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What happened to Katherine Langridge's Narnia essays?
Unless my memory is playing tricks with me, Katherine Langridge used to have a whole series of excellent essays about the Narnia books on her Seven Miles of Steel Thistles blog.
But they've gone missing. Does anyone know why, or whether they are still accessible somewhere?
I Will Create A Winning Basketball Program At The University Of Austin
"We begin with the simple home truths of winning basketball,
albeit from a perspective grounded in a free-market and inquiry-forward approach to the game that rejects the cringing 'correctness' that holds back ostensibly enlightened CUSA programs like Rice and Florida Atlantic. My Meritocrats will talk on defense, but not about defense—by engaging opponents on more important questions, we will leverage our program’s discursive advantages. The goal is to be an exhausting and infuriating opponent, and I believe we will achieve this in year one." (From Defector, requires e-mail sign-up)
For when you're sure you hate it but not sure why
Daylight Savings Time Gripe Assistant Tool.
A handy tool to help make your case when whining about a biannual time change.
It's the patriarchy
In this interview in Jacobin, Calvin University's historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez address the conundrum of evangelical support for Donald Trump. She points outs that much of modern liberalism (feminism, acceptance of alternatives to heterosexuality, etc.) threatens White male authority. Trump's morality (or lack thereof) can be handily overlooked given his male dominance displays and his ability stoke the fear that "they" (non-evangelicals) are out to get "us" (real Americans).
In her book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she connects the historical dots and shows the dark underbelly of misogyny and toxic agression has always been present.
"If we make more angry content, we get more engagement."
Whistleblower Frances Haugen will give congressional testimony later this week about internal Facebook research and communications she gave to the SEC, in the form of tens of thousands of pages that document the company's deliberate and deceitful amplification of hate, violence, and disinformation to maintain ad revenue and profits, across all its social media network properties. A former product manager at Facebook, Haugen gave an interview with CBS News 60 Minutes that was broadcast last night.
So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?
"Graduate school application season is upon us and so I wanted to take this as an opportunity to talk about it. Every year, I talk with undergraduate students who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities, who mostly come to me because they know that my graduate school experience was relatively more recent and so they hope I can offer some useful advice beyond what they might get from a more senior academic who attended graduate school decades ago. So this week I am going to give all of you a version of the advice I offer those students."
An Absolute Magnet for Bad Tempered Online Debate
Do Taxes Fund Spending?
But, of course, this is the whole point of “Modern Monetary Theory” – as I regularly and apparently irritatingly point out, the first word of that phrase is an adverb modifying the adjective, not an adjective modifying the noun. It’s a theory of modern monetary systems, not a modern theory of monetary systems. That’s why people shouldn’t be surprised to find that there’s not much to it that wasn’t in Keynes. The word “modern” here means “not gold standard” and it is meant to describe a system in which the government sector is able to issue IOUs which don’t need to be paid back; money. That changes things a lot.Daniel Davies discusses the semantics and substance of Keynesian theory and MMT.
America is a Pyramid Scheme
America is a pyramid scheme.
“It relies on people buying into the American Dream and then working hard to get to the top. But of course - almost no one does. Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor.” So reads the buried lede in Anne Helen Petersen‘s insightful interview with Meg Conley where they discuss 'LulaRich,’ a baffling story of greed, crime, and crappy leggings. What shape is more sustainable (and more delicious) than a pyramid? A doughnut.
volunteering, mistakes, & "when we get the least signaling about it"
"We have to be willing to let someone else make mistakes and do it worse sometimes." Marissa Lingen reminds us that it's important to step back from particular volunteer jobs if you've been doing them for a long time -- for your own sake, and for the health of the organization. And: "Also of concern, and very hard to bring up: sometimes A’s skills slip for one reason or another. Yes, you. Even if you’re A.....we never think it’s us. We never think, I bet I’m the problem here."
R is for reason and poor old reality. Once in fashion, but now obsolete.
The Public Domain Review introduces the 1913 parody children's book railing against modern art, The Cubies' ABC. (Including full text scans from the Internet Archive.)
OverDriven?
Writing for The New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross dives into “the surprisingly big business of library e-books”: (archive.org)
[P]ublishers [mostly] do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me.
Ball drop.
