August 6, 2019
Everywhere You Look
shoving his bottlenose dolphin sister out of the way
Researchers Document First Known Case of Dolphin Mom Adopting Whale Calf [Smithsonian.com] [more inside]
We all are struggling, just doing our best
The Paradox at the Heart of Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Films
The making of images was at the heart of Kiarostami’s work from the start; in his 1974 feature “The Traveler,” the young protagonist raises money for a bus ticket to go see a soccer match by setting himself up as a local portraitist, and scams residents out of change by taking their pictures with no film in the camera. Yet, soon, Kiarostami would go further, rendering his own image-making central to his movies. [slNYer]
August 5th, 2019: The Day of the Feral Hogs
So, here's what happened: A guy on Twitter tried to make the argument that he needed an assault rifle in order to stave off the "30-50 feral hogs" that allegedly swarm his yard within 3-5 minutes every time his kids play outside. The idea that this man was fighting off upwards of 50 hogs every time his kids went outdoors sent Twitter into a meme frenzy, and just about everyone had a Feral Hog Tweet™.
I am becoming what she wanted me to be: myself.
RF Jurjevics: My Mother, Myself: To My Mom, Who Wrote For Allure About Parenting Me in 1991. In 1991, when she was 47 years old and I just seven, my mother, Laurie Colwin, published an article for Allure Magazine titled “My Daughter, My Self.” In it, she wrote of parenthood, of her attempts to raise an independent and free-thinking little girl in a world of Barbie dolls and television — both banned from our household — and the other gendered pressures of modern life in the 1990s. Just a year later, however, nearly everything in my world would change: I would be eight, and my mother would be gone, dead from a sudden aortic aneurysm two months after I started the third grade. Gone, too, would be most traces of the daughter, as I emerged into the summer of ’92 a husky, short-haired boy named Felix.
The legendary cat suddenly appears!
Florida's first bird warden, in the era of birds slaughtered for hats
More than a century ago, the discovery of a hidden bird refuge in the Everglades led down a path of greed, vanity, and murder. And that’s just the beginning of the story. The Price of a Feather (National Parks Conservation Association, 2015) || In the late 19th century, there were no limits to how many birds a plume hunter could kill. In Cape Cod, 40,000 terns were killed for the hat industry in one summer. In Florida, the slaughter was often indiscriminate and senseless. One popular pastime among tourists visiting the Everglades was to shoot critters from the comfort of boats, plinking alligators and birds with no intention of ever picking up their carcasses. The Most Dangerous Job: The Murder of America's First Bird Warden (Mentalfloss, 2018)
Post-Liberal Conservatism
“Hawley, for his part, inveighed against “multinational corporations” as responsible for “flat wages . . . lost jobs . . . declining investment and declining opportunity” in middle America. Left unmentioned: Hawley opposed a minimum-wage increase on the campaign trail in 2018 and supported Missouri’s draconian right-to-work ballot initiative that would have stripped workers of their basic right to unionize—a proposal that Missourians voted down last year by an overwhelming margin.” Flirting With Fascism (Jewish Currents) “Hawley’s bill isn’t about helping disadvantaged students gain valuable skills. It’s about dismantling a class of enemies—his “cosmopolitan consensus”—who he believes, “look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.” Josh Hawley Wants to Break Higher Education to Own the Libs (The Bulwark) Josh Hawley Is A Fraud (Splinter)
The Case for Rent Control
(SL The Urbanist) explains how rent control is more nuanced than earlier analysis suggests, though it's not a panacea on its own. An excerpt : "Economic analysis often focused on market distortion and did not placed a value on the sociological benefits of housing stability – things like being able to keep kids in the same school or maintaining social support networks. A recent paper by Columbia professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh measured those ancillary benefits within New York City’s rent-controlled housing stock and found dramatically different results."
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at 88. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Beloved in 1988. She authored 11 novels and was a professor of literature at Princeton from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. Her vivid descriptions of the black American experience were groundbreaking, and her powerful prose influenced countless readers and writers. [more inside]
A weekly conversation with a non-fiction writer on how they tell stories
The Longform Podcast is a refreshingly honest and direct look at the art, practice, and business of longform writing. Hosted by Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff, the podcast has featured Metafilter favourites including Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing, Wesley Morris on pop culture, Tom Bissell on games writing, Elif Batuman on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on The Making of Dylann Roof, Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Case for Reparations, and Susan Orlean from The New Yorker.
A way towards 'reparations': expand housing opportunity (& public goods)
America has a housing segregation problem. Seattle may just have the solution. - "Economist Raj Chetty found the program has 'the largest effect I've ever seen in a social science intervention.'"[1,2] [more inside]
Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days
Not just a personal story about Christian Science This is a Guardian long read, an excerpt from Caroline Fraser's book: God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church which is now coming out in a new 20th anniversary edition. [more inside]
Avoiding the data-driven wave
Kalev Leetaru on how Computer Science Could Learn A Lot From Library And Information Science.
Testing no-wash socks, one sweaty day at a time
Mommy Dearest vs Mama Bear
"Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves “mama” seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once. And like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of “mama” is about power and discontent. "The rise of Mama
The alligators in this study were donated by the state of Louisiana
Part I: This story starts with my research team currently deploying alligators* (3 total, 2 – 2.5 meters in length) at three different sites 2000 meters deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
Part II: Giant isopods eating an alligator in the deep sea.
[more inside]
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