June 17, 2021
$5 to $50K, and climbing
A 1997 painting by David Bowie, DHead XLVI, was purchased for $5 at a thrift shop three hours north of Toronto. Current auction bid is $50,100.00 [more inside]
Joychild
Documenting a Trans Child’s Poignant Revelation It’s probably the best memory I have, telling you, ‘I’m not a girl,’ for the first time. But it’s probably the worst memory, too, because that was so hard for me. [more inside]
“A grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible”
Janet Malcolm, journalist, essayist, and author has died at age 86. As a longtime writer for the New Yorker and other publications, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literature, photography, and true crime, Malcolm became known for provocative critiques of her own profession. Her most famous book, “The Journalist and the Murderer”, can be found on the reading list of nearly every journalism student in the US. Originating in 1989 as a two-part essay in the New Yorker, it opens with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” [more inside]
A Night at the Sweet Gum Head
In A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, journalist Martin Padgett tells Atlanta’s overlooked queer history during the disco decade [Atlanta Magazine] A Q&A with the author and an excerpt from the book [includes a guest appearance from Burt Reynolds]. But Atlanta has so much more inside. [more inside]
Watch for events, floating down the stream.
Gently Down the Stream: A gentle guide to Apache Kafka.
Indicators of Broadband Need.
The Biden administration publishes a new map of American broadband access. It's a change from the FCC's map, in that it offers more data, more tools - and doesn't rely on ISP self-reporting.
The Moving Finger of WhoWunIt
Who Won? Mystery in Small Town After $731M Powerball Win "Sometime in late January, someone bought a Powerball lottery ticket at the Coney Market, and that ticket’s six numbers won the big one — $731 million, the biggest jackpot ever in Maryland and the fifth-richest payout in U.S. history.
That someone lives in Lonaconing, according to the mayor and the owner of the market. But because Maryland is one of seven states that allows lottery winners to remain anonymous, and because the winner is no fool, the identity of that someone isn’t public." [more inside]
Juneteenth Becomes a Federal Holiday
What is Juneteenth? This afternoon President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates the effective end of slavery in the United States.
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"It really is a great feat ... that any of the games ... worked at all"
Kids today, with their multi-gigabyte graphics cards and CPUs capable of billions of operations per second. In my day, the Atari Video Computer System (later known as the 2600) had 128 bytes of memory and a single 1.19Mhz processor responsible for both executing game code and manipulating and drawing graphics. How, you may ask? Well, it was a little tricky. (SLYT, 38 min). [more inside]
UK libraries and museums unite to save ‘astonishing’ lost library
[SL Guardian] From the British Library to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a consortium of libraries and museums have come together in an “unprecedented” effort to raise £15m and save an “astonishingly important” set of literary manuscripts for the nation. [more inside]
TWO households? BOTH alike in dignity? In this economy?
SparkNotes tweets about classic literature. Do you like some memes with your classic literature? She's got you.
The world is an open book, if you open your eyes and look
On The Move was a BBC series from the 1970s that set out to address adult illiteracy - sample episode. It was a sort of "Sesame Street for grown ups". With a notably catchy theme tune. Bob Hoskins, played, Alf - the removal man who was struggling to learn to read and write. The show attracted 17 million viewers a week - (way beyond the size of its target audience) and helped make Hoskins famous. It was also responsible for persuading 70,000 people to sign up for adult literacy programmes. [more inside]
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