June 3, 2015
As a fable it’s incoherent.
"Why so Poky? The scourge of terrible canonical children’s books." by Gabriel Roth, Slate
Reading to one’s children is, as everyone knows, one of the great pleasures of parenthood. I love the creaturely warmth of my daughter snuggled up close and the feeling of giving her something intrinsically human and necessary. And Eliza loves being read to. She enjoys the stories and the pictures, but more than that, I think, she responds to the mental intimacy: the knowledge that she and I are looking at the same pages and interpreting the same sentences. It’s a balm for the terrible isolation that arrives around age 2, along with language and self-consciousness—the knowledge that one’s experience is inescapably private. And so the time I spend reading to her can feel, for both of us, like communion.[more inside]
Cliteracy
IN 1969, WE PUT A MAN ON THE MOON. IN 1982, WE INVENTED THE INTERNET. IN 1998, WE DISCOVERED THE FULL ANATOMY OF THE CLITORIS.
Extreme Makeover: Classroom Edition
I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me. Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.
Whose heroes are these? Not mine.
Cyborg isn’t just an emasculated man, but an emasculated black man, and as one of comics’ higher profile black superheroes — starring in his own movie in distant 2020 — the unspoken fact of his castration is demeaning. The racist narrative of black man as sexual threat is served by the idea of a character who is rendered heroic in the same event that symbolically renders him sexually unthreatening. (Genitals do not define gender or sexual power, but they are often tied to an individual’s relationship with their sexual, gender, and cultural identities.)
The Re-Masculation of Cyborg asserts that DC Comics may be correcting the problems that blogger Robert Jones Jr. identified in his essay Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body.
I am very bullish on Twitter’s future-I can’t imagine life without it
What Twitter Can Be.
I believe in Twitter. The company itself is improving, not worsening. The stock market doesn’t get that because Twitter has failed to tell its own story to investors and users. Here is how I think that story could unfold:
I believe in Twitter. The company itself is improving, not worsening. The stock market doesn’t get that because Twitter has failed to tell its own story to investors and users. Here is how I think that story could unfold:
To Do: Book Guests, Buy 1-Hour Energy Drink, Figure Out Who Self Is
Just under 2 weeks after the Finale of "The Late Show with David Letterman" and 13 weeks before the Debut of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", we have been given the first hints of what we can expect from the Former Parody Pundit: The Show's Official Website (colbertlateshow.com), the first episode of a podcast with Stephen and members of his staff behind the scenes, and a Very Special Video with the New Stephen and The Colbeard. (SPOILERS: Contains references to Hitler, the Amish, Wolverine and Camptown Races)
Who's Ben Garrison?
Ben Garrison is the most trolled cartoonist in the world. His trolls love him so much, they recreated him in their own image. [via]
White Ignorance, Black Lives Matter, and Gentrification
White ignorance refers to
the connection between privilege, ignorance and denials of complicity. It is Charles Mills, however, who has drawn special attention to the epistemology of ignorance. Mills’ work is guided by the question, ’How are white people able to consistently do the wrong thing while thinking that they are doing the right thing?’[more inside]
Making Victoria’s Secret Pay For Keeping Staff "On Call"
The controversial form of scheduling locks staff into shifts that can be canceled at the last minute, with no pay. [more inside]
The Pluto family is a little dysfunctional.
Pluto and its moons just got a whole lot stranger A new analysis of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that Pluto's four smallest known moons have been thrown into chaos because of Pluto's relationship with its largest moon Charon.
They're a bit codependent.
The art of motion control
How To Make Apocalyptic Eye Candy
The Visual Effects of Mad Max: Fury Road - Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson said: “I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film - which it is, but also how there’s so little CGI in the film. The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film. A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well.” [more inside]
"Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband..."
Sheryl Sandberg reflects on the sudden, tragic death of her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, thirty days ago. [more inside]
Do you really need those danceable cables?
Now that Tidal has given us a CD quality streaming service, NPR Music Editor Jacob Ganz and some co-workers have put together a quiz to help figure out if it's worth paying for: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (Tidal has its own test, if you want something different.) "Danceable cables" come from an old Gizmodo review.
