October 14, 2023
"His face is full of grimace"
Steve Martin, Olympic Diving Finals. (SLYT 4mins) A golden oldie comic masterpiece from the late 1970s.
Curious Curios
“I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could probably do with some interesting links and internet ephemera to take the edge off so, well, here you are.” [more inside]
The olive-sided flycatcher migrates from Alaska to Brazil
World Migratory Bird Day is October 14. Because birds use magnetic fields to navigate at night during long-distance migrations, severe space weather can throw them off course. Cheyenne Bottoms (KS) is the most popular rest stop for North American migratory shorebirds. Thousands of Vaux's swifts will roost together in a single chimney. Lili Taylor's PSA for the Lights Out for Birds campaign. [more inside]
provoking, funny and more than a little bit freaky
"A literary journal? Well I guess so..." Going Down Swinging is one of Australia’s longest-running and most respected literary journals: publishing digital as well as print and audio anthologies since 1979. For all of their past editions in one place and freely accessible to readers, visit their digital archives. [more inside]
Deliberate Ignorance
Traditionally, the search for knowledge has involved paying close attention to information—finding it and considering it from multiple angles. Reading a text from beginning to end to critically evaluate it is a sensible approach to vetted school texts approved by competent overseers. On the unvetted Internet, however, this approach often ends up being a colossal waste of time and energy. In an era in which attention is the new currency, the admonition to “pay careful attention” is precisely what attention merchants and malicious agents exploit. It is time to revisit and expand the concept of critical thinking, often seen as the bedrock of an informed citizenry. As long as students are led to believe that critical thinking requires above all the effortful processing of text, they will continue to fall prey to informational traps and manipulated signals of epistemic quality. At the same time that students learn critical thinking, they should learn the core competence of thoughtfully and strategically allocating their attentional resources online. from Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
“When I think of colleges, the word courage doesn’t come to mind”
Why Won’t Elite Colleges Deploy the One Race-Neutral Way to Achieve Diversity? Giving a leg up to poor students of all races would diversify elite schools. Officials would rather do anything else.
but mine goes up to 11
rolling stone's list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time - we all know that we will find total agreement on this, right?
"female music caught on dusty records and tapes, in the hidden archives"
Ladies on Records is the project of record collector, DJ and cultural anthropologist Kornelia Binicewicz. Her SoundCloud page is full of her mixes, for example, two volumes she made in support of feminist activists in her native Poland. Her main focus, though, is on female singers of the 60s and 70s, for example in the mixes Polish Ladies on Records, Ladies of the Arab World and Turkish Ladies. She used Turkish music to explore the lives of Turkish immigrant women in Germany in the essay Intimacy of Longing.
How recipes knit our past with our present
Bev Moon | Fortune (a knitted yum cha for my mother’s 90th birthday), 2021-2022, Mixed media, on a table with central rotating Lazy Susan - interview with Moon, a second/third-generation Chinese New Zealander on art and craft, diaspora belonging and where family stories become national history.
Design for Living
Rhael Cape, known as Lionheart, has been inserting himself into Architecture firms e.g. as Poet-in-Residence. Posing such questions as "‘You’ve got 10 minutes, can you design a section of a building that would mitigate someone’s mental health issues?" [more inside]
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