July 15, 2019
But You Look Fine: A Reading List
About Disabilities, Accommodations, and School. "Because of her reaction, I assumed all professors might view my health condition as a nuisance. I became skilled at performing wellness, enough so that even people in graduate school made sly comments like, I’ve never seen you this way after reading my personal essays about my neurological symptoms, as if they, too, needed reassurance that what I had experienced was real."
Write like you need it to survive
Maybe you wanna start getting ready for nanowrimo, maybe writing is for all year round. Either way, I've got around 50 links bookmarked just for you [more inside]
100 Most Sustainable U.S. Companies
Best Buy tops the list of "most sustainable U.S. companies." Barron's and Calvert Research and Management teamed up to produce the list, culled from the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies. The scores aren't based on only environmental sustainability. It's more about overall corporate responsibility.
Is "Is your food fake or real?" real or fake?
Food scientist and YouTuber Ann Reardon (How To Cook That) decided to evaluate the claims in a scaremongering viral video about detecting "fake foods". Unsurprisingly, the video's claims were nonsense. [more inside]
What It Feels Like for a Fangirl in the Age of Late Capitalism
Both the fans and the media companies want to cheat a little. The media companies want to parade their Web savvy in the marketplace and they want to funnel all the ‘Net traffic into a few commercial sites. The fans want to have freedom of speech and assembly in sites of their own choosing and to have fewer constraints on the use of copyrighted materials than in any other medium. - Keidra Chaney on What it Feels Like for a Fangirl in the Age of Late Capitalism.
ROUGE by Yuna
I can feel the change this time
They'll never take away what's mine
I'm gonna reach even higher I know
I found the strength I'm looking for
I'll take it to Forevermore
I feel the fire that burns inside
I hear a choir sing through the night
Don't let it go
Don't ever lose hope [more inside]
They'll never take away what's mine
I'm gonna reach even higher I know
I found the strength I'm looking for
I'll take it to Forevermore
I feel the fire that burns inside
I hear a choir sing through the night
Don't let it go
Don't ever lose hope [more inside]
"Tiffany had always dreamed of attending the Gathering..."
It's taken him three months longer than usual but the Adam Cadre's 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest Winners are here! [more inside]
“He couldn’t make an ugly job of work to save his life.”
Going home with Wendell Berry The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing. [more inside]
👁️ “A Great Eye, lidless, wreathed in flame.”
Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops [Vice] Motherboard obtained a Palantir user manual through a public records request, and it gives unprecedented insight into how the company logs and tracks individuals.
“Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir.”[The document obtained by Motherboard for this story is public and viewable on DocumentCloud.]
It is a complex tension, isn’t it?
"If you conduct a quick internet search on “history of data visualization,” you’ll nearly always see Florence Nightingale included in the annals of history. Why? It’s not like a Nightingale Rose chart is easy to read, or a cinch to make, or even all that common. One clue to the answer lies in the fact that she is most often the only woman on such lists." Beyond Nightingale: Being a Woman in Data Visualization
Let’s see them aliens
A video game streamer SmyleeKun and the group “Shitposting cause im in shambles” created an event, titled Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, on Facebook. The event is set to take place on September 20, 2019 at 3am. Attendees will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada before proceeding to Area 51 itself. Well, attempting to proceed, anyway. The initial plan was simple: "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens." As the number of people who say they'll attend has grown past a million, there have been a number of proposals and expanded plans kicked around on a related Facebook group, and in r/memes, where about half of the posts are related to Area 51 now. [more inside]
This movie database is pretty coo
Mirror, mirror on the wall
"Lizzo is a joyous inspiration – but body positivity has come too late for the likes of me" – Grace Dent in The Guardian: "There was no such thing when I was a teen in the 80s... As Lizzo paraded gloriously with her flute at Glastonbury last month, a paean to body positivity, a poster girl for billions of proud, perfectly-imperfect young women worldwide, I finally accepted that, when it comes to radical self-acceptance, I have missed the boat."
Dorktown - The Comic Book
Internet sports statistical bard Jon Bois and partner Alex Rubenstein have showcased a number of statistical oddities on the SBNation show Dorktown. But for the tale of the 2014 Spurs-Mavericks series in the first round of the NBA finals, the two have gone to a new format - a digital comic book. (SLDorktown)
"Microwave from the Comfort of Your Bed in Brent"
Against the background of London's housing crisis, Joel Golby of Vice presents the Rental Opportunity of the Week. [more inside]
All Art Comes From Life
Discarded
When China took action to protect its borders from foreign plastic pollution by effectively shutting its doors to plastic waste imports in the beginning of 2018, it threw the global plastic recycling industry into chaos. As waste began piling up in ASEAN nations, leaders stepped up to send containers "back where they came from" - the United States (the world's leader in plastic waste creation), Japan, the UK, and Germany, among others. As more Asian nations ban foreign plastic waste, a full fledged global crisis is ongoing for the "developed" world.
geometry and ornament in Islamic architecture
Created by master builders in the late medieval Iranian world, the Topkapı Scroll compiles a rich repertory of geometric drawings for wall surfaces and vaults. [previously]
the noise of hope / is like a racket in my heart
Vanishing Twin is a British band with members from Belgium, Japan, Italy, France and America. Their latest album, The Age of Immunology, has been garnering great reviews featuring lots of favourable comparisons to obvious touchstones Stereolab and Broadcast. Its title is the name anthropologist A. David Napier gave to the modern era viewed as the zenith of 'the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of [the] non-self'. The band's music is an expression of its desire to push against this tenet and towards a genuinely utopian future. Check out tracks Magician's Success and Backstroke, and then hopefully listen to (or even purchase) the whole thing!
The Comforts of Queer Baking
"One way to preserve that sense of home is to bring it with you, wherever you end up — a recipe, a memory, a confrontation with homophobia in search of something better."
"Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents: one batch, for myself (because holy fuck), and, later, one for my mother."
"As if these hours of blending, rolling, baking, stirring, spooning, freezing, spooning and freezing again were not sufficient workout for a lanky, depressive teenage girl with hormones to burn, there was still the meringue."
Queer baking stories galore, and if you're hungry when you're done, maybe you'll find something appealing in this round-up of cookbooks with LGBTQIA+ authors.
Indian tycoon Dr. Yusuf Hamied fights big pharma
AIDS Medication Produced and Sold for $1 Per Day “We cannot afford not to (help.)” became the driving force behind Cipla’s production of AIDS cocktail. Hamied said in response to accusation of an ulterior motive: “Of course I have an ulterior motive: before I die, I want to do some good.”
Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use of Online Video
Is Netflix bad for the environment? How streaming video contributes to climate change - "Driving an electric car, choosing train travel or using less plastic — we know there are many things we can do to be less of a burden on the world's environment. But would you be willing to give up on streaming video?" [more inside]
Art UK
Simeon Solomon: the rise and fall of a Victorian aesthete; Madame de Pompadour: Rococo style icon; Who were the Bluestockings?; The socialite and the introvert: the shared life and art of Ethel Sands and Anna Hope Hudson; Frank Bowling: 60 years of pioneering colourful abstraction; The cinematic and artistic genius of Ray Harryhausen; Fashion reconstructed: the dress in Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait... these are a small handful of the many articles at Art UK: "a cultural education charity [who] enable global audiences to learn about the UK’s national art collection" whose website "is the showcase for art in every UK public collection" and includes "over 220,000 artworks by over 40,000 artists." [more inside]
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