Wrestling an Electric Eeel
You might find Tesla (and all of Elon Musk's businesses) to be excitingly Geektastic (or not), but you may have wondered if there's anything more to it than just a lot of cool engineering. Does any of it actually have the potential for real positive change? If you want some information and a framework to help answer that question, check out this post, which investigates Understanding Why What Tesla Is Doing Is Important. [more inside]
After Water
#maybe she's born with it #maybe it's bear blood
Historie of Beafts combs through Medieval bestiaries to bring you the finest in olde-tyme animal facts. [more inside]
How the Red Cross Raised '$488 million' for Haiti and Built Six Homes
How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes. Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures [more inside]
International Brotherhood of Memesters, Local One-oh-Snark
Today, Gawker editorial staff vote on whether to unionize with Writers Guild of America, East, saying that transparency in compensation and fair health benefits are among the issues that have led them to organize. [more inside]
The tampon is cylindrical, the human vagina is not
A lot of people argued that [tampon use] was not only inappropriate because it might break the hymen, but it might be also pleasurable and might be a way for girls to experience orgasmic pleasure.A history of the tampon, in the Atlantic. In related news, as of July 1, feminine hygiene products will no longer be subject to federal sales tax in Canada.
liberate your eyes with Alice's own unisex mascara
Pop stars of yesteryear sell their souls with style.
Oi, boofhead!
A short explanation of why an Australian state's parliament officially declared Eddie McGuire to be a boofhead. [more inside]
"We do have coming in…confirmed reports of nuclear detonations."
Bethesda Softworks has released the official trailer for the highly anticipated Fallout 4. [SLYT]
Lahore Landing: 'an interactive documentary on another side of Pakistan'
Lahore Landing, an interactive documentary. "It all started when Taahira went to Karachi for a journalism internship ... Over Skype calls, she shared with us her experience – from underground indie rock concerts to alfresco BBQ nights. It surprised us. It seemed that all the media shared about life in Pakistan was a world of violence and terrorism when it was a lot more than that." [more inside]
To Live And Dine In L.A.
To Live and Dine in L.A. is a multi-platform project of The Library Foundation of Los Angeles based on the extraordinary menu collection of The Los Angeles Public Library.
The entire project, which includes a book, an exhibition, and a variety of city-wide public programs and media events, is dedicated to curating and mobilizing the Library’s collection of historic L.A. menus in order to explore both the food history of the city and the city’s contemporary struggles with food insecurity, food deserts, and youth hunger.
(You can also navigate the collection via the Archive page.)
The entire project, which includes a book, an exhibition, and a variety of city-wide public programs and media events, is dedicated to curating and mobilizing the Library’s collection of historic L.A. menus in order to explore both the food history of the city and the city’s contemporary struggles with food insecurity, food deserts, and youth hunger.
(You can also navigate the collection via the Archive page.)
Bureaucracy lays atop the organization like a frozen snow.
HuffPost would rather not fire people, since that often comes with severance, so it torments them into leaving whenever possible. One editor was barred from all but slideshow management because she accidentally crossed a friend of Arianna’s. Others have been stripped of all responsibility, with reporters or staffers they oversee reassigned. Another favored tactic is for people to be suddenly told that they are miserable failures and given stringent story quotas and harsh warnings. The ending is almost always the same. Driven mad, people flee.Hell Is Working at the Huffington Post
I'll get back to making you laugh. I promise you.
"There are times where I have my good day and my bad days, where I forget things," he said. "There are times where I get the headaches, and the nose bleeds. I won't even let my lady know because I don't want her to be worried about it."--Tracy Morgan speaks about his injuries, the loss of his friend "Jimmy Mack" McNair, and the recently settled lawsuit against Wal-Mart. [more inside]
Books & Records
Simon James is an artist who turns record albums into Penguin-esque book collections. He also has a handful of half-forgotten classics & recession books. [more inside]
Beijing is Sinking
This weekend, the seminal Beijing band Chui Wan will launch their (self-titled) second album after an extensive U.S tour. Their new single, The Sound of Wilderness, debuted on NPR last week - quite possibly a milestone for the Chinese
indie scene. The album's highlights include the seven-minute closer "Beijing is Sinking", a swirling, chaotic song about staying afloat in a torrent of change. An apt metaphor, perhaps, for all the musicians in Beijing's fiercely iconoclastic indie underground. Initial reviews for the album are buoyant. It's seen as a coming-of-age moment for the band, for its influential record label Maybe Mars, and perhaps even for the small, vibrant Beijing indie community. So let's turn back the clock to the early 2000s, to post-SARS Beijing, and see how we got here. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »