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Entries for January 2018
The genius physical comedy of Mr. Bean
For the latest installment of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak explains the distinct brand of physical comedy practiced by Rowan Atkinson, best known for his character Mr. Bean. For my money, this scene of Mr. Bean running late for a dentist appointment is one of the funniest things ever put on screen.
This is the comedy of personality rather than the comedy of gags. It’s not about doing funny things. It’s about doing something quite normal in a funny way.
Atkinson himself explained and demonstrated the principles of physical comedy in a 60-minute documentary called Funny Business; here’s part 1:
This is really odd timing. Just two days ago, I was watching some videos with my kids and we stumbled across Rowan Atkinson performing as Mr. Bean at the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics in 2012, which a) opens Puschak’s video, b) I had completely forgotten about, and c) is perhaps the most British thing ever.
The Awl bids a final farewell on its last day of publication. Adieu, website.
My recent media diet for January 2018
Quick reviews of some things I’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in the past month or so. I worked so much in January, mostly on getting the Noticing newsletter launched, that by the time the evening rolled around, all I wanted to do was collapse and watch a little TV or maybe go to a movie (I’ve seen all the Oscar Best Picture nominees this year). But I still managed to read a couple books and am currently working my way through two more: Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.
Generation Wealth by Lauren Greenfield at ICP Museum. A retrospective of Greenfield’s photographic survey of wealth. Also available in book form. (A-)
Lady Bird. This one’s been growing on me since I saw it. (B+/A-)
The Post. My main problem with this movie is that Streep, while otherwise excellent, does not properly sell the transformation of her character at the end. (A-)
The Farthest - Voyager in Space. I had no idea about many of the amazing things about the Voyager program. If I’d seen this as a kid, I might work for NASA right now. (A-)
Black Mirror season four. Perhaps not as strong as some of the previous seasons, but USS Callister is one of the best episodes of the series. (B+)
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. A compelling argument that Buddhists figured out thousands of years ago how to route around a human brain designed to delude us, a tendency that neuroscientists and psychologists have only learned of more recently. (B+)
Call Me By Your Name. A touching love story. One of the best movies of the year. (A)
Jane. Jane Goodall is a remarkable person, one of the best scientific researchers of our time. The footage in this movie of her early career is stunning, like it was filmed specifically for the documentary. (A-)
Jane soundtrack. Philip Glass. What more needs to be said? (A-)
Darkest Hour. Churchill is over-acted by Oldman, like an SNL character. I much prefer Lithgow’s take in The Crown. (C+)
The Shape of Water. This was ok, I suppose. (B)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: interview with Errol Morris. I could listen to Errol Morris talk about film and truth all day. (A-)
Phantom Thread. One of those movies that gets better once you read about it afterwards. (B+)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Frances McDormand is amazing in this. I’m also unconvinced of the straightforward reading of the movie as the redemption of a racist cop. (B+)
Slow Burn. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. (A)
The New York Times For Kids. The rest of the paper should be more like this. (A-)
Past installments of my media diets can be found here.
Indepth Sound Design deconstructs and explains sound effects from movies. I want one of these for Kylo Ren’s lightsaber.
A Choir of Strangers Accompanies David Byrne Singing David Bowie’s Heroes
A group called Choir! Choir! Choir! recently put on a show in NYC where they taught the audience to accompany them on a song, in this case, David Bowie’s Heroes sung by David Byrne. Byrne wrote up the experience in his online journal:
What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?
A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.
The second thing that happens involves the physical act of singing. I suspect the regulated breathing involved in singing, the act of producing sound and opening one’s mouth wide calls many many neural areas into play. The physical act, I suspect, releases endorphins as well. In singing, we get rewarded by both mind and body.
No one has to think about any of the above-we “know” these things instinctively. Anyone who has attended a gospel church service, for example, does not need to be told what this feels like.
So, the reward experience is part of the show.