"For Dynamic Machines, I challenged 3D artists to guide a chrome ball from point A to point B in the most creative way possible. Nearly 2,000 artists entered, and in this video, the Top 100 renders are featured"
Permutation.City
CW: flashing throughout video
An experiment in AI assisted video composition, starring the Storror parkour team. [via The Awesomer]
How A “Smart City” Watches You
Whose Streets? Our Streets!
2020-21 “Smart City” Cautionary Trends & 10 Calls to Action to Protect and Promote Democracy.
A thorough and well argued exploration of how 'Smart Cities' are eroding privacy, democracy, social justice and freedom.
Stones speak and ashes live
An overview of archaeological investigation into pre-Neolithic use of grains:
"Well before people domesticated crops, they were grinding grains for hearty stews and other starchy dishes." Lots of different archaeologists, many of them experimental archaeologists, and their recent insights into early diet. Links to all the scholarly articles at the bottom.
Chat and social media reactions, images, and poetry
"When so much of life is mediated through WeChat, stickers become a necessary mask. A way to be visible without committing. Communication without actually communicating." Chaoyang Trap (previously, cofounded by MeFi's Own beijingbrown) delves into "laziness-as-resistance" in China (discussed in a recent New York Times article), the process of making and selling these images, how they differ from reaction GIFs, copyright, woodblock prints, fandom, and more. Related: the poem "This Language That We Share" by Judith Kingston.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates joining Howard University
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining the faculty of Howard University, creating a center for Journalism and Democracy. Hannah-Jones' has a sharp and clear statement on her new job and her mistreatment by the University of North Carolina.
protecting outliers
It's important for the US Census to collect and publish a lot of information. It's also important for individual respondents to retain their privacy. Re-identification techniques pose a problem, so The Markup's Julia Angwin interviews Cynthia Dwork, one of the creators of the "differential privacy" approach, about how differential privacy could help ensure the US can meet both goals.
Highway to Hell
Electric Vehicles Won’t Save Us.
"Cars, however they’re powered, are environmentally cataclysmic, break the tethers of community, and force an infrastructure of dependency that is as financially ruinous to our country as it is dangerous to us as people."
Zapped!
Zapping: The boisterous protest tactic that ignited early LGBTQ activism Designed to disrupt the status quo and gain support for gay rights, these theatrical tactics included everything from duck costumes to pie throwing. [National Geographic] Archive link.
Movie: Winter's Bone
An unflinching Ozarks girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts for her meth-cooking father in order to keep her family intact.
Ruth Coker Burks
For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s... Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.David Koon writing in Arkansas Times in 2015.
The invention of trousers.
The oldest trousers in the world.
Scholars painstakingly recreate wool trousers found in a 3000-year-old grave site in Central Asia.
Unearthing the Forgotten Design History of the Recent Past
From Frutiger Aero to Global Village Coffeehouse to Wacky Pomo, the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute is committed to cataloging the design trends of turn of the century, referred to broadly as Y2K.
Look at Curry Man
Stephen Curry, point guard for the Golden State Warriors, along with his wife Ayesha, have helped serve 16,000,000 meals to Oakland kids this year. In November he bought a new food truck for Homies Empowerment, after theirs was stolen and trashed. In early April, he worked with the Bruce Lee Foundation to raise money to show solidarity with the Asian community. He's also found time to set the record for the most 3 point buckets in any 11 game stretch in NBA history for players 33 and older.
Democracy’s indigenous origins in the Americas
"One could make a case
that some of the very earliest Enlightenment salons were held not in Europe but in Montreal, during the 1690s. It was there that an indigenous statesman called Kandiaronk, acting as liaison between the Wendat (“Huron”) confederation and the regime of Louis XIV, sat down regularly with the French governor-general, the comte de Frontenac et de Palluau, and his deputies—including a certain Baron de Lahontan—to debate issues such as economic morality, law, sexual mores, and revealed religion."
Techno, from Detroit to now
Beatport's Definitive Guide to Techno
As part of Beatportal’s new series on the history of electronic dance music, Marcus Barnes explores the rich history of techno, from the 1970s through to today. A long-form article packed with samples and tracks.
