Posts with Recent Comments
FAFSA: The Bureaucracy of Suspicion
"Before 2024, the FAFSA was a Frankenstein’s monster, with all kinds of different forms grafted together to create a confusing and demoralizing process that left far too many eligible students unable to access their aid. This year, the Department of Education rolled out major revisions that are, in fact, much better — but only if they work. Right now, they don’t." David M. Perry (co-author of the wonderful The Bright Ages) with an opinion piece on the ongoing problems with FAFSA, incrementalism, and the suspicion around giving students money for school.
When Pearl Jam Get Dark About Matters, Things Get Great
First we got the title track, Dark Matter thick and meaty, grown out of a drum riff. Something was a'brewin'. Something more powerful than in the recent past, with a blistering guitar solo. Running was the second single, maybe even more intense than the first. Then the miracle review: Pearl Jam Dig Deep and Find a New Light on ‘Dark Matter’ [Rolling Stone] But the band is also excited: [more inside]
When I think of genre awards
10 Major Awards for Fantasy Literature (2018) hits the SFF high points. There is, however, a long list of contenders for awards of varying sizes (2019). Another perspective (2016), from around the time of the last major Hugos fracas. If you haven't heard of them, maybe check out the Ignyte Awards, the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (or see the overall database of Lambda winners), or the Prix Jacques Brossard. For more information, visit the Science Fiction Awards Database. [more inside]
"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
The "G" is pronounced the same as in GIF
simultaneously beloved and overlooked
Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick [more inside]
West Deutsche Rundfunk Big Band does Prince
WDR BIG BAND - The Prince Experience | Konzert [1h40m] "The WDR BIG BAND plays the music of PRINCE together with internationally renowned guests Liv Warfield (vocals), Cassandra O'Neal (vocals, keyboard), Ricky Peterson (Hammond B3), Paul Peterson (vocals, bass), Mike Scott (E -guitar), Kirk Johnson (drums) and Luis Ribeiro (percussion). Vince Mendoza, Composer in Residence of the WDR BIG BAND since 2016, has specially arranged PRINCE's compositions for the WDR BIG BAND. The concert was recorded live during the Bonn Jazz Festival (August 2023)." Song list in video description." [more inside]
Have You Eaten?
"The thesis of HAVE YOU EATEN, at the start, was "here's how community actually works," & in the process of making this thing happen, I've felt it in my bones. We show up for each other & frustrate each other & make things together & let each other down & mend each other's hearts. We feed each other." Author Sarah Gailey wrote a 4-part novella at Reactor (fka tordotcom) about queer community in a too-possible future USA. [more inside]
‘read and censure ... but buy it first ... whatever you do, buy.’
A Series of Headaches is a video from the London Review of Books following printer Nick Hand as he prints a page from the magazine using methods as close as he can get to those used to print the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. The page selected is an old LRB article about the First Folio by Michael Dobson [archive link]. The video is made in conjunction with Folio400, a website with lots of information about the First Folio, as well as a series of articles on it.
“I don’t fear your wings, man.”
Conan O’Brien Needs a Doctor While Eating Spicy Wings is the season 23 finale of Hot Ones [previously], where Sean Evans asks Conan O’Brien questions while they eat chicken wings with increasingly spicy hot sauce. It goes off the rails pretty quickly.
Ad Maiorem Gloriam Concreti
"If that offends them, so be it."
"Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts" A letter from The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) editor Chris Quinn
Libraries of life on earth
The Crucial Role of Herbaria in Science by Dr. Cassandra Quave. Podcast episode (on Youtube) includes Dr. Quave's WaPo opinion piece. In February, Duke University announced that it was shuttering its herbarium, to widespread dismay from scientists across the globe. With one of the nation's largest collections of algae, lichens, fungi, and mosses, Duke's herbarium is "highly unusual" for its depth and variety. It's also where the Lady Gaga Fern is held, named for the artist's outfit at the 2010 Grammys which looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte.
"There is no more business"
By all appearances, Widell certainly seemed to be thriving. She took business lunches at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, a leading Tulsa destination. She was a member of the Summit Club — "Downtown Tulsa's Only Private Social Club" — perched atop the Bank of America Center, with its panoramic views of the Arkansas River. She hobnobbed with the local elite and claimed to have more Airbnb listings than anyone else in the city. She cut her hair short and, to her husband's annoyance, swapped out her conservative style for big sunglasses and more "flamboyant" fashions. Widell, who hadn't had much growing up, also projected an image of benevolence. She made a point of hiring people with criminal records to work in her warehouse, and she talked about buying a church that had just come on the market and turning it into a women's shelter. But then investors started asking questions. And soon enough, Widell would be turning on the very people she'd promised a second chance. from The fall of the Queen of Airbnb
The "King of Carbonara" shares his pasta recipe
What if orchestra conductor, but also DJ?
Synthony is apparently an EDM orchestra. I mean, like, that's what it is. It's a DJ mix being played live by an orchestra. With singers and other things. Like, I can't describe this adequately, here: SYNTHONY - World Premiere - Full Length Show [1h55m] Performed by Auckland Philharmonia.
The alter ego he created led a more glamorous existence
Enty’s Hollywood was a dark and messy world, uglier and more menacing than the glamorous town imagined by outsiders. The authenticity of this vision — and, in turn, the authenticity of his scoops — was bolstered by how pathetic he came across in his own accounts. Enty described himself as a 300-pound heavy-drinking entertainment lawyer who had been married six times, lived in his parents’ basement in L.A., and was bullied by his famous clientele — a zhlub with the right connections and a nose for dirt. In reality, Nelson didn’t live in his parents’ basement, and he hasn’t been married six times — only three. from The Man Who Gossiped Too Much [Vulture; ungated] [CW: well, almost everything]
Troubling the Water (Conceptualizing science, academic freedom & China)
Yangyang Cheng explores the historical evolution of how we think about science, its capitalization, politicization, and securitization, & how the US' competition with China is restricting the future of scientific research:
"To understand the present woes in scientific collaboration between the United States and China and to conceive of a better future, one must go back in time to trace the evolution of this transpacific relationship."
Social media is neither inherently beneficial or harmful to young people
The Coddling of the American Parent by Mike Masnick (TechDirt) debunks Jonathan Haidt's panicky new book on teens & the internet. Developmental psychologist & scholar Candice Odgers' article for Nature: The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes. [more inside]
Willie Nelson Outlaw Tour 2024
Willie Nelson Outlaw Tour 2024
I would have posted this to IRL if I knew how. Considering the principals and the age of some, this presents a last chance opportunity to see them. And as someone here I've already notified said about the front row tickets, those are stupid cheap prices.
Indeed, indeed.
I would have posted this to IRL if I knew how. Considering the principals and the age of some, this presents a last chance opportunity to see them. And as someone here I've already notified said about the front row tickets, those are stupid cheap prices.
Indeed, indeed.