September 20, 2016
The Great Fall of Chyna
Natural Friends
She just wanted her mother to love her a little bit less
Ursula Vernon (Hugo Winner and Nebula Winner) has started posting a serial novel, Summer in Orcus. [more inside]
You Ought’er watch
The largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab in Kenya, 25 years old
While the International Court of Justice in The Hague takes up a dispute between Kenya and Somalia over maritime oil and gas reserves this week, Human Rights Watch alleges that Kenya's plan to close the Dadaab refugee camp complex, amidst protest from Somalia, violates the UN's 1951 Refugee Convention, which requires that repatriation of refugees must be voluntary. Earlier this year Kenya's Interior Ministry announced that the camp, covering 50 km² (20 mi²) and home to nearly 300,000 people, would be closed by November. Ground was broken to construct the earliest portions of Dadaab in October 1991 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a temporary measure to aid Somalis fleeing from their country's civil war, but as the years passed the site became home to refugees from other conflicts and to refugees from drought and famine, at its height holding more than half a million people. [more inside]
“That looks like a bad dude, too,” the second officer said.
The Shooting of an Unarmed Black Man in Oklahoma [The New York Times] The Police Department in Tulsa, Okla., released video [YouTube] [Graphic Content] on Monday of an encounter during which, the authorities said, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man who could be seen raising his hands above his head. The department opened a criminal investigation into the shooting and said the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, would review its findings. The federal Justice Department opened a separate civil rights investigation. [more inside]
six hundred petrified dragon eggs
I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square. Then I paid five thousand dollars a month to live in the garbage chute of a postwar luxury condominium on First Avenue. It’s important to live in terrible places when you’re young.
A short video on humility
Subway Doodles
We got too many runaways eating up the night
That album, for me, was musical hell. I joined the band in '74, and gradually the music had become vacuous, sterilized, escapist. It was an embarrassment. We had band meetings with big arguments. I probably should've tried harder to oppose it. I had a family. -- An oral history of Starship's "We Built This City."
Control Not Justice
Every year, the vast majority of murders in Chicago go unsolved. The city's homicide-clearance rate of 26% (a case is cleared as soon as someone is charged) is less than half the national average. The rate for non-fatal shootings is 10%. Meaning, if you shoot someone in Chicago, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Alex Kotlowitz writes here about how Chicago law enforcement's abysmal homicide-clearance rate may be contributing to violence in the city. (previously)
How Shelton Johnson became the Buffalo Soldiers’ champion
God's Own Country: the nation of Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a county in t'north of England. It has a distinct range of dialects; for example 'nowt' means 'nothing', 'who?' means 'what?' and 'how are you?' is asked ... differently, with further variations across the county.
Yorkshire is famous for its pudding, caustic cricket commentary, rhubarb, having its own day, one of the earliest surviving film fragments, the chocolate bar, poetry, tea, and ferret legging (alternative explanation).
The anthem of Yorkshire, On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at, is about hats, death and cannibalism.
Like other English regions, such as Cornwall and Wessex, Yorkshire has movements towards devolution, greater autonomy and ultimately independence. But what is the essence of Yorkshire? [more inside]
"Do you guys ever think about when we were just pets?"
Dogtor is a short, sweet animated film by Rhea Dadoo about friendship and reflecting on personal journeys--also dogs!
Silencing Kurdish Voices
An on-the-ground report from post-coup Turkey, where the Kurdish press is facing stepped-up repression.
“If we were doing this kind of journalism in another part of the world, we would get international awards, but here, our reward is punishment.”
“If we were doing this kind of journalism in another part of the world, we would get international awards, but here, our reward is punishment.”
poing poing poing
"If I can do this many paintings of it, it's a problem."
Artist Patrick Martinez memorializes victims of police violence by way of vintage school supplies. [more inside]
Poor Willard
The concept is simple: rat birth control The rat’s primary survival skill, as a species, is its unnerving rate of reproduction. Female rats ovulate every four days, copulate dozens of times a day and remain fertile until they die. (Like humans, they have sex for pleasure as well as for procreation.) This is how you go from two to 15,000 in a single year. When poison or traps thin out a population, they mate faster until their numbers regenerate. Conversely, if you can keep them from mating, colonies collapse in weeks and do not rebound.
Girlhood Gone: Notes from the New Nashville
El Día Nacional de la Lucha Libre
By unanimous proclamation of the Senate of Mexico, tomorrow is El Día Nacional de la Lucha Libre, or the National Day of Lucha Libre, Mexico's variety of professional wrestling. [more inside]
You're going to hear some serious @#$%...
Audiobooks for the Damned (main site, previously) have been forging ahead in their quest to audiobook-ify film novelizations, and have finally released one of their holy grails - a seven-hour audiobook of George Gipe's legendarily insane novelization of Back to the Future Part I, as chronicled in Ryan North's B to the F (read it chronologically here, also previously). [more inside]
25 years of Belle
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of Beauty and the Beast, Angela Lansbury Sings the title song at Lincoln Center [more inside]
Only Disconnect
"If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out....My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?” On the costs of the always-connected life: Andrew Sullivan, "I Used to Be a Human Being" (nymag.com).
Conservative, Brutal, and Anonymous ... Often Monotonous
Today, our flesh comes to us from the Internet, and not only what we consume but how we consume has changed since the porn wars. Porn is abundantly more, in every way: there are more people, more acts, more clips, more categories. It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar. Making Sense of Modern Pornography by Katrina Forrester in The New Yorker
The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister
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