August 28, 2018
Star Wars Episode 8: Clark Griswold's Jedi Adventure
Mr. Plinkett examines Star Wars Episode 8 The Last Jedi and argues that the movie is actually a comedy of errors, like National Lampoon's Vacation (minus the actual comedy), where nothing make sense and everyone is disturbingly stupid.
American Beauties - The story of the plastic bag.
Essay examining the history and impact of the humble plastic bag. They catch in the wind, gather on the street, and clog our trash cans. How plastic bags came to rule our lives, and why we can’t quit them.
The river site, 63 years later
The first sign, pointing us off the asphalt and down the dirt road, is riddled with bullet holes. We knew to expect this, but it’s still shocking. A spray of perforations, haphazard and angry. One took out the last letter in body. One hit just above the a in black. One pierced right between the first and last names, severing Emmett from Till. This is where it ended, somewhere near here on unincorporated land in Tallahatchie County, a few miles north of the village of Glendora, Mississippi. Siddhartha Mitter on Emmett Till for Popula.
Here They Come Again
While the #MeToo movement has had success with unveiling abusers in the media, there has been a question about the long term, with the individuals involved looking to return to public life. Writing forJezebel, Anna Merlan reports on the wave of trial balloons being floated by those that had been named as abusers and the pressure being placed on the movement to "move forward". (SLJezebel)
All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter…and the One Way That It Does.
Mastering Obama's Voice
The Woman Behind The Presidential Curtain A charming and fascinating story about the Office of Presidential Correspondence during the Obama Administration.
“We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas”
Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong’s The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 but has since gone out of print. After a year on The Verge’s staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah’s old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.
What Not to Read in High School
The current literary canon for high school is wrong and should be fixed. The whole concept of the “canon” is less essential to our culture, especially as we see how many people were kept out of this canon, and how many were prematurely thrust into it. There are more good writers publishing more good books now, and they’re being disrespected by our obsession with a narrow set of “timeless” stories that are in fact showing their age.
The sticker price: sixteen thousand dollars.
The New Yorker on 25 years of Magic: the Gathering.
The Secret Garden
"The oral history of how a scientist found a rainforest on top of a mountain, then led a team of 28 scientists, logistics experts, climbers, and others to a place where humans had not set foot for a century or more."
The New 1930s.
“The hearings in 1935 that were held before the Labor subcommittee on the Lundeen Bill are a remarkable historical document, “probably the most unique document ever to appear in the Congressional record,” at least according to the executive secretary of the IPA. Eighty witnesses testified: industrial workers, farmers, veterans, professional workers, African-Americans, women, the foreign-born, and youth. “Probably never in American history,” an editor of the Nation wrote, “have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress.” The aggregate of the testimonies amounted to a systematic indictment of American capitalism and the New Deal, and an impassioned defense of the radical alternative under consideration.” Are American Workers Really Opposed to Socialism? The lost history of the Worker’s Bill, a radical 1930s era attempt to change Americans’ relationship to work.
“BE A HOLE.”
Hopi-less: How Kachina Became Donut County [Rock Paper Shotgun] “Five Two years ago, GDC 2013’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop featured a game that had the crowd cheering and applauding in delight. It was Ben Esposito (The Unfinished Swan) with Kachina. This year’s GDC revived an old favourite of the show, the Failure Workshop. This was a chance for developers to share the stories of their disasters, and the good or bad that came from them. And during it, Esposito generously and honestly told an engrossing and humbling tale of how Kachina became Donut County [Official Site], and the hard cultural lessons he learned along the way.” [YouTube][Trailer] [more inside]
Stop Buying "Native Inspired" Designs
Brands need to do more to prove they're using this imagery in a respectful way—and hiring Indigenous people to design it [more inside]
It is time to check that your buns are suitably firm to the touch
As Autumn arrives, British supermarkets fill with Christmas foods and distant cousins in the thirteen colonies drink their pumpkin spice lattes, everyday is so wonderful. The Great British Bake Off, a show famous for baking and infamous for scandal - not forgetting the biggest controversy of 2016 - returns tonight [series 9 on Wikipedia]. While past winners watch, twelve bakers will do battle, with Manon Lagreve tipped by some to win. The first week is biscuit week; a future episode will be a vegan week (and here's a brownie recipe), plus a Danish week. In the UK, it's on Channel Four at 8pm. Turn on your ovens, MeFites... [FanFare]
KING of CHICKEN LEGS / Using 100 Chicken Legs / Prepared by my Daddy
The Indian Filmmaker Who Made His Dad’s Village Cooking a YouTube Sensation (Priya Krishna for The New Yorker). Jaymukh Gopinath cooks huge meals -- everything from 100 chicken legs to huge Prawn Masala and 15 KG Butter Chicken Recipe, and entertains millions around the world, as Village Food Factory on YouTube. Because he makes so much, leftover food is donated to local ashrams. [more inside]
The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages
Superlative feats have always thrilled average mortals, in part, perhaps, because they register as a victory for Team Homo Sapiens: they redefine the humanly possible. If the ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, he may inspire you to jog around the block. If Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, perhaps you can crank up your high-school Spanish or bat-mitzvah Hebrew, or learn enough of your grandma’s Korean to understand her stories. What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?
America eats its young
The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story of America’s Student Debt Machine. "Why is the nation’s flagship loan forgiveness program failing the people it’s supposed to help?"
What Socialism Looks Like in 2018
Capitalism, Socialism, and Unfreedom - "Minimal government doesn't remove power from our lives." (via) [more inside]
And no-one ever knew.
The Dover Boys ReAnimated Collab has been releCONTEXTUALIZE THIS POST, BIGGERJ! CONTEXTUALIZE THIS POST, BIGGERJ! CONTEXTUALIZE THIS POST, BIGGERJ! Hey, we're getting in a rut!
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