Which was the stylus at the time
The finest Simpsons history posting group on Facebook - since that story of the rocks painted as copper last week - is just emerging from an extremely intense exploration of how many jokes they can get from that 1750 BC cuneiform complaint tablet to a guy called Ea-nasirOr, how to remake classic Simpsons memes into jokes about Sumerian copper merchants delivering substandard ingots.
Anti-Hauntology: Mark Fisher, SOPHIE, and the Music of the Future
Fisher essentially sees that contemporary music has been trapped in a cycle of repetition
which has allowed the capitalist culture industries to trap listeners in a state of suspended animation; a state through which novel and new ideas are not being created or even expected by the listener. Here, in some respects, Fisher is harking back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industries and their subsumption of cultural forms into the machine of late capitalism.
Long dark driving instrumental metal and drone tracks?
I'm looking for heavy intense driving emotional engaging longform metal and drone tracks. I prefer instrumental but hit me with whatever you gots. General preferences below the fold! But please open my mind to what's out there. I can't wait to hear what you come up with.
Feeling Unsure Shouldn’t Make You an Imposter
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review (limited free articles), Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey examine how and why the idea of imposter syndrome has been approached as an individual pathology rather than a symptom of systemic issues in business culture.
(h/t to Anne Helen Petersen's substack; "imposter syndrome" was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in their study The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. (pdf link))
Ruling Class Solidarity: Conflict & Growth at SFMOMA Reexamined
How museum collector-trustees recapture charitable donations.
Sam Lefebvre on the financialization of art, racialized class conflict, offshoring of endowments, and more.
Dance of the Continents
Geoscientists at the Univ. of Sydney have published a model of continental plate movement of the last billion years, accompanied by a cool video demonstrating this dance.
We asked an art historian to review 8 fighter cockpits
Grumman F-14 Tomcat: This space is redolent of Pop Art, it riffs on the imagery of the past but there is an unmistakable element of Studio 54 about it. The joystick and serried ranks of switches remind one of a Lichtenstein image (see below). The pilot here is part of the narrative, two screens reflect back at them. The optimism of the sixties has gone, this is about brittle individualist control, it could be a DJ’s lair or the pilot might be Bowie—in any case this is the cockpit as Warhol print.
Movie: The Dig
As WWII looms, a wealthy widow hires an amateur archaeologist to excavate the burial mounds on her estate. When they make a historic discovery, the echoes of Britain's past resonate in the face of its uncertain future.
Beware The Groove
This oral history of The Emperor's New Groove delves into the fascinating story of the turbulent production that became one of Disney's most delightful and off-brand animated movies.
Money Pleeease!
Joe Biden, Welfare King
"Joe Biden's presidency could be one in which the toxic ideological bias against a proper welfare state and active government dies an extremely deserved death. Free money is both good and fun!"
Can this new app filter out Twitter harassment?
BlockpartyApp
has opened on producthunt.com Founded and launched by Tracy Chou after her bad experiences on Twitter. Every woman, PoC and queer person on Twitter needs this app.
You can ask a friend for an invite (requires an email address), or you can use this special invite for Product Hunt members for the next 24 hours. Whichever way you join, a phone no. is required for 2fa.
You can ask a friend for an invite (requires an email address), or you can use this special invite for Product Hunt members for the next 24 hours. Whichever way you join, a phone no. is required for 2fa.
Robson wasn’t looking for a murder-cow when she found the specimen
How bones set aside as a "Weird Thing Found In A Closet" turned out to be the missing link between previously-known hunting grounds of a "terrifying" ancient, omnivorous ungulate.
Warrior: Learn to Endure or Hire a Bodyguard
Cinemax's Warrior gets a second chance at finding an audience on HBO Max. It's a diverse historical drama focused on Chinese immigrants to late 19th century San Francisco! It's an adrenaline-charged fictionalization of the Tong Wars! It's the dream project of the last Bruce Lee as finally realized by Fast and Furious series director Justin Lin! It's a bloody two-fisted actioner with breathlessly choreographed kung-fu and hatchet fights! It's the best show you’re not watching (The Ringer).
Throat Notes
Felix Colgrave, creator of Double King (previously) and other interesting cartoons, returns with Throat Notes, a charming and bizarre story about frogs and frog sounds.
Forever war, pantry edition - what spices and sauces to buy?
After cooking a lot over the past eight months, I've run through most of my basic spices, etc, and have realized that I'd like to restock slightly differently. What do you recommend?