September 11, 2017
“I Look Like Martin Shkreli and It’s Ruining My Life”
NYU Student Graham Dunn has written a short essay about a serious problem.
"Mythology to me has always been about bigger than life struggles"
With just an ordinary ballpoint pen, the kind we’ve all used to scribble down classroom notes or phone numbers for possible Friday night dates, Toronto-based artist Rebecca Yanovskaya creates exquisite, magical worlds filled with mythical beings and characters out of creepy old folktales which she then blings up with a lot of 22 karat gold leaf.
"To be eligible, a movie has to be at least partly set in space"
What Brown has done for me...
The Last Mile ---UPS Manny making a delivery. "The last mile" is used to describe the most inefficient and costly portion of any delivery service....getting that package to the door. [more inside]
“Nobody likes this job,” she says in hesitant English. “But the money.”
Under Cover in Temp Nation by Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy [The Toronto Star] “There are two dozen of us crowded around a conveyor belt, bodies twisting to snatch dough off the line. The floor is strewn with raw pastries that seem to accumulate faster than anyone can sweep them up. They collect in bloated masses at our feet. It is my first day as a temp at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery that reeks of yeast and is alive with the constant drone of machinery. We are forming and packing raw, circular pastry dough into wet plastic trays — a shoulder-crunching task called pinching. These may well be the croissants you eat for breakfast. Supervisors shout at us to wake up. They shout at us to move faster, pinch nicer, work harder. No one talks through the noise and exhaustion. The factory relies heavily on temporary help agency workers. Its health and safety record is checkered; three temps have died here or at Fiera’s affiliated companies since 1999. Across the province, more and more people are relying on temp agencies to find work. When they do, statistics show they are more likely to get hurt on the job. I am undercover to investigate why.”
“Sport death, only life can kill you.” 💀
The demise of Senior House is emblematic of a larger shift on campuses across the US. Last year my own alma mater, Wesleyan University, closed down its countercultural house Eclectic, which had existed for a century. A few years ago Caltech kicked students out of its countercultural dorm Ricketts. “If it were just Senior House I would be upset and sad,” says alumna Christine Corbett Moran, an astrophysicist and engineer who, after graduation, helped write the code for the encrypted chat app Signal. “But I really see it as a harbinger of MIT and other colleges homogenizing and corporatizing.” — A Weird MIT Dorm Dies, And A Crisis Blooms At Colleges (Emily Dreyfuss, Wired)
Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?
Crime and Punishment is a Letter from Washington on the Harper's blog that details the current state of play of a court case that "...grew out of a suit filed in 2002 on behalf of bereaved family members and other victims of the attacks...". The post also ranges over the history of the investigation of the 9/11 attacks during all three of the presidential administrations involved, as well as the relationship of each administration with Saudi Arabia.
You Can’t Stay Here
The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech
In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits—foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown—due to violations of Reddit’s anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits.
Somehow, this must be good for bitcoin
The People's Bank of China (PBoC) has drafted instructions banning Chinese platforms from providing crypto-currency trading services, the Wall Street Journal's Chao Deng reported citing people familiar with the matter. The move comes just a week after Beijing announced it was banning initial coin offerings, a virtual currency-based method of fundraising.
Seven Days of Heroin
Seven Days of Heroin: This is What an Epidemic Looks Like The Cincinnati Enquirer sent more than 60 reporters, photographers and videographers into their communities to chronicle an ordinary week in this extraordinary time.
Hobby Horsing Around
Optimistic nihilism
To live meaningfully in a meaningless universe, you must first make your own meaning. Existential nihilism , the philosophy that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.
Optimistic nihilism, the view that, once one accepts that life lacks any intrinsic meaning or value, one can find joy and contentment by attributing their own sense of meaning or value to existence. [more inside]
Bad Medicine
Allergan, maker of eye drug Restasis, tries to sidestep a patent challenge by transferring the drug's patent rights to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Nation, under the theory that the tribe's sovereign immunity will prevent the patent from being invalidated. An expert wonders if this will open a new chapter in IP law where "“The validity of your patents is subject to review, unless you pay off some Indian tribe”.
Making War Illegal
In 1928, the Great Powers came together and formally renounced war as an instrument of national policy in a treaty known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Given the terrible blood-letting overseen by the signatories over the next twenty years, the general view of the Kellogg-Briand Pact has been that it was a hopelessly naive exercise. But a forthcoming book by two law professors argues that it was an important step in changing the way nations thought about war and guaranteeing the relative peace that has reigned since 1950. Of course some disagree. And the New Yorker puts the argument in the context of the debate between "Realists" and "Idealists" in International Relations.
That's the situation from the content of the beautiful things
Just because it's Monday morning
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