September 28, 2020
Chocolate latest
"Serves 8"? Nope. Tin of Disappointment? Nope. 2,268 slices of chocolate cake? Yes! All the chocolate! As a chocolate museum opens in Switzerland where it snows chocolate (but a rival in Belgium?), and people nibble on Terry's balls or the nation's favourite (the right way up), what else is happening in the world of chocolate? "...disgusted yet excited..." Orange twix? Body paint? Chocolate candles? Breakfast oats? Legal shenanigans? Salted caramel chocolate spread? Lindt chocolate spread? Violet Crumble becomes liquid. Science! The Mirage? Please make a chocolate and pear pudding and take me to Bristol's finest. White chocolate Nutella? CBD bar? Or steal it in Austria or read the regular Notes on chocolate or watch TikTok or make chocolate chip cookies.
“I don’t need a crown to know that I’m a queen.”
Claudia Rankine writes in Vogue about her conversation with Lizzo on Hope, Justice, and the Election [medium read with fashion photography] [more inside]
If voting didn't matter, they wouldn't try so hard to stop you.
VotingWorks.us is a resource for people who are skeptical about voting, or know people who are skeptical and want to talk with them. [more inside]
Fix-it fic in Gatsby's pool
"'Do you think you could call me "Nick" from time to time?' I asked him. At the time, I was not sure why it suddenly mattered." "To Stay at the Scene of a Crime" by Prix is a short fanfiction story with an alternate ending for F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby.
New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster
Do you know *this* Jiayang Fan?
Jiayang Fan writes on the struggles she and her mother faced immigrating to America (The New Yorker), including her mother’s A.L.S. diagnosis. This year, as COVID-19 threatened her mother's healthcare, Chinese nationalists began calling them traitors to their country. [more inside]
every valley is a nature valley, dumbass.
Just in case you were wondering
Rooms Full of People
Is Palantir's Crystal Ball Just Smoke and Mirrors? Peter Thiel-backed surveillance giant Palantir Technologies (previously) is set to go public September 30. Long controversial for its secrecy and involvement with the more unsavory parts of the national security state (e.g., ICE, CIA, NSA), Palantir is under scrutiny for its financial woes -- it posted a $600 million loss in 2018 and in 2019 -- and for whether its product even works as advertised. Palantir portrays its software as like its namesake — a crystal ball you gaze into for answers... But the truth is that it still appears to take a lot of manual labor to make it work, and there’s nothing magical about that.
Hopper without the melodrama
Robert Bechtle, Bay Area photorealist, has died at the age of 88.
Vacant roads, driverless parked cars, and the occasional person appear in Bechtle’s work, which often feels purposefully sucked dry of emotion. Its sangfroid disturbs because the imagery feels trapped in a specific cultural moment, in a way that ought to feel nostalgic. But Bechtle delivered his banal material—distinctly American, distinctly middle-class—without any affect.
“Bechtle exploits the strangeness in humdrum photographs of the obvious, and he does so with the sort of reticent, stubborn grace that marks most of the Bay Area’s finest painters—David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud,” critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker in 2005. [more inside]
The World Is Finally Ready for Beverly Glenn-Copeland
[Glenn-Copeland] also belongs […] in the tiny group of people whose lives could be a realistic inspiration for a young, queer artist today. I wanted to know how he did it: How did he make it to 76 years old so completely unjaded? As a young person, he explained, “I was very independent of what other people thought. I didn’t really care.” It was only in his teens that he learned psychiatrists considered queer desire “to be an emotional disease.” But he “never gave it two thoughts. I just considered they were out to lunch.”– From a biographical essay about Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his music by Josephine Livingstone.
A categorization of conspiracy theories
Climate science student Abbie Richards has created a chart to categorize conspiracy theories in an inverted pyramid structure from most to least reality-based (and made it available as a PDF on google drive), with videos on tiktok and twitter breaking it down: Part 1 and Part 2 with more to follow.
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