August 13, 2021
Just a Girl
An essay about Briseis's story, and yours. The academic part of your brain knows that no text is about one thing. The Iliad is about a million things, but for you, right now, it’s really just a story about how women have to pay terrible prices for what men want. (cw: sexual assault)
Is Taiwan Next?
"Nancy had given up her career to help Hong Kongers in exile. She wanted to protect Taiwan’s own nascent democracy, but she wasn’t sure where that had really gotten her. Still, she was happy she had."
In Taipei, young people watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future. [NYT]
Put this Covid vaccine up your nose
According to an article published in Science magazine in July, almost 100 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are currently in clinical trials in various places around the world, but only seven are are delivered intranasally. Intranasal vaccines have a potential to do more to protect areas of infection in the nasal passages and upper airways. There may be issues effectiveness for people who have prior exposure to viruses the vaccines are based on.
The Art, Science, and Mystery of Sleep
Sleep schedule all jacked up*? Stuck at home? Explore--virtually--the American Visionary Art Museum's current exhibit, The Science and Mystery of Sleep (alt YT). [more inside]
Don't ask us to attend, 'cause we're not all there.
If you've ever wondered what the bit players in Kids in the Hall would do if they were given their own series, there's a six episode answer that's hard to buy but is now on youtube [note: includes some things that haven't aged well, including using non-obvious gender representation as a punchline.]
"We are all Martians"
Natalija Majsova (06/09/2020, Strelka Mag; also in a video lecture for the Canadian Centre for Architecture), "Soviet Sci-Fi Film and Different Modalities of Future Ecosystems": "Irina Povolotskaia's 1967 debut The Mysterious Wall [75 mins.] pioneered in offering an alternative approach. This production, stylistically influenced by the French New Wave, ... used the overarching theme of encountering outer space to interrogate the human capacity to ever really engage with otherness, such as aliens. In this case, the aliens take on the form of a mysterious wall that appears at regular intervals in the nowhere of the taiga." Previously mentioned in #WomenMakeSF.
The music of the world's closing subway doors
"Ted Green has been collecting the sounds and sights of transit systems for more than a decade... the telltale chimes — beeps, ding-dongs, jingles and arpeggios that warn riders around the world to stand clear."
This SLNYT multimedia piece lets you hear Toronto's "calming downward arpeggio," Rio's "homage to bossa nova," and Paris' "sustained chime," while explaining the backstories behind these sounds that play background to so many urban lives.
It’s when the darkness rolls away.
Nanci Griffith has passed, age 68. Such sad news. I had the privilege and joy to see her twice, and her cover of Kate Wolf’s Across the Great Divide has helped me through every dark patch of life I’ve encountered. It really was impossible to see her perform and not feel like some of your hope and decency had been renewed.
Earlier this year, she was inducted into the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Rest in harmony and power, dear lady.
It's been a crazy week in America. Let's find out what happened!
Maybe you didn't know you needed a ribbon and sparkle-suit clad Black woman who can explain why using police as debt collectors leads to the killing of Black people in one breath, then bust out a retro R&B jam for the vaccinated in the next. But The Amber Ruffin Show is the special blend of silly and serious we all needed. Launched during the pandemic, the Emmy-nominated show returns on Peacock tonight with its first-ever live studio audience. [more inside]
“When I grow up, I want to be like you. No kids and two dogs"
"In a place where there were so few acceptable ways to be a woman, she modeled something different, vibrant, and fulfilled."
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