October 16, 2018
Living with Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home. [more inside]
Love and death have long walked hand in hand
Memento Mori, Memento Amare [was] a three-person exhibition featuring art nouveau body horror sculptures by Isabel Peppard (NSFW), absurdist vanitas paintings by Beau White (NSFW) and neogothic etchings by Jonathan Guthmann (NSFW).
"A family ruthless in its quest for power and passion."
"Dallas" at 40: The Inside Story Behind the Show That Changed Texas Forever (SL Texas Monthly).
An Amazing Obituary
If you work in one of the many institutions through which addicts often pass—rehabs, hospitals, jails, courts—and treat them with the compassion and respect they deserve, thank you. If instead you see a junkie or thief or liar in front of you rather than a human being in need of help, consider a new profession. One family's amazing, heartbreaking, and educational obituary for a loved one who died too soon.
Gene Genie
Most White Americans’ DNA Can Be Identified Through Genealogy Databases. "Already, 60 percent of Americans of Northern European descent — the primary group using these sites — can be identified through such databases whether or not they’ve joined one themselves, according to a study published today in the journal Science.
Within two or three years, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA, researchers found."
Grammin'
Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem The platform has cast itself as the internet’s kindest place. But users argue harassment is rampant, and employees say efforts to stem it aren’t funded well or prioritized. (Taylor Lorenz for The Atlantic)
In the future days which we seek to make secure
For Freedoms is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization to increase civic discourse via art. [more inside]
Suss "feels a movie soundtrack that got bored ... and left the theater"
What would it sound like if Brian Eno had produced the Western film scores of Ennio Morricone? We don't know, but it might sound like Suss, who make ambient country, "the new folk music." "There is no chair! It's a new thing every time" (Facebook video; also on YouTube). Those and more musings are from member the musicians behind Suss, who released their album Ghost Box (YouTube playlist) last February, and they're putting out an expanded version via Bandcamp. More audio/visual chaos from Bob Holmes (on mandolin, guitar, and harmonica): Canyonlands (Return to Wichita) live; Rain, live @ Secret Theatre, NYC 2/4/18; Rain (studio audio/ mixed media video); and Late Night Call (clip).
The penpal experience
Slowly is an app avaialble for iOS or Android, which enables you to write letters to people around the world. The catch (or hook): Your letters will take hours to arrive, mimicking a slower, pen-pal like experience.
Abandoned in America
STET
STET is a new short story by Sarah Gailey, written “entirely out of spite” and published online by Fireside Magazine. Don’t skip the footnotes.
Universal Childcare
"At the same time we thrust new parents back into the labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for childcare in a country with no national standards for quality, accessibility or safety. Nearly 11 million children, including over half of children below the age of one, spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week in some kind of childcare setting, yet the burden is on individual parents to assess the risks and benefits of a confusing, unaccountable, generally private system pieced together state by state for the care of our littlest and most vulnerable children. In essence, giving birth or adopting a child in America means you also take on the job of government regulator. It’s an impossible task, with occasionally tragic consequences." A Blueprint for Universal Childhood Care (Jacobin)
“To have light, there must first be darkness,”
Montegrappa Chaos Watch & Pens by Sylvester Stallone [YouTube] “Sylvester Stallone [has] teamed up with the 106-year-old Italian luxury brand Montegrappa to create the Montegrappa Chaos Limited Edition. But a pen like this, inspired by 16th-century artists such as Battista Franco and Sebald Beham, couldn’t simply just be put on sale. No, a pen like this needed a trailer. The trailer, which has just resurfaced on social media, it is easily the most ostentatious project Sylvester Stallone has been involved with. It deserves to be deconstructed.” [via: The Guardian]
there is another ...
Artificial Robot Funk
Apiarists Gone Rogue
California’s almond harvest has created a golden opportunity for bee thieves. Come for the bee thievery; stay for names like Joe Romance and "Rowdy" Jay Freeman (a sheriff's deputy and a beekeeper).
A Map of Recent Philosophy
"This graphic is my attempt to give a data-driven representation of the structure of recent philosophy. ... For this map I parsed 55327 papers in philosophy from the Web-Of-Science-Collection." [more inside]
"just whose side was Virgil on?"
Since the end of the first century A.D., people have been playing a game with a certain book. In this game, you open the book to a random spot and place your finger on the text; the passage you select will, it is thought, predict your future. If this sounds silly, the results suggest otherwise. The first person known to have played the game was a highborn Roman who was fretting about whether he’d be chosen to follow his cousin, the emperor Trajan, on the throne—Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique? by Daniel Mendelsohn. You can inquire about the future from the Aeneid on the Sortes Virgilianae website (English, Latin).
Some 41
The dawn of television promised diversity. Here's why we got "Leave It to Beaver" instead. [more inside]
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