September 19, 2018
The Most Perfect Album
We invited some of the best musicians in the world to create songs inspired by each of the 27 amendments; a kind of “Schoolhouse Rock!” for the 21st Century. [more inside]
Even Holofernes’ headless corpse is like mehhhhhhhhhhhh
Toronto racoons are at it again
Toronto resident Jenny Serwylo had enjoyed a quiet evening at home Tuesday and had gone to bed when she was startled awake by noises coming from her kitchen. [more inside]
Learning From Bob
Robert Venturi, famed-postmodernist and icon of American architecture, passed away Tuesday at the age of 93. [more inside]
The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed
The online reader reviews I found varied between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claimed he had given a copy of the 1198-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he wrote.
At Least That's What He Wants You To Think
Alan Abel, notorious hoaxer and director of Is There Sex After Death? is dead ...again, this time at 94. Previously, previouslier
Chevy Chase can’t change
The 74-year-old comedy star is sober and ready to work. The problem is nobody wants to work with him. [Washington Post]
"Chase can be arrogant, unpredictable and mean. He is a masterful put-down artist. He can be blunt or tone-deaf, depending on what he fesses up to, and he doesn’t always seem to understand the fine line between comic provocation and publicity disaster.
But Chase can also be hilarious, sensitive and surprisingly supportive. Sometimes, he’s all of these things at once."
"'Accepting charity is an ugly business'"
"My return to the refugee camps, 30 years on": Dina Nayeri was eight when she and her family fled Iran. Are today’s refugees treated with more dignity? (SLGuardian)
I’ll make $0 off of all of this by the way.
WorkMarket is a "payment processor" that Huffington Post, Yahoo, and many other media companies use to pay freelancers. WM offers a super-convenient feature called "FastFunds" that gives those freelancers the "opportunity" to be paid immediately, rather than after the usual few weeks that a megacorp will make a freelancer wait, in return for an 8% cut, which works out to about a 200% APR. They won't call it a payday loan, though. [CW: Pointless picture of injured bird at top of article]
Drawings of golf courses leads to man's freedom
Ghost Plants (not greenery)
Reusing huge abandoned Sears buildings across urban America. A few years back, I [author] moved into a Sears building — no, not that famous skyscraper in Chicago, or one of those department stores in the suburbs, but a city block-sized brick behemoth just south of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Formerly known as the “Sears, Roebuck and Company Mail-Order Warehouse and Retail Store,” it was a distribution center for an empire that revolutionized commerce in the 20th century. Today, it plays a new role in the post-industrial age, as do a series of similar-looking Sears “plants” in cities around the United States. [more inside]
This Is Just To Say
Seeing the face of Harriet Tubman staring back at you from a $20 bill
"I was inspired by the news that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, and subsequently saddened by the news that the Trump administration was walking back that plan. So I created a stamp to convert Jacksons into Tubmans myself. I have been stamping $20 bills and entering them into circulation for the last year, and gifting stamps to friends to do the same." [more inside]
"I like how y'all literally gained a crowd in seconds"
Get your KPOP dose for the day with the KPOP IN PUBLIC challenge, including my fave Taiwan. Need more?
The Seoul Shinmun sponsored a 2018 K-POP Cover Dance Festival in June 2018. The video of the finals include groups from MEXICO | UNITED STATES | RUSSIA | INDONESIA | THAILAND | PHILIPPINES | JAPAN [more inside]
The Seoul Shinmun sponsored a 2018 K-POP Cover Dance Festival in June 2018. The video of the finals include groups from MEXICO | UNITED STATES | RUSSIA | INDONESIA | THAILAND | PHILIPPINES | JAPAN [more inside]
Bad medicine sings false
Musical instrument goes flat in presence of adulterated medicine (Ars Technica). Heran C. Bhakta, Vamsi K. Choday, and William H. Grover at the Grover Lab in the Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside have figured out a way to modify an mbira to turn the instrument into or allow people to make an inexpensive sensor, when paired with a digital audio recorder, such as an iOS or Android phone, and the lab's online sound analysis tool. Full description in their paper Musical Instruments As Sensors (ACS Omega, 2018, DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01673). [more inside]
I'm not on the menu: McDonald's workers strike against sex harassment
The Guardian: Workers at McDonald’s restaurants in 10 cities [across the United States] walked off the job on Tuesday to demand that the company address sexual abuse and harassment....Organizers said this was the first nationwide strike ever called specifically to protest sexual harassment. According to a 2016 survey, at least 40% of American women in the fast food industry have been sexually harassed on the job, and 20% of these women experienced retaliation from supervisors after reporting the harassment--higher for women of colour. In May 2018, the national US labour organization Fight For $15 backed ten women from different American cities who filed a federal suit against McDonald's for failing to respond to harassment or retaliating after a harassment complaint.
Steam men
all that is solid melts into air
The Dirty Secret Of The World's Plan To Avert Climate Disaster - Abby Rabinowitz and Amanda Simpson, WIRED.
The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”... Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?[more inside]
2018 surplus of $45 billion, with a B.
“Apple’s revenues come from purchases made by consumers across the entire wealth distribution, but the moment that money hits Apple’s ledger it comes under the control of the elite: most shares of Apple, like most shares of stock in general, are owned by the wealthy. While stock markets have reached record highs in recent years, fewer Americans own stock than ever before, with the top 10 percent of the wealthiest households owning 84 percent of all stock in 2016. (According to economist Edward Wolff, this is up from 77 percent in 2001.) The bottom 80 percent of households, by contrast, own just 7 percent of stocks. The preponderance of Apple’s income is transferred to shareholders, who largely fall into the upper echelon of the economy. - Apple redistributes more wealth upward than any corporation or country on the planet.“ Think Different ( Boston Review)
Canon Fodder
Where's the country music on Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 1980s?
"I didn't want to be the last person to look away"
I reviewed police documents, interviewed witnesses and experts, and made several pilgrimages home to Texas to try to understand what exactly happened to Wyatt — not just on that night, but in the days and months and years that followed. Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we’ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there — even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.
"How Hannah Stands Up to Schizophrenia"
Hannah Bryndís Proppé-Bailey talks about how stand-up comedy and football help her deal with schizophrenia (autoplaying video, may blow dust into eyes) for UEFA’s Equal Game project. Earlier this year Hannah Jane Cohen interviewed her about her comedy.
“WHOA!”
Humanism
You Might Have Earned It, But Don't Forget That Your Wealth Came from Society - "The distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can." (via) [more inside]
No, I Will Not Debate You
In a new longform piece, Laurie Penny explains why debate is not going to save us from
fascism, that arguments defending bad faith debate are disingenuous, and why she won't debate those operating in bad faith. (SLLongreads) [more inside]
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