April 16, 2018
DAMN!
Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. wins the Pulitzer. Called “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” DAMN. is the first album to win that isn’t a jazz or classical album.
Court Adjourned
“prison-style boot camp”
a barbed-wire backdrop, a mugshot mockup for new clients, and prison bars at the entrance to the workout room:
If many women are taught to clutch their keys and walk the other way if they encounter such a group [of men of color] on the way home at night, ConBody counts on the fact that in the safety of a boutique studio, these same women will pay to exercise with the people they’ve been socialized to fear.
Two Blasts from the Past
The Cherry King of Brooklyn
The Maraschino Mogul’s Secret Life: First the red bees arrived; then the Brooklyn cherry factory’s dark secret came to light.
This New Yorker story had so many unexpected twists that I had to stop every few paragraphs to search for more information on some tangentially related topic. I hope you enjoy it too. [more inside]
The Police never record "Tea In the Sahara," for one thing
How would the Earth's biomes be different if it rotated in the opposite direction?
"I confess to you that that causes me pain and shame."
Pope Francis publicly apologized to victims of sexual abuse by clergy in Chile, months after defending the bishop accused of covering up the scandal. [CW: discussion of sexual abuse] [more inside]
The Tripods
The Tripods was a dystopian Sci-Fi series written in 1967 which served as a template for many of the YA novels out today. Picked up by the BBC in the 1980s, a TV series was released and then brought to the states on PBS on Saturday Afternoons. (And now some of you are about to watch it on YouTube.) [more inside]
#BoycottStarbucks
Starbucks Apologizes After Two Black Men Were Arrested For Not Ordering Anything [The New York Times] “Last Thursday, the two men asked to use the restroom in the coffee shop but an employee refused the request because they had not bought anything, officials said. They sat down, and they were eventually asked to leave. When they declined, an employee called the police. Some of what happened next was recorded in a video that has been viewed nearly 10 million times on Twitter and was described by Mr. Johnson as “very hard to watch.” Police officers surrounded the men and escorted one of them out of the Starbucks in handcuffs. The other soon followed.” [more inside]
E S O T E R I C
Peter Thiel's Apocalypse
For two decades, Thiel has been one of the most blood pressure–raising figures in Silicon Valley, provoking fury from his liberal opponents and caveat-dripping defenses from even his most loyal allies. Yet there’s something oddly elusive about him, something that goes beyond his identities as a semi-closeted gay man, a heterodox Christian, and an exceedingly flexible libertarian—something reflected in the mishmash of seemingly irreconcilable beliefs to which he subscribes. Trying to discern what drives Peter Thiel can be an exercise in extreme futility, especially when he declines interview requests, as he did for this story. Yet everywhere Thiel goes, he leaves behind clues.[more inside]
Bananas, Crackers, and Nuts
"How did three, and only three, food-related terms become shorthand for mental illness [in English]? ... There are reasons, or at least guesses, for the winding path these three terms took. But their etymologies are not related, and show just how weird and broken and non-systematic language can be. To put it in another, definitely worse way: What if….it’s language itself….that is bananas, crackers, and/or nuts?"
The 100 Pages
To assemble our list of 100, we assembled a brain trust of comics professionals, critics, historians, and journalists. Our criteria were as follows: A page had to have either changed the way creators approach making comics, or it had to expertly distill a change that had just begun. In some cases, there were multiple pages that could be used to represent a particular innovation; we’ve noted those instances. We didn’t necessarily pick the 100 best pages — there are many amazing specimens we didn’t include because they didn’t have a significant influence on the craft of comics. The 100 [American] Pages That Shaped Comics. (A few pages are NSFW)
Semper fi
RIP R Lee Ermey, marine and actor, most famous for playing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.
Handmade heritage
The stories from Atharna's project to document and archive Middle Eastern crafts are now up on their website: portraits of artisans and skilled craftspeople, from Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, Egypt and the countries of the Gulf. via
When skunks duel, wind direction is everything.
Entitled Opinions is back, with Dr Andrew Hui, an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. His second book, A Theory of the Aphorism (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, Fall 2018), is "a short book on the shortest genre of all: the short saying. It studies the ubiquitous yet under-explored form of the aphorism, one that pervades multiple traditions, from Heraclitus to Confucius, Buddhist sutras to Pascal, Nietzsche to Twitter."
Evaporate: Cartoon-Shaped Sequences of Images and Sounds
From a distance, Lenstar Productions' Evaporate certainly has the shape, and basic episode plots, of an ordinary cartoon. But look any closer and its true nature becomes clear - based on creator Jacob Lenard's dreams (the hallucinating-in-your-sleep kind, not the aspirations kind), only the outermost structures of the series make a lick of sense - everything those structures contain is Something Entirely Else. (All non-numbered videos in the playlist are also based on dreams, except for Acid Rain.)
« Previous day | Next day »