April 2, 2018
Dirt changed my life.
'I like low tones, polite enthusiasm, courteous complaints."
Author Elena Ferrante: I make an effort, at least in the artificial universe that is delineated by writing, never to exaggerate with an exclamation mark. Of all the punctuation marks, it’s the one I like the least. It suggests a commander’s staff, a pretentious obelisk, a phallic display.
Editor Elaine Benes: I disagree, I really disagree!
Editor Elaine Benes: I disagree, I really disagree!
It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it
The Sensual World [full album, ~45m] is a 1989 album from Kate Bush. If you've never listened to it before, you should. If you have listened to it before, you should also listen to it. Side A: The Sensual World [video], Love And Anger [video], The Fog, Reaching Out, Heads We're Dancing [more inside]
A More Scientific Approach to Improving Education
The Education Endowment Foundation is a UK non-profit researching what works and what doesn't in public education, where students are the guinea pigs. Through its close ties with the UK government, the EEF tries to find evidence on best practices in education, then deliver the evidence to teachers. Studies range across the spectrum, from peer tutoring to summer schooling. The "yardstick" used to measure impact is how many "months forward" a student's education moves as a result of an education program, such as "outdoor adventure learning." The results are posted as "Evidence Summaries." [more inside]
20/M PLAYING FOOTBALL INJURED BUTTOCKS STRAIN BUTTOCK
american injuries (@usinjuries) is "...a bot that tweets descriptions of emergency room visits from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. By @collinskeith." (CW: injuries) [more inside]
None of the authorities are here to help you.
A Betrayal: The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. In an absolutely horrifying case involving bureaucracy, racism, and apathy at the hands of the FBI, ICE, and MS-13, a young man risked his life to help the FBI catch gang members and murderers; they hung him out to dry. ICE ordered him deported via the same facility to which they'd sent the MS-13 members he'd informed on, eventually sending a memo explicitly detailing how he informed on the gang and its members. The Trump administration is repeating many of the circumstances that lead to the establishment of MS-13 in the first place. TW: Violence, murder. [more inside]
I vote therefore I am clueless
Voter Behavior: The Power of Groupthink in Trump's America - a special report (SLEconomist) "...people may well decide which candidate they like and then ascribe policies they approve of to him or her, often incorrectly. Each presidential-election year the ANES asks voters to place themselves on a spectrum with “many more services” on the left to “reduce spending a lot” on the right, and then to place the two main political parties somewhere on that spectrum. About 15% decline, or say they have not thought about it. The same number, more or less, will place themselves but cannot place the parties, meaning that 30% of the electorate does not have a good sense of where Republicans and Democrats stand on the most fundamental question about the role of the state." [more inside]
They Feel Good
Delightful funk covers by Scary Pockets: The Scientist, All the Small Things, Love Yourself, Since You've Been Gone, Shape of You, Toxic, Humble.
Teeth studded her eyelids, the twisted geometry of her limbs
In response to YA author Gwen C. Katz examining an author's claims about his facility with writing female characters, writer/podcaster Whit Reynolds proposed a Twitter game: Describe yourself the way a male author would. [more inside]
And I said / What about / The Mothman Prophecies
Movies That Would More or Less Scan the Same But Arguably Make for More Interesting Replacements for the Titular Film Referenced in the Chorus of Deep Blue Something’s 1995 Hit Single “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” [more inside]
Throw off the chains of fast social media
The author of Deep Work describes how to benefit from the Social Internet without being consumed by Social Media. Practicing slow social media allows you to maintain the hard to replace value that these services might provide you, while at the same time neutering their ability to transform you into a pawn in their algorithmic attention economy games. [more inside]
Wakanda Shakes the World
Foreign Policy (1 April): It’s been six weeks since the “Wakanda speech,” and the world is still reeling. [more inside]
Attack oligarchs at home and abroad
“The next administration should make the case that the transnational oligarchy spanning from New York to London to Moscow isn’t merely greedy but also poses a threat to national security by undermining the integrity of the political process. It should expand FARA and end foreign lobbying, both legal and illegal, on K Street. It should crack down on money laundering through banks and real estate, as well as offshore tax havens.” How Progressives Should Think About Russia - David Klion, The Nation.
Internet Trolls Vs Comics
Winnie Mandela has died
enough to generate internal weather patterns, some say
"It has been said that Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, currently under construction in Nevada, will be the biggest building in the world, if completed as planned, in 2020. Though superlatives like this are usually more a comparison of ways of measuring than empirical fact, it does provoke a consideration of the outer limits of enclosed space. If the Gigafactory, and the overall economy of scale, suggests that big boxes are getting bigger and bigger (Tesla even has other gigafactories in the works too), then perhaps it is interesting to consider the current state of the art of megaspace." The Center for Land Use Interpretation takes a look a megastructures in Building Big: The Outer Limits of Enclosure
"The constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here"
Whaling History, launched this week, is an online collection of comprehensive data on the North American whaling industry, 1700-1920, including every known whaling voyage (over 15,000) as well as logbooks recording day-to-day whale sightings and takings by type and location and crew lists with detail on people involved in the industry. A project of Mystic Seaport and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, it's the most comprehensive database of whaling material ever to be available. Users are encouraged to share their projects. [more inside]
It really could have been anyone.
"Having killed two people and hit three others, Dorothy Bruns did not receive a summons. Had her car not been wrecked, she might have been allowed to drive home. A couple of weeks after the crash, we learned that she had reportedly hit another pedestrian in September and sped off. Paperwork that would have led to a deeper review had gone unfiled. Like Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, she was recognizably unfit to handle a dangerous machine, known and perhaps flagged by the authorities but not stopped, leading to violent, preventable death. And a lot of people seem to think of a driver’s license in near-purist Second Amendment terms: as a right that can be revoked under only the most extreme circumstances." What New York Should Learn From the Park Slope Crash That Killed Two Children.
Not to be Crass, but slob-a-dob-a-dob bing! bing! bing!
Amebix Risen A documentary about everyone's favourite west country anarcho-crust-punk band.
Best known for crossing the salty pentagram lines atwixt punk/goth/metal and helping birth the whole thrash-metal thing.
There is also anime, sword making, Hawkwind reminiscence, and unfriendly felines. [more inside]
You'll still need that universal translator, Mr La Forge
Tom Scott introduces Rikki Poynter explaining why sign language isn't universal [SLYT] [4:31] [subtitles]
Let's be careful out there.
Steven Bochco, the 10-time Emmy Award-winning co-creator, producer and showrunner of such groundbreaking TV police dramas as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, and (non-cop) Doogie Howser, M.D., died on Sunday of complications of leukemia at the age of 74. [more inside]
I think it all has to do with the gelatin sphere.
The Soft Truth. A short story by Leigh Alexander.
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