November 18, 2019
You're The Voice
John Farnham is an Australian institution, who's widely considered to be one of the country’s greatest singers. ‘The only Australian artist to have a number-one record in five consecutive decades’, he’s been crowned King of Pop (1969-1973), King of Moomba (1972), Australian of the Year (1987), made an Officer of the Order of Australia (1996), inducted in to the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame (2003), and holds the record for the highest selling Australian album of all time (24x platinum for 1986's Whispering Jack). [more inside]
Come back tomorrow for a new word.
Make guesses ... and I'll tell you if my word is alphabetically before or after your guess.
Hey! People! Guess My Word is back on the Internet!!
[via MeTa]
The global, omnivorous sonic diet of SVBKVLT, cyber beyond cyber
SVBKVLT is a digital label, based in Shanghai, China, but pulling in artists and fostering collaborations spanning the globe. For example, Indonesia’s Gabber Modus Operandi, who mix metal/noise with Indonesian happy hardcore, to gamelan sounds and everything in between (FACT Mag pick), and Ugandan producer Slikback (Soundcloud), whose sound moves fluidly between influences like trap, gqom, footwork, and a number of East African regional styles (TMT interview).
Bogaletch Gebre, The woman who began the rebellion of Ethiopian women
She led the successful campaign to nearly eliminate female genital mutilation in Ethiopia Gebre said that simply demanding people to live a certain lifestyle wouldn’t end discrimination against women. Instead, her philosophy was rooted in the belief that spearheading conversations with communities in safe spaces that nurtured dialogue and debate was the best path forward.
You're not going to scratch me, are you?
Feral Cat Documentary is a 22m long video of a man in his backyard slowly getting to know a feral cat that hunts squirrels and birds in the wildlife refuge on the other side of his fence. Anyone who has tried to know a cat will know this story. It has a happy ending. [more inside]
"We propose a shift from asking ‘Why engage in same-sex sexual behavior'
... to 'why not?' "
Julia Monk writes about queering evolutionary theory for the Nature Ecology and Evolution research community.
A new review in Nature Ecology and Evolution, An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals, identifies the heterosexist biases that underpin decades of investigation in the evolution of sexual behavior. Most tellingly, most scientific investigations that seek to explain how same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) may evolve and persist in a population of animals start from the premise that different-sex sexual behavior was the ancestral position. [more inside]
The Supreme Court May Criminalize Immigrant Advocacy
Steamed Hams, Chuck Tingle, plums, Bee Movie, dat boi, Babadook, rainbow
The A.V. Club's 100 best, worst, and weirdest things we saw on the internet in the 2010s [more inside]
GENERAL CONSENSUS: It technically works.
Google Stadia review: the best of cloud gaming is still just a beta [The Verge] “GoogleGoogle Stadia works. [...] All you need is a decent internet connection, a good Wi-Fi router, and your pick of Google’s Chromecast Ultra dongle, Pixel phone, or the Chrome web browser on a laptop or desktop. Oh, and a lot of patience. Google’s cloud gaming service isn’t anywhere near what the company initially promised in March. It’s effectively a beta that Google is charging real money for, and you should wait until 2020 for that to change.” [more inside]
How the spirit of the indigenous occupation of Alcatraz lives on
In 1969, indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz Island, demanding that their treaties be honored. Fifty years later, they’re still fighting. [more inside]
“Essentially, what we’re doing is kicking the can,”
“Experts say cap and trade is rarely stringent enough when used alone; direct regulations on refineries and cars are crucial to reining in emissions. But oil representatives are engaged in a worldwide effort to make market-based solutions the primary or only way their emissions are regulated.“ Cap and Trade Is Supposed to Solve Climate Change, but Oil and Gas Company Emissions Are Up (ProPublica)
Long Island Divided
Long Island Divided — In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island. [more inside]
...and not one book by Malcolm Gladwell.
The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years. Slate’s list of the definitive nonfiction books written in English in the past quarter-century includes beautifully written memoirs but also books of reportage, collections of essays, travelogues, works of cultural criticism, passionate arguments, even a compendium of household tips. What they all share is a commitment to “mostly truth” and the belief that digging deep to find a real story—whether it’s located in your memory, on dusty archive shelves, in Russian literature, in a slum in Mumbai—is a task worth undertaking.
that's just how it tastes
"Maybe meeting a new flavor is alchemy. Today, you can’t stand it. Tomorrow, it’s all you can stand. At home, using books like Sohui Kim’s “Korean Home Cooking,” I cooked stews. Minced garlic. Read about blending the flavors—combining chilies and anchovies until the spice bloomed the way that I liked, simmering until the heat of the red pepper was present without screaming. It was a privilege, I guess, growing to care so deeply about something that had nothing to do with my life. Only now, it did." Bryan Washington wrote and filmed about learning to make Soondubu Jiggae for the New Yorker.
Happy Tom's Diner Day!
Thirty-eight years ago this morning, a recent graduate of Barnard College in New York City named Suzanne Vega sat down to write a song at Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th (Tom’s would become sufficiently famous in other ways to inspire a documentary). A photographer friend of Vega’s had shared that he "felt as though he saw the world through a pane of glass," and inspired by that thought Vega set out to write a song where she was simply an observer. She constructed the lyrics around sitting at a restaurant and watching life happen around her - the man behind the counter greets a regular, a woman outside uses the restaurant's window as a mirror to adjust her wardrobe, bells go off at a nearby church, etc. The song is simple and beautiful. Its story and multifaceted legacy are remarkable. [more inside]
constantly being under a magnifying glass
Broadly, code-switching involves adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities. Research suggests that code-switching often occurs in spaces where negative stereotypes of black people run counter to what are considered “appropriate” behaviors and norms for a specific environment. We also see examples of guidelines encouraging black people to code-switch to survive police interactions, such as “acting polite and respectful when stopped” and “avoiding running even if you are afraid.” Based on our research and the work of others, we argue that code-switching is one of the key dilemmas that black employees face around race at work. [more inside]
30-50,000 Feral Hogs
Planet Zoo is, temporarily, a game about mass-producing knackered warthogs (Rock Paper Shotgun). “As the mass-produced offspring of the grindhouses flooded the market, [conservation credit values] for those species plummeted still further ... [for new players] it turned out “low prestige”, “unendangered” and “fast-breeding” boiled down to three creatures: the Indian peafowl, arguably the crappest animal in the game, plus ostriches and warthogs, which had the added bonus of being happy to cohabit, for more efficient mass breeding.”
Bootlickers and the Civility Police Won
This is not a story about the private equity vampires ruining this specific company. It is about the implications of the fact that Splinter was not allowed to live, and Deadspin is not allowed to be political. Rude media, for lack of a better term, is dying. From The Death of the Rude Press by Alex Pareene in The New Republic
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