November 19, 2013
"Not all our foremothers wore taffeta and lace"
Not so long ago, Western women who wore short hair, and/or garments usually tailored for men, had to be pretty badass to go so visibly outside the usual gender norms, whatever their reasons. And their reasons were many. A gallery on Flickr, with short descriptions of the women featured, from Ida Emily Leeson (1885-1964), the first woman to be named head librarian at the Mitchell Library, the state library of New South Wales, in 1932, to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919), a Civil War surgeon who was the only woman to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor in the United States military, for her service during the Civil War.
"Overall, I think that Diamond is like Mao: 70% right and 30% wrong."
Anthropologists weigh in on Jared Diamond's latest: lack of citations, ethnographic carelessness, and the smoothing of complex narratives into quotable fables. The World Until Yesterday has prompted a flurry of commentary from anthropologists unenthusiastic about the physiologist turned evolutionary biologist turned geographer. In a recent London Review of Books, leading political anthropologist James C. Scott doesn't buy Diamond's description of the modern nation-state arising to curtail primitive tribal violence "[i]n a passage that recapitulates the fable of the social contract" given how "slaving was at the very centre of state-making."
Anthropologist Alex Golub, who shares Papua New Guinea as a major research site, wrote "Still, it is telling that we live in an age when a member of America’s National Academy of Sciences and one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals has less concern for citations and footnotes than do the contributors to Wikipedia."
David Correia pulls no punches in his opinion piece "F*ck Jared Diamond" calling Diamond's resurrection of environmental determinism as racist apologia and his latest book as essentializing primitivism in order to define Western industrialized exceptionalism. [more inside]
the armor of the body politic
"The American homeland is the planet" Not content with a militarized southern border, the U.S. is now militarizing borders around the world (slsa)
The Inherent Awkwardness Of Cuddling Some Random Dude
A short video clip about an artist who takes pictures of stranges acting like they're old friends or lovers or relatives. Surprisingly touching and beautiful photos ensue.
What This Unstoppable Pianist Did Is Genius.
Before You Say You've Never Discriminated Against Someone, Listen To The Second Sentence From An Introverted Single Dad. You Will Punch Your Monitor When You See What A Homeless Upworthy Generator Delighted The Internet With.
Starts around 1:54. Gets mindblowing around 2:15.
Homeless in Paradise
36 years in the making
Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos: Live "From this rich catalog, Cooder cherry-picked only a dozen songs to include on Live but they’re fairly representative of his eclectic oeuvre. His picks also feature plenty of his guitar playing, which will please fans who felt (as I sometimes did) that his recent albums were a bit stingy with his greatest asset. "
"The shows also were a family affair. The Corridos Famosos include Ry’s son Joachim on drums, Joachim’s wife Juliet Commagere on vocals, and her brother Robert Francis on bass, as well as an old friend and collaborator, Flaco Jimenez, the Tejano accordionist who was at Cooder’s side when he played this venue 34 years earlier. Terry Evans, another veteran of the 1977 shows, handles backup vocals, along with Arnold McCuller, filling in for Cooder’s other longtime singing partner Bobby King." Don't miss the clip at the end of the review. [more inside]
Now it goes the way of all street art
5pointz is gone. Here's a tour of what one day in its history looked like. Here's 50 nice photos of the building and its surroundings. Bid farewell to one of the most (only?) iconic NYC subway views, as the 7 train emerges from underground. [more inside]
Mirrors on the ceiling
That Intoxicating Pink
Rose champagne is the intoxicant of choice for courtesans and kings. Beautiful, expensive, and rare, it was beloved by the grandest of the grandes horizontales of nineteenth-century Paris—and the men who could afford to love them. In Second Empire France, the Countess Henkel von Donnersmarck—known to historians of the libido as La Païva, and earlier as Esther Lachmann, late of the Moscow ghetto—demanded magnums of it as a “gratuity” while entertaining clients in the boudoir of her ill-begotten Hotel de la Païva on the Champs-Élysées.[more inside]
Something Rotten in the State of Denmark
The Danish royal family has released their new portrait, which is less Hans Holbein and more "cover of a Stephen King novel." [more inside]
"...disgraces every American official who has colluded in it."
The Economist takes aim at the American criminal justice system in three articles from their latest edition: An opinion piece on mandatory life sentences without parole, a more in-depth view of some specific instances and of the data, and a look at the practice of charging fees to those convicted, or even just accused.
An Atlas of Cyberspaces - comprehend the new digital lands
An Atlas of Cyberspaces An archive of late 90s cybergeography research: Conceptual (Neuromancer/Snow Crash/The Matrix), Geographic, ARPANET, Usenet, submarine cable systems, early African fibre optics, Cospace screenshots and a ton of 90s web visualisations. via silentservant in /r/techonolgy (reddit).
Mu Mu Land
Behind the scenes footage of the filming of the music videos for The KLF's 'Justified and Ancient' and 'What time is Love?'.
