November 28, 2017
The Progression of Alzheimer's...
it's his shirt tails
Even Hey Arnold!'s city is gentrifying now After more than a decade off the air, Arnold is coming back to TV this week for Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie. In the show’s timeline, just one year has passed. But Hillwood, their fictional city, has clearly changed. Just like the the real-life places it’s based on, Arnold’s historic neighborhood has been discovered by hipsters. [more inside]
"To the victims of the purge...
...who were surveilled, interrogated, and abused; who were forced to turn on their friends and colleagues; who lost wages and lost health and lost loved ones - we betrayed you. And we are so sorry." Today, Canada's prime minister delivered an apology to LGBTQ2 members of the Canadian civil service and military whom the government attempted to purge between the 1950s and 1990s and to people who were criminally convicted for same-sex acts in the years when they were illegal. This included introducing legislation to expunge their criminal records. In addition to the apology, a settlement with the victims of the purge was also announced today. [more inside]
Little bitty pretty one / I've been watchin' you grow
Race and the White Elephant War of 1884
Of course we have all learned by this time,” Barnum told his retinue, “that there is no such thing as a really pure white elephant. This is a sacred animal, a technical white elephant, and as white as God makes ’em. A man can paint them white, but this is not one of that kind.” Although readers who had followed the coverage of Toung Taloung’s reception in London would indeed have learned that white elephants are not literally white, Barnum’s matter-of-fact statement belied the controversy that the color of white elephants had already engendered in the popular imagination. In 1884, Toung Taloung was the catalyst for a broader public debate about race and authenticity.Ross Bullen on how a bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race.
Music is a time machine
“I was struck by an emotion so powerful and raw that I had a hard time identifying it at first: grief. I sood there in that ecstatic crowd and mourned. I mourned all of us dumb kids. I mourned our graying hair and slackening bodies. I mourned some unnameable forgotten truth I used to know. I mourned Harold. I'd thought I was there for nostalgia; turns out I was there for an opportunity to grieve that I didn't know I'd needed”Young and Dumb Inside (SLNewYorker), a comic by Emily Flake about an adolescence spent in an underground music scene, and the mid-life nostalgia of the former kids to whom music meant everything.
Meet the Woman Who Fought to Record and Preserve Broadway Shows
Betty Corwin, 97, the woman responsible for NYPL’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, explains how she founded the comprehensive database to create live theatre’s legacy.
Rhyme Displays that Engrave Deep as X-Rays
The Dangerous Lure of Writing for White Readers in an MFA
The only reliable method is iteration and trial and error.
Good Reader, Bad Reader
Why do bad readers matter? It is because they lead us to the kinds of citizens—the internationalized subjects—that practices of bad reading aspired to produce; and show how these literate subjects used reading to navigate a political climate that championed liberal individualism, on the one hand, while establishing unprecedented forms of institutional oversight, on the other. These subjects’ diverse and often overlapping genres of reading— properly “literary” novels but also “how to” manuals, advertisements, magazines, newspapers, simple novels, and bureaucratic documents—formed a rich textual ecology whose national and geographic limits literary scholars and cultural historians are only just beginning to map. Good Reader, Bad Reader, an essay by Merve Emre in Boston Review [Via Literary Hub]
Golden Blue
Back in 1973 a certain Ridley Scott directed a famous advert for Hovis... the star of that ad returned to the original location - Gold Hill in Dorset - for another advert this year, this time for a different product.
“I think I'm missing a piece.”
The true story of the fake US embassy in Ghana
Last year, the US state department said it had uncovered a fake embassy in Accra that had been issuing a stream of forged visas (Previously). The fake embassy became a sensation largely because the story was so predictably familiar. The Africans were scammers. The victims were desperate and credulous. The local police officers were bumbling idiots. Countless officials were paid off. And at the end, the Americans swooped in and saved the day. There was only one problem with the story: it wasn’t true.
Alternate Timelines
The modern Doctor Who Episodes that never got made, joining a long list of meanwhiles and neverweres.
It may be my 32nd or 33rd book
Judith Kerr, now 94, escaped Nazi Germany with her family on the eve of Hitler's rise to power.
Writer of 33 books (so far!) she is the creator of the much loved Tiger who came to tea, as well as the lovable, recently deceased Mog. [more inside]
The educational technology revolution is over.
Laptops are great. But not during a lecture or meeting. In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture. Those who had used laptops had substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardized test, than those who did not. [more inside]
At The Museum
AT THE MUSEUM is a short webseries produced by the [New York] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that shows off some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into running an art museum. The videos primarily consist of ambient recordings of museum employees at work, feature little narration, and are incredibly satisfying/relaxing to watch. Episode 1. (via kottke.org)
A Cornucopia Of The Past
The Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario, has a collection of 30,000 historical seed catalogs. Once produced as ephemera, they are now of interest to historians, biologists, and others. [more inside]
The Times Doesn’t Know Where Nazis Come From, But The Internet Does
On Nov. 25th the NYT published ‘A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland’, a profile of white nationalist Tony Hovater that, in the Times own words, ‘has drawn significant feedback, most of it sharply critical.‘ Criticism included failure to fact check or confront Hovater’s claims (‘Here Are Some Facts And Questions About That Nazi The New York Times Failed To Note’- Splinter News), briefly linking to a Nazi merchandise store, normalizing white nationalism ( ‘New York Times Faces Back Lash Over Half-Basked Profile’ - Washington Post), and a failure to understand where these young men are being radicalized into far-right groups ( ‘The online ecosystem that supports and nurtures white nationalists..’ - Buzzfeed cw: Nazi imagery, hate speech.)
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