January 11, 2015
The ethics tutorials end when dissent quiets
August Never Ends -- by Zoe Quinn: The machinations of online abuse aren't going away - we need to talk about it.
It’s a head splitting cognitive dissonance to be fielding requests for help from friends who have just gotten swatted at the same time as giving someone else numbers on the harassment and abuse perpetrated by GamerGate because someone he’s talking to thinks it’s over and never had a big impact on people in the first place. This entire week has been spent putting out fires started by scriptkiddies and adults who should know better but are too empty to care about their victims. I’ve been trying to take a day to just be a regular person, recenter myself, and have the energy to get back to work with the same enthusiasm I tend to have, but every attempt gets cut short by some fresh, new, horrible news about someone trying to get into my accounts, a new asinine conspiracy theory being used as an excuse to dox people I went to high school with, friends freaking out because anonymous message board people are talking about how to mail them bombs, or just another death threat. At least the death threats have become somewhat routine.
Go on, say it.
But your blade it might be too sharp
Singer/songwriter Sia's dancer mini-me, Maddie Ziegler, and actor Shia LaBeouf put on a captivating (and to some controversial) performance in the video Elastic Heart
"discard anything that doesn’t spark joy"
De-cluttering your house with love: "Marie Kondo has built a huge following in her native Japan with her “KonMari” method of organizing and de-cluttering. Clients perform a sort of tidying-up festival: time set aside specifically to go through belongings. Each object is picked up and held, and the client needs to decide if it inspires joy. If it doesn’t, it needs to go." [more inside]
The Secret History Of Thoughts
Locked-In Man - "Martin Pistorius spent more than a decade unable to move or communicate, fearing he would be alone, trapped, forever. NPR's new show Invisibilia tells how his mind helped him create a new life."
Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth: by Labor, for Labor
From October 1950 to January 1952, the Mexican American miners at the Empire Zinc mine in Bayard, New Mexico were on strike, protesting the racial discrimination between them and their Anglo counterparts in pay, safety standards, and quality of life in company housing. Two events make this particular strike stand out from similar strikes at other mines are the involvement of the miners' wives in both requesting better living conditions and later in taking to the picket lines themselves, and after the strike was over, the feminist and pro-labor docudrama made by blacklisted Hollywood film makers, Salt of the Earth (YouTube; lower quality on Archive.org; Wikipedia). [more inside]
Flowers of the sky
Flowers of the Sky - Depictions spanning almost a whole millennium – in chronological order – of comets, meteors, meteorites and shooting stars.
He was just a giant tortoise, the last one of his kind
Two NYRB essays on recent biopics and their issues with history
Christian Caryl on The Imitation Game: "Either you embrace the richness of Turing as a character and trust the audience to follow you there, or you simply capitulate, by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius. The latter, I’m afraid, is the path chosen by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore[.]"
Elizabeth Drew on Selma: "[T]hough Johnson was an extraordinarily dramatic figure in real life, dramatists don’t seem to be able to settle for that. In fact, Selma is a reverse twist on the portrait of LBJ in last year’s Broadway hit All the Way, in which Johnson’s role in winning passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while crucial, was way overblown." (Drew's essay on the show.)
Elizabeth Drew on Selma: "[T]hough Johnson was an extraordinarily dramatic figure in real life, dramatists don’t seem to be able to settle for that. In fact, Selma is a reverse twist on the portrait of LBJ in last year’s Broadway hit All the Way, in which Johnson’s role in winning passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while crucial, was way overblown." (Drew's essay on the show.)
To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This
Through a series of increasingly intimate questions, the author sees if she and her acquaintance can make themselves fall in love. (NYTimes link)
Comfort Objects
MH17: Searching for the Truth
Starting from Belling the Cat's research German investigative organization Correct!v has put together a compelling case that the 53rd Russian Air Defense Brigade was responsible for the shooting down of Malaysian Air flight MH-17. [more inside]
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