Kay Nielsen's Little Mermaid
Kay Nielsen, a Danish illustrator who was popular in the early 20th century, the "golden age of illustration", contributed artwork for many Disney films, including concept paintings for a proposed adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid. The adaptation was to be part of a package film containing various segments based on Anderson's fairy tales. The film, however, was not made within Nielsen's lifetime and his work went unused until production started on the 1989 film. [more inside]
Martha Stewart's horrible food tweets.
Just like if you found out that revered Japanese/Australian chef Tetsuya secretly does the Tim Tam slam, there's a special kind of awesome when you see a collection of Martha Stewart's horrible food tweets. Maybe it's reassuring when the Queen of Lifestyle Programming makes food look so bad.
Plata o Plomo o el aguacate
We're ALL bachelors
The First Gay Bachelor with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and George Takei
It's Hard to Speak About these Things in Public...
So He Drew This Instead. (TW: child abuse)
Gettysburg Address: 150 years ago today
In a week which also marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, the Gettysburg Address was delivered by Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, 150 years ago today. Mitch Rapoport narrates an animated version. [more inside]
Chomsky-Man?
In the summer of 2012, Jeffrey Wilson interviewed Noam Chomsky.
“When the police came into [Occupy Wall Street] under Bloomberg’s orders and smashed up Zuccotti Park one of the things that they did was destroy all the books. You have got to destroy books that are dangerous. It has a long tradition back to the middle ages. Arizona knows all about that.”They discussed the Occupy movement (previously) and its roots in previous resistance movements, back to the Civil Right Movement Spanish Civil War. To bring the conversation to a mass audience, he's now publishing the transcript as a comic book. The artwork so far is beautiful. [more inside]
You're reading this because procrastination.
English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet. The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun."
Rhabarberbarbarabarbabaren
A simple guide to how compound words work in German. (SLYT, rudimentary German makes it funnier but probably not essential)
What is a castle? A miserable little pile of recurring rooms!
You might've noticed that the castles in the various Castlevania games, while different in every game, often feature similar areas and architectural ideas from game to game. You probably haven't gone to the trouble to catalogue these common components and their recurrences in the sprawling Castlevania series, but this is the internet, which means that somebody has.
TV Talkin' Song
"Martha, call the cable company--it's playing 'Like a Rolling Stone' on every channel again!"
Protecting America's Great Outdoors and Powering Our Future.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has an Instagram account, to which it posts some truly breathtaking photos.
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.
"We are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders. Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart." — John Muir [more inside]
Whoomp
Slate's Ben Blatt "sat in a Barnes & Noble for three hours flipping through all seven Where’s Waldo books with a tape measure" and emerged with a method for finding Waldo with speed more than 50% of the time. [more inside]
The Unfixed Brain
In this teaching video, Suzanne Stensaas, Ph.D., demonstrates the properties and anatomy of an unfixed brain, showing its squishiness and vulnerability. [WARNING: The video contains graphic images, a human brain from a recent autopsy.]
Everybody loves forced perspective.
In the spirit of "Cog," here's Honda's "Illusions." Making of here. Via Hendrick Ball's "Grand Illusions."
A Cold War Fought by Women
A Cold War Fought by Women Intrasexual competition among women (SLNYT).
Gold-pressed latinum
How does economics work in a post-scarcity society - namely the United Federation of Planets? As depicted, the canon is not entirely consistent. But there are clear consequences to meeting all one's material needs with ease. Why is there money at all, for example? Does Picard's family own vineyards just for kicks?
Football as football
Football as soccer …or should that be American Football as football?
Can't Put a Lid On It
What Combat Feels Like, Presented in the Style of a Graphic Novel. An animated film based on a true story by Iraq veteran Colby Buzzell (previously).
How would Lubitsch do it?
These movies offer not just a twist, but a twist atop a twist, and a joke atop the joke: the “superjoke,” as Billy Wilder called it. Those themes repeat: the lively, often-painful love triangle, the sexual and romantic jealousy, the thrill of sex, and in this case, the carnal kicks co-mingling with the art of stealing, an act more erotic than gold-digging. (Gold-fleecing is much more penetrating.) And then—important during one of the worst economic times in America’s history—there’s Lily and Gaston’s hard, artful work, something to respect.
Ernst Lubitsch’s charming pre-Code transgressions
Ernst Lubitsch’s charming pre-Code transgressions
You are taste & luxury. You have money to burn. Your awesomeness ...
... has no limits, and your awesomeness will not be limited by your TV. Not anymore. Not today. Not with your new 4K UHDTV (or 4k TV. Or Ultra High Def TV).
Get it for your yacht. Enjoy being on top with a TV so expensive, Sears' POS system didn't have enough commas for the price. You earned it, so soak it in.
Except your 4k $39999 UHDTV yacht TV, will have to come over to my house and watch my 8K Super UHDTV, which will be known as Super Hi-Vision. Super Hi-Vision.
Also available in 'Full Dome' Super Hi Vision. You heard me.
So f*ck your $40k 4k Ultra High Def TV, because in 2016 I'm getting the 8K Super Hi-Vision Full Dome moth3rf*cker. Things just got real.
Why are you so fluffy? Why are you so feathery?
Magpie and puppy play a game. Featuring a very unphased woman hanging out a sheet.
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