June 13, 2019
28 years later, Swiss women strike again for equality
In 1991, there were no women in Swiss government, there was no statutory maternity leave, and some Swiss women had been granted the vote only the previous year. Fed up with such inequality and lack of respect, hundreds of thousands of Swiss women staged the biggest strike in Swiss history. Now, 28 years later, Swiss women are going on strike again to protest the lack of equality that plagues the country, which has an average 20% pay gap and 37% pension gap between men and women. You can follow the strike and its stories using the Twitter hashtag #frauenstreik2019. Also on Twitter, Anna Wiederkehr of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper shows what the news would look like without women: "No women, no media."
h o r s e l i p s
The New Wilderness
Maciej Cegłowski on Facebook, Google, and the absence of "ambient privacy": "This requires us to talk about a different kind of privacy, one that we haven’t needed to give a name to before. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition."
63-Up
Michael Apted's 56-year-long documentary is back once again [previously] and [even more previously] and [hints of more previously before that].
63-Up is the latest update on a group of 14 individuals filmed every seven years since their first appearance, aged seven in 1964.
King Princess - Cheap Queen
New video out today from King Princess. (N.B. the actual song doesn't begin until 0.55.) King Princess previously.
Typographical Posters, Post Typography!
IDC School of Design in Mumbai holds an annual Typography Day with a poster design contest. Here are winners from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011. [more inside]
A single line tattoo
A single line tattoo. Across the chest, down the arm and around the fingers. Up forearms and down forearms. Back up the arm and over the shoulder. Across the chest and crawling down the back. Along the thighs. Up and down the spine once more. Neck flows into ear. Ears and ears and ears. Chin. Lip. (All links to artist Instagram posts.)
when I was sick I had a fever
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia Hypothesis of life on Earth in a vast interrelated self-stable complex system , named after a Greek primordial goddess. But what if our idea of feedback is incorrect? What if Life On Earth Is Ultimately Self-Destructive, as laid out in Peter Ward's Medea Hypothesis? [more inside]
For it must be looked upon as borrowed by the other person
Medieval Christian theologians were OBSESSED with the cannibal baby question: if our bodies are resurrected in the Last Judgment, what happens if we were eaten? (CW: cannibalism, including medieval images of same.) [more inside]
REꓷЯUM
LIKE ALL HUMANS I AM NOT A ROBOT
There’s a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots... There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output. Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human. (source)
An animated history of social media growth by users
Fascinating animation of the rise and fall in number of users of the most popular social media networks. Starts with Friendster in 2003, with so many others, coming and going, through 2018. (warning - annoying music). [more inside]
Hey (nonny nonny) now
"Now I want to hear 'All Star but it's a Madrigal' or 'All Star but it's a 40-part motet composed in the style of Thomas Tallis.'" TheWhiteSkull, Feb. '18.
Ask, and it shall be given you.
Sex Work Is Work
“From even a quick scan of the 20-plus page draft bill, it’s clear that decriminalizing sex work means dealing with more than just laws against prostitution per se. “This actually speaks to exactly how pervasive the criminalization of the sex industry is,” said State Senator Julia Salazar, “that it touches so many parts of the law the average person doesn’t think about when they think about prostitution being illegal.” A Historic Breakthrough for Sex Workers’ Rights: New York could become the first state to decriminalize prostitution. (The New Republic) Sex Work Is a Hot and Messy 2020 Political Issue (City Lab) Philosophy Tube: Sex work, criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization (43:00)
Heels touch ground when Slavs squat around
Picture a Russian male stereotype. What image comes to mind? Is it a guy squatting in an Adidas tracksuit? A People's History of the "Slav Squat"
NYT drops all cartoons
The New York Times announced on Monday that it will cease publishing political cartoons, weeks after the newspaper came under fire for publishing a cartoon that was slammed because it had been deemed blatantly anti-Semitic.
"I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general," Chappatte wrote. "Over the last years, some of the very best cartoonists… lost their positions because their publishers found their work too critical of Trump. Maybe we should start worrying. And pushing back. Political cartoons were born with democracy. And they are challenged when freedom is."
"Corpus Bones! I utterly loathe my life."
Jeanna Kadlec writes for Nylon on how Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, "this queer, feminist book, defined [some] millennial women. For a particular age bracket of millennial women, this book was our first feminist guidebook. It was the first fiction that insisted: God wouldn't have given me this if he didn't want me to use it. It said: Your parents don't necessarily know what is best for you. It taught us about consent, showed us that we alone owned our bodies and minds and futures."
‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refuge
A Guardian long-read about food and identity Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon has written a book: My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong, from which this is an excerpt. Quote beneath the fold [more inside]
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly
Earth's clingy best friend is also the site of one of the largest-known impact craters in our entire solar system. Essentially, something caused a giant hole on the moon billions of years ago, and astronomers have just discovered that there's something big -- really big -- buried underneath the surface. [more inside]
There, is that better?
An Oral History of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Perfect Men in Black ‘Sugar Water’ Scene On the eve of the release of the latest Men In Black movie, Rachel Handler at Vulture looks back at one of most memorable scenes from the original film. [more inside]
Hong Kong’s Kitchen Shorthand
From the essay Hong Kong Food Runes: Nobody knows I’m a fraud. No one here knows where I live, but they assume I live nearby—every evening with my punters’ guide, a black notebook, and a dozen bottles of beer. Like an unassuming creeper, I leisurely slot myself into taking food orders for customers when the noodle-stall keeper does not have enough hands, until eventually I’m asked to simply open the till for change. [more inside]
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