November 12, 2021
What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Beatles.
McCartney’s recently published two-volume set The Lyrics, a gorgeous work. All told, the collection spans north of 800 pages and collects the lyrics to 154 McCartney songs. Paul McCartney has been one of the most famous people on earth for nearly 60 years, and in many ways, he has served as the best model of how to be a celebrity: He’s disarmingly amiable, boundlessly energetic, gracious and graceful in the face of unimaginable fame. McCartney has written and published a beautiful book, yet another gift from this talented man. [more inside]
"I know that my only chance now is to be reclassified"
"The Stateless Person's Tale" & "The Arriver's Tale," as told to Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (previously). "Delia's Return: The Migration and Deportation of an Unaccompanied Child" by Lauren Heidbrink, Delia, and Gabriela Afable (American Anthropologist, 06/2021; Spanish; study guide; podcast; transcript). 27 more tales. More anthropologists on deportee experiences in Haiti, Mexico, and Ghana. Anth. of transnationalism syllabus archive. Mary Ruth Wossum-Fisher (MA thesis, 08/2021), "Cultural Anthropologists' Reflections on Expert Witnessing for Asylum Cases" [PDF]. Anne McCready Heinen (Texas Monthly, 01/2021), "Finding the Lost": "They didn't discover Christian's fate until six years later ... His story might have ended there if not for forensic anthropology professor Kate Spradley."
Money, Power, Beauty, Fame; Choose your weapon to beat the game.
Lyric vid: DJ Chris Lake and producer-musician Grimes have put together a collective 'banger' in 'A Drug From God.' [more inside]
Pollinator art
If pollinators designed gardens, what would humans see? "Pollinators see colours differently from us, forage in different ways, and emerge in different seasons to each other. As a result, a garden designed for them may look quite different from a garden designed for us."
The Fallacy of Eating the Way Your Great-Grandmother Ate
Our great-grandparents, Pollan and others have argued, didn’t raise their kids on guar gum, soy lecithin, and many of the other ingredients common in today’s processed foods. They served milk fresh from the cow, turnips dug fresh from the garden, and cooked almost everything from scratch. If only we had stuck to this small-scale agrarian lifestyle, our kids would never spill Go-GURT in the backseat or bug us to refill their snack cups with ever more Goldfish crackers. The underlying claim is that if we ate this way, nobody would be fat.
"looking at the lives and voices of women in medieval literature"
Encounters with Medieval Women is a four episode series of the London Review of Books podcast where scholars Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley discuss four medieval texts by or about women: St. Mary of Egypt, Julian of Norwich, the Wife of Bath, and Margery Kempe. Each episode page has a full transcript.
How China Avoided Soviet-Style Collapse
Full Article On the Eurasian landmass, this is a reversal of historic proportions. In 1914, the GDP per capita of the Tsarist Empire was approximately three times China’s; by the 1970s, it was six. [...] Forty years later, in terms of purchasing power parity, China has nearly caught up with Russian GDP per capita. [...] Multiplied by its giant population, China’s GDP is now more than nine times larger than Russia’s.
I Would Like You to be Pleased with the Idea
After introducing himself, [Jasper] Johns told [Jéan-Marc] Togodgue about a decision he had made that would forever link the 91-year-old, Georgia-born art legend with the 17-year-old student and basketball standout. It would also spark a legal dispute — eventually settled — as well as raise questions about how artists use other people’s works to create their own. from How did this teenager’s drawing of his knee wind up in a Jasper Johns painting at the Whitney? [WP; archive] [more inside]
scars, cracks, blood, and video games
"That Story Isn’t the Story" by John Wiswell (previously) is a fantasy story about escape and recovery from abuse (author interview). "Everything Anton owns goes in one black trash bag. His ratty yellow sketchpad, which he bought to draw the other familiars when he moved here, and only ever used three pages of. The few shirts and khakis that he paid for with his own money, before Mr. Bird took control of his finances." "The Breaks" by Scott King (also available in Spanish) is a fantasy story in which people help each other heal. "When the clerk at the convenience store takes my twenty for the frozen mac and cheese and the cheap wine, I barely notice the fractal pattern of cracks running across his face."
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