October 1, 2020
Subway Bread isn't Bread (in Ireland). Or Anywhere Else.
Using Century-Old Seaweed to Solve a Marine Mystery
Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, the University of Hawai'i, and Duke University, have examined a collection of dried, pressed seaweeds dating back over 140 years to learn what ocean conditions in the bay were like in the early 19th century. Actual paper on Pubmed.
"Fools lack the insight needed to digest and appreciate my book."
Samovar "is a quarterly magazine of and about translated speculative fiction", a regular special issue of the magazine Strange Horizons. For Samovar, Brishti Guha translated a (wacky, in my opinion) 11th-century Sanskrit piece by Kshemendra about language misunderstandings and an angry scholar. "...the reason the meat was so poor was because hunters couldn’t get hold of any well-fed animals. All the animals wanted to listen to Gunadhya’s story even more than they wanted to eat!" (Previously.)
A Fuller Picture of Artemisia Gentileschi
Rebecca Mead celebrates pioneering painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s harnessing of motherhood, passion, and ambition – and pushes against the notion her work was defined by surviving a rape (The New Yorker). Links to every painting referenced (Kottke). [more inside]
An eagle-eyed focus on their own financial future
the lifestyle blog voter. In a followup of sorts to her BuzzFeedNews 2016 essay, Meet The Ivanka Voter, Anne Helen Petersen takes a look at what white suburban women are thinking about the 2020 election.
Kicked off by an informal poll on a well-know lifestyle blogger's Instagram, Petersen digs into why some of these women are Trump supporters, and how what may be a decisive demographic slice of the electorate often gets overlooked and misunderstood.
The Culmination of an Arms Race in Maximizing Caloric Intake
Magary: Why it's OK to only skim articles on the internet
If you’re like me, you’re not gonna read all of this article. Many of you will see the headline and that’ll be all you require to formulate your opinion and then hop on Facebook to be like, “Can you believe this a—hole doesn’t read everything he reads?!” I would castigate you for such hasty judgment, but allow me now to confess something that deserves to make me an eternal pariah: I barely ever read anything on the internet in full.By Drew Magary.
"Do whatcha wanna do what the old toilet lady"
Pikotaro is the comedian you may know from Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen or his recent collaboration with Pikachu. His PIKO-10 project consists of ten new songs, uploaded one per week to his YouTube channel, starting with a message to a father from a child inside the womb (Pikotaro is a newish dad) and wrapping up with the viral hit "Everyone must die" which he describes as "his wish for happiness and good health for everyone as they share the same journey from birth to the end of life." The song's release was timed to coincide with Obon, the Buddhist festival of the dead in Japan.
Pirate Care, a syllabus
We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.
The Best American Essays from the pre-apocalypse era
The new edition of The Best American Essays for 2020 is not out until November 3rd, by which time the nation will be busy with other matters, so why not look back at the essays selected for 2019 by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit? Here is the full list of the essays in that edition as available online: [more inside]
Open Letter About a Closed Show
Four major museums - The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - announced they are postponing their joint retrospective of the works of Philip Guston. At issue are Guston’s paintings that feature hooded Ku Klux Klan figures.
The artist's daughter and other curators and critics criticized the decision, and now more than 100 contemporary artists have released an open letter that criticizes the move. "The people who run our great institutions do not want trouble," the letter reads. "They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience."
Make way for the Giant Panjandrum!
The Giant Panjandrum was a WW2 device developed by the British military as a method for creating a tank sized gap in the concrete coastal defenses which comprised the Atlantic Wall. The device - designed by engineer Nevil Shute (yes, that one) - was to be launched from a landing craft and would be propelled like a fiendish Catherine wheel by cordide rockets fixed to its 2 huge iron wheels. The hub between those wheels housed a drum containing a 1800kg of explosives. The panjandrum would scoot up the beach at 60 miles an hour, crush any obstacles in its path and explode when it hit the concrete wall. What could go possibly go wrong? Twitter user Dreadnought Holiday takes up the story with the help of some great contemporary film of the test runs. [more inside]
How Normal Are You?
How Normal Am I? is an art project/tech demo website by Tijmen Schep that that uses your camera and face-recognition to gauge how "normal" you are. [more inside]
Organizing religious people in favor of reproductive rights
The majority of Americans and the majority of religious Americans are in favor of abortion rights, but the anti-abortion people are organized. This is a substantial article about statistics, beliefs, and history. [more inside]
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