February 20, 2020
VHS Diabetes Pronunciation Battle
A battle of words! Two foes contend, and with the support of a late arrival a clear victor emerges. [more inside]
"We no longer have hope for anything other than a quick death"
'It looks like judgment day': inside Syria's final battle (FT) - "Trapped between a closed border and advancing forces, opponents of the Assad regime face a humanitarian crisis." [more inside]
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor. The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together. [more inside]
everything is forum wars
The debate over subtitles, explained
In January, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho planted his flag in the subtitle camp, stating during his Golden Globes acceptance speech (for Best Foreign Language Film) that “once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” After Parasite’s Oscar win, it seemed that fans of foreign films had punched a sizable hole through that wall.
Did The Early Internet Activists Blow It?
With all of the issues we've seen with the internet these days - abuse, disinformation, doxxing, and so on - many people have been arguing that the early pioneers of the internet miscalculated and set the stage for what has been happening. In a longform piece for Slate, Wikimedia Foundation and former EFF counsel Mike Godwin argues that while there have been missteps, their position is still sound. (SLSlate)
Raspberry Pi - now in Blueberry and Strawberry flavors!
Techie @sailorhg (sailor mercury), who likes to put the 🌸 soft in software 🌸, has made a name for herself writing approachable tech zines and making tech femme clothing and stickers. Last year, she converted her transit cards into wearable jewelry. This year, she's been building her own fruit-themed computers, like the Strawberry Pi and Blueberry Pi. [more inside]
We will never find dignity in air travel
You should just never do that, because we can all see you and feel a bit defiled by what we are witnessing, but even if you don’t care about how creepy you seem, you should still never, ever, ever do it, because as well as being bizarrely aggressive and somewhat frightening, it is undignified, and the margin of error here simply does not allow for it. Know that for the rest of your days you are going to feel hotly embarrassed about this thing you are doing now on the plane. Have some respect for your future self, and do not do it.
The false promise of “renewable natural gas”
It’s no substitute for shifting to clean electricity. To stay in line with the targets laid out in the Paris climate agreement, the US needs to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, known as “deep decarbonization.” Virtually every credible study on deep decarbonization agrees on the basics of a strategy to get there...This strategy — for which I use the shorthand “electrify everything!” — is beginning to catch on, especially in California, which is always something of a preview of broader trends to come. In a relatively short span of time, a robust “all-electric movement” has emerged, as dozens of towns and cities take steps to encourage all-electric construction in new buildings...Natural gas utilities do not like this movement one bit. The more all-electric buildings there are, the fewer natural gas ratepayers there are. An all-electric future inevitably involves the obsolescence, or at least the substantial diminution, of natural gas utilities. Naturally, they are fighting back furiously, with astroturf groups, PR campaigns, and lobbying at the local level.
There Will Be Blood
The Tampon Wars: the battle to overthrow the Tampax empire. Tampax, the Proctor & Gamble owned menstruation product, dominates the feminine hygiene market. But a wave of disruptors have come to destroy them. [Guardian Longread] [more inside]
post-traumatic narratives
"One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does. What I have found myself hungering for, in short, is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity. What is the situation of survivors who saw the injury proven and exposed—and maybe even punished—and saw, also, that nothing much changed? I am curious about their vision of things. I want to know how they think things should be." Lili Loofbourow writes for the New York Review of Books on fiction, non-fiction and sexual assault. [more inside]
"I can’t believe I’m being gaslighted by a room full of children"
Was Leonardo DiCaprio Actually a Star Before Titanic? An intra-Slate Gen X debate.
The Worst Way to Write an Email, But For Buildings
"Well, no, I’m sad, and I want to make you sad, too.”
The Bleak Humor of Tehran’s One and Only Standup Comic (New York Review of Books): "His monologue grew only more morbid from there, delving into what he described as his loveless, meaningless existence and his hatred for the macho behavior he saw in the world all around him. Yet there was something wonderfully endearing about his exaggerated melancholy, which often veered into unrepeatably obscene riffs. It was all so clearly at his own expense, and delivered so brazenly, that it had the crowd laughing along with him. “You’re thinking I’m a typical comedian who is sad on the inside and wants to make you happy,” he said. “Well, no, I’m sad, and I want to make you sad, too.” And everyone laughed. ¶ I realized that I had been expecting certain clichés to be fulfilled: that this would be another example of the Middle Eastern comic using satire to fight back against political repression—an evergreen topic for a Western correspondent. Instead, this was an awkward, abrasive, deliberately transgressive set, at times closer to performance art than comedy…"
Radio Sputnik comes to Kansas City
Sputnik (fka The Voice of Russia and RIA Novosti) is a news agency established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya (Wikipedia), with Radio Sputnik operating in 30 languages, covering over 130 cities and 34 countries. In the U.S., Radio Sputnik operates around Washington, D.C., and now leases airtime in Kansas City (Inside Radio). When commuters spin the radio dial as they drive through Kansas City, Missouri, these days, between the strains of classic rock and country hits they can tune in to something unexpected: Russian agitprop (NY Times; Chicago Tribune mirror). My Life at a Russian Propaganda Network: I thought they’d let me be a real journalist at Sputnik news. I was wrong. (Andrew Feinberg for Politico, 2017) [more inside]
The Myth of Johnny Appleseed
From Dr. Sarah Taber (previously on the blue): come for the hickory milk recipe, stay for the description of how John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, co-opted Native American agricultural practices that far pre-dated his supposed seed-sowing. [twitter]
“The games retail market is dying.”
Hard Sell: GameStop employees report extreme pressure from ‘desperate’ bosses [Polygon] “In more than a dozen interviews with Polygon, current and former GameStop employees spoke of a tightening regime of strict sales targets and intrusive customer scripts, designed to extract as much value as possible from the company’s dwindling base. All the employees we spoke to said they were concerned about the future of the company. Most reported their customer numbers had decreased noticeably in the last year. “I’ve seen a change in the sheer desperation the company has towards its profit margins,” said one store manager with multiple years’ experience at the company. “The company is frantic and distrustful,” said one assistant manager. “You can feel it in every message they send. The structure is falling apart and they’re scrambling.” “I think they’ll close a thousand stores this year,” said one former store manager with many years’ retail experience.” [more inside]
RIP: Larry Tesler, inventor of copy & paste
Solvitur ambulando
At 7:32am on Feb 6th 2020 I walked out of my flat in London with the sole intention of getting lost and going on a really big walk across the UK with no specific direction or purpose or ending…
Needs more bear
When your stuffed teddy bear moo's when you take it out to play..... you know you've gone too far. [more inside]
A Useful Tool For Radicalizing Your Peers
HOW BIG IS A BILLION? "1,000,000,000" doesn't cut it. A billion is far too large to understand by merely seeing a one followed by 9 zeroes. It is 1,000 millions. The interest on $1,000,000,000 accrues $1,370/day. It would require 4,000 bank accounts to safely store $1,000,000,000. But the best way to understand the size of a billion is to do what we do best...
Scroll! Each 1 pixel thick line represents 100. [more inside]
How heat and drought turned Australia into a tinderbox
A scrollable photo montage from the ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Story Lab, based largely on satellite imagery, documents this summer's fire season from its unprecedented early start in September.
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