxes and glass cubes. But as deadly, hundred-degree heatwaves become commonplace, we have to learn to see shade as a civic resource that is shared by all.Sam Bloch on the legal and social forces that keep Los Angeles' sidewalks treeless, bright, and hot. [more inside]
The Consultant Crisis
“We listened to their estimates,” said Quentin Kopp, who was chairman of the rail board in 2008 but has since become an ardent critic. “They were clearly wrong.” How California’s faltering high-speed rail project was ‘captured’ by costly consultants (LA Times) [more inside]
“...the equivalent of 1,700 years of research data on Alzheimer’s.”
A Video Game Developed To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Seems To Be Working [Kotaku] “Sea Hero Quest is a video game developed in partnership with Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, game studio Glitchers and several European universities and it is designed to identify individuals who might have early and mild symptoms of dementia that medical tests aren’t able to detect. [...] In Sea Hero Quest, which is a VR game, players have to navigate and control a virtual boat. They are given a map and shown checkpoints, then the map is taken away and players must navigate to these checkpoints in the game world without the map. According to researchers, every two minutes spent playing the game is equal to five hours of lab-based research.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
A lot of people in that building were pretty fragile
The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence What happened to the group of bright college students who fell under the sway of a classmate’s father? (Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh for New York, includes descriptions of violence and abuse) [more inside]
"And then she was gone"
Saige Earley was gone in stages.
To her mother, Ellen, the 22-year-old grew increasingly detached within weeks of returning from the dentist with a fateful prescription for opioid painkillers. The young woman with long dark hair and a broad toothy smile was gone physically a few months later when she walked out on her young son and left Ellen wondering if her daughter was even alive.
Then last September, Saige was gone for good, found dead of a heroin overdose in a toilet stall at Syracuse airport, clutching a plane ticket to drug rehab in California. (Chris McGreal, Guardian) [more inside]
Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
Steve Paulson interviews Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak When she first started working on a translation of Derrida’s treatise, Spivak was an unknown academic in her mid-20s — “this young Asian girl,” as she says, trying to navigate the strange world of American academe. Spivak was a most unlikely translator. She had no formal training in philosophy and was not a native English or French speaker, so it was an audacious — almost preposterous — project to translate such a complex work of high theory. She not only translated the book; she also wrote her own monograph-length preface that introduced Derrida to a new generation of literary scholars.
« Previous day | Next day »