That’s really thrilling and cool to watch. You can check out some of Choir! Choir! Choir!’s other performances on their YouTube channel, including Zombie by The Cranberries, Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty, Karma Police by Radiohead, and Passionfruit by Drake. (via ted gioia)
A choir imitates a thunderstorm
Before they start to sing Toto’s Africa, the Angel City Chorale perfectly imitates a thunderstorm by rubbing their hands together, snapping, and stomping their feet. You might want some headphones for this one. What a cool effect.
Update: This performance is likely a reference to a 2008 performance of Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile, a vocal group from Slovenia.
Their thunder is definitely better. (thx, scott)
Update: Ok, this appears to be the original choir thunderstorm by the Kearsney College Choir.
As Rion said when she sent me this link, “I’d never run into them before but now I can’t believe how many Toto/rainstorm videos there are on YouTube”. (thx, rion)
What Does Living in a Dictatorship Feel Like?
According to writer G. Willow Wilson, living in an authoritarian society does not look like “something off the Syfy channel”.
It’s a mistake to think a dictatorship feels intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does. I’ve lived in one dictatorship and visited several others—there are still movies and work and school and shopping and memes and holidays.
The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries.
How does a society go from a democracy to an autocracy? It’s like that line of Hemingway’s from The Sun Also Rises about how to go bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.
Until one day we wake up and discover the regime has decided to postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other. Or until it can ‘ensure’ that the voting process is ‘fair.’
I don’t know about you, but Trump and the Republican Congress working to “postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other” seems like a completely plausible scenario. I would not be surprised if we see conservative pundits start floating this idea, slowly normalizing it over a matter of months until it seems like a plausible option. After all, it’s much easier for Republicans to remain in office if they got rid of those pesky elections (in lieu of gerrymandering and voter ID laws).
Update: In a poll from August 2017, 56% of Republicans polled said that they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump and Republicans in Congress were in favor of it. (via @taestell)
The skincare industry is a racket. Your skin is an amazing organ and spreading fancy acid on your face is not healthy.
Verena, an iOS app to help protect people in abusive situations
Verena is an iOS app designed to protect and help guide you through situations like “domestic violence, hate crimes, abuse, and bullying”. The app was developed with the LGBTQ+ community in mind, but can be used by anyone facing abuse or harassment.
Create an account, and develop a network of emergency contacts, who can be alerted without leaving a trace on your phone.
Use the emergency feature to be guided through your problem, giving you the resources you need to get out of the emergency safely.
Create incident logs to keep track of abuse, hate crimes, or bullying for reference and later reportation.
Select the preferences that match your situation, such as using incognito mode to hide the app behind a math user interface, shutdown which can permanently disable the app if found by an abuser, and emergency access which allows you to alert all of your contacts with the press of a button.
Open resources to find and get routed to hospitals, shelters, and police stations near you.
Use timer to set a specified amount of time. If the timer isn’t canceled, Verena will send an emergency alert to all contacts with your last known location.
Select location to see your current location, the distance between you and your different contacts, and get routed to them as well.
Verena was built by Amanda Southworth, a 16-year-old iOS developer who created the app to help her LGBTQ+ friends in the aftermath of the election of a known abuser to the White House in 2016:
Seeing her friends — many of whom are part of the LGBT community — worry the day after the presidential election in November 2016 inspired her to create the app. “That day I saw all of my friends crying and it was really upsetting, you know, when people you love are scared,” she says. “So I decided, I’m going to make something so that I know they’re safe.”
Verena, which takes its name from a German name that means “protector,” allows users to find police stations, hospitals, shelters, and other places of refuge in times of need. They can also designate a list of contacts to be alerted via the app in an emergency.
Southworth, whose first iOS app was a “mental health toolkit” called anxietyhelper, attended Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this past summer and wrote about it for Teen Vogue. She also gave a TEDx talk about “how her struggle with mental illness and suicidal thoughts inspired her start coding”.
You Have to See This Place. “Pick a spot on the globe and I’ll send you a print of my nearest photo.”
A visual introduction to the Fourier Transform
The Fourier Transform is an incredibly useful mathematical function that can be used to show the different parts of a continuous signal. As you can see from the Wikipedia page, the formula and the mathematical explanation of the Fourier Transform can get quite complicated. But as with many complex mathematical subjects, the FT can also be explained visually. In the video above, 3blue1brown breaks down the Fourier Transform into a really intuitive visual system that’s surprisingly easy to follow if you’re not a science or math person. This would have been super helpful in my physics and math classes in college.
See also Better Explained’s interactive guide to the Fourier Transform, which describes the FT metaphorically like so:
What does the Fourier Transform do? Given a smoothie, it finds the recipe.
How? Run the smoothie through filters to extract each ingredient.
Why? Recipes are easier to analyze, compare, and modify than the smoothie itself.
How do we get the smoothie back? Blend the ingredients.
The guide includes interactive graphs that you can play around with. Stuff like this always gets me so fired up about math and science. Ah, the path not taken…
A pair of oil paintings algorithmically pixelized into treemaps of color
Greek visual designer Dimitris Ladopoulos took two of his favorite oil paintings, one by Rembrandt and the other (confusingly) by Rembrandt Peale, and used a piece of 3D modeling software called Houdini and pixelized them into treemaps of color. They look great in 2D (above), but he also rendered them in 3D with a worn texture:
Those worn plastic rectangles with the beveled edges are reminding me of something in particular, like a piece of electronics. Something from Sony maybe? Anyone? (via colossal)
A Mister Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks (WHAT!!?)
Variety is reporting that Tom Hanks is set to play Fred Rogers in a biopic called You Are My Friend.
“Now more than ever, we all need a re-introduction to Fred Rogers’ message of uncompromising love and kindness between all living things. Mari Heller is the perfect visionary filmmaker to bring Noah and Micah’s script to life and because of her vision and this remarkable script, we have the quintessential actor to play Fred Rogers,” said Turtletaub and Saraf.
The script is loosely based on Tom Junod’s Esquire piece about Rogers, Can You Say…Hero?, which is very much worth a read if you’ve never had the pleasure.
Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself… and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: “Well, Tom, I guess you’ve already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.”
Oh, I hope this doesn’t get derailed. Unless it’s going to be bad, in which case: shelve away!
John Williams conducting the opening fanfare for Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Director Rian Johnson has posted a short clip of the legendary John Williams conducting the opening fanfare (aka the Star Wars theme) for The Last Jedi. It is difficult to think of the Star Wars films without Williams’ music.
An HBO documentary about Andre the Giant
A documentary film about pro wrestler Andre the Giant is going to air on HBO starting on April 10.
André René Roussimoff was born in 1946 in Grenoble, France. In his early teens, he exhibited signs of gigantism though he was not diagnosed with acromegaly until his twenties. He began his training in Paris at 17 and eventually became known in wrestling circuits around the world. In 1973, Andre joined the organization now known as World Wrestling Entertainment, where he became a superstar and rival of WWE legend Hulk Hogan.
I loved watching pro wrestling when I was a kid and Andre was always a favorite.
The original US patent drawing for the Lego brick, filed 60 years ago
This is one of two drawings that accompanied Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s US patent application for the Lego toy building brick. The application was submitted 60 years ago yesterday on Jan 28, 1958, an occasion that is celebrated annually as International LEGO Day. (thx, david)
Surfer rides a wave 115 feet tall
The waves off the coast of Portugal near Nazaré are some of the biggest in the world. Nearly two weeks ago, a German pro surfer named Sebastian Steudtner rode a wave estimated at 115 feet high and didn’t crash or kill himself. If you watch the video, even at a larger size, it’s difficult to pick Steudtner out from the wall of the cartoonishly massive wave.
Curiously, the current world record for the largest wave ever ridden (also set at Nazaré) is 78 feet. And if you look at the video and compare, Steudtner’s wave is definitely much bigger.
Recommendation: Slate’s podcast series about Watergate, Slow Burn
There are many cultural and political lenses through which to view the Trump Presidency — reality TV, Mike Judge’s alarmingly prescient Idiocracy, the OJ Simpson case, Germany in the 1930s — but perhaps the most relevant is through the lens of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. A lot of what I know about Watergate came through cultural osmosis (Johnny Carson and SNL were still doing Watergate jokes in the 80s when I started watching) and movies like All the President’s Men, and I suspect that’s true of many Americans who are too young to have lived through it. We may know the broad strokes, but that’s about it.
Enter Slow Burn, a podcast by Slate about some of the lesser known stories surrounding Watergate and what it felt like to experience it as the scandal unfolded. Here’s series host Leon Neyfakh describing what the show is about:
Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).
Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation. Some days it seems like our democratic institutions won’t survive, or that permanent damage has already been done. Pretty much every day, we are buffeted by news stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of highly stressful and very unrealistic novels.
The point of Slow Burn is to look back on the most recent time Americans went through this en masse, and to put ourselves in their shoes.
Historical events like these make great podcast subjects; I’ve also listened to LBJ’s War recently. Reading articles or books about these topics is one thing, but actually listening to the investigators, journalists, lawyers, and Congressmen talk about about their roles in and perceptions of Watergate, both in contemporary interviews and recordings from that period, adds a lively and engaging aspect to these stories. I mean, just hearing Nixon on those secret tapes and then in press conferences saying that he had done nothing wrong…it’s completely gripping. I’ve been thinking up excuses to go for drives this past week just so I can get my Slow Burn fix.
A woman’s place is at the South Pole
Why is this 16-year-old girl holding a ham & cheese sandwich at the South Pole?
At 14, Jade Hameister became the youngest person to ski to the North Pole from outside the last degree of latitude. After she gave a talk about the journey at TEDx Melbourne, a video of the talk was posted online and the comments — like “Make me a sandwich” — rolled in from men presumably upset that Hameister isn’t preparing for a life of cooking & cleaning rather than polar exploration. After skiing across Greenland and then to the South Pole, Hameister had a message (and some lunch) for those men:
Tonight (it never gets dark this time of year) I skied back to the Pole again… to take this photo for all those men who commented “Make me a sandwich” on my TEDX Talk. I made you a sandwich (ham & cheese), now ski 37 days and 600km to the South Pole and you can eat it xx
How’s that Hameister & cheese sandwich taste, fellows? *bicep flex emoji* *dancing woman emoji*
Tycho DJ set from Dec 2017
Tycho is one of my favorite electronic artists and he recently did this 90-minute DJ set at the SnowGlobe music festival that’s currently powering me through some lazy Sunday chores and work.
See also his most recent Burning Man DJ set. Oh, and he’s also got some sets coming up in Boston, NYC, Houston, and DC.
The improbability of Mark E. Smith
Geeta Dayal writes about the late singer, founder, and driving force behind The Fall, one of the most influential and least likely indie bands of the last forty years.
The members of the group shifted constantly and erratically from album to album, or even from month to month, with Smith as the only constant presence. Nearly 70 people have been members of The Fall over the course of the past four decades — an eye-popping number. “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall,” Smith once famously quipped — less a joke than a statement of fact.
On Twitter, I described it this way: Mark E. Smith was like Old Dirty Bastard, if ODB had somehow managed to assemble and reassemble two dozen different versions of the Wu-Tang Clan, they released an album every year, and half of them were unpredictable masterpieces.
Dayal quotes Mark Fisher, one of The Fall’s best critics, who also died in the past year:
A group like The Fall — working class and experimental, popular and modernist — could not and should not exist, and The Fall are remarkable for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque.
If you’re looking for a place to start with The Fall, I recommend four albums that bridge their early art-damaged punk period with their 1980s pop-damaged indie rock peak:
1. Totally Wired: The Rough Trade Anthology
2. Hex Enduction Hour
3. The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall
4. This Nation’s Saving Grace
Pope Francis’s definition of ‘fake news’
“Fake news” is kind of a catch-all family-resemblance concept that’s abused as often as it’s used with real insight. But I was impressed by Pope Francis’s clear definition, given as part of an official message by the Vatican to mark World Communication Day:
While President Donald Trump has often dismissed news outlets and stories as “fake news,” Francis defined it as “the spreading of disinformation online or in the traditional media. It has to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader.”
He added, “Spreading fake news can serve to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests.”
Francis’s main example of fake news? The serpent’s message to Eve and Adam about the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This example shows that “there is no such thing as harmless disinformation; on the contrary, trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences. Even a seemingly slight distortion of the truth can have dangerous effects.”
Maybe along with Bishop of Rome and father of the Church, the Pope would make a good public editor.
How to write a comic book
Greg Pak is one of my favorite comic book writers, an intellectual and superfan who really knows how to do world-building and get into his characters’ heads. Among other books, he wrote Planet Hulk, a huge part of the basis for Thor: Ragnarok (minus Thor) that’s also one of the best (largely) self-contained comic book stories ever.
The other day, Pak took a moment on Twitter to describe his process for writing comics. It’s really good descriptive/prescriptive advice for any kind of writing, and well worth a read:
How I write a comic book script:
1. Outline the whole thing.
2. Break the outline down into pages.
3. Write from the beginning, but if I get stuck, skip around and write the easier scenes first.
4. Go back and write the harder scenes, which are easier now that I’ve done the rest.
5. Rewrite the easier scenes now that I’ve written the harder scenes and know my story better.
6. Go through and edit everything multiple times.
7. Turn it in when I run out of time.
8. Enjoy that fourteen minutes of calm you get after turning in a script.
9. Work on revisions.
10. Figure out what it’s REALLY all about and make the subtle dialogue tweaks that bring out that deeper theme/emotional thread.
The whole thread includes lots of dynamite numbered (3A, 3B, 4A) and unnumbered supplementary notes (the work of revision is never done). This one is probably my favorite:
Two general notes to myself that always seems to work is give your characters quiet moments that dramatize character, especially early in the script/story, and give the big emotional beats time to play out. Let it breathe when it needs to breathe.
Slowly Shredding Some Pow to Classical Music
Glide along with this snowboarder as he surfs his way through a powdery forest to the strains of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. I’ve watched this twice now; it’s super relaxing. A fine antidote to the typical extreme sports video. (via the kid should see this)
Going Fishing, an amazingly fluid stop motion animated film
Animator and sculptor Guldies has combined his passions and made this short stop motion animated film out of 2500 still photos. The result is remarkably fluid, particularly in the scenes with the human hand.
After months of hard work GOING FISHING is finally here. I have never worked so hard. The animation is filled to the brim with new stuff I’ve never tried before. I animated with branches and leaves, paper, clay, fabric, fishing lures, forks and stones and moss and EVERYTHING I could think of.
It’s a joy to experience things made with such evident love of craft.
The invention of the bendy straw
In September of 1937, Joseph Friedman was awarded a U.S. Patent for a “drinking tube” with a flexible neck, aka the bendy straw.
My invention provides a flexible portion in the straw positioned near one end so that a bend may be made at a point above the rim or lip of the container and the upper, or mouthpiece end of the straw may then be angularly directed to enter the mouth readily without the customer assuming an awkward position.
Derek Thompson describes the moment of inspiration and subsequent experimentation that led to the bendy straw’s invention:
Half a century after Marvin Chester Stone found grass in his julep, Joseph B. Friedman was sitting at his brother’s fountain parlor, the Varsity Sweet Shop, in the 1930s, watching his little daughter Judith fuss over a milkshake. She was drinking out of a paper straw, so we can be assured that the milkshake did not taste like grass. But since Stone’s paper straw was designed to be straight, little Judith was struggling to drink it up.
Friedman had an idea. As the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center explains, he brought a straw to his home, where he liked to tinker with inventions like “lighted pencils” and other newfangled writing equipment. The straw would be a simple tinker. A screw and some string would do.
Friedman inserted a screw into the straw toward the top (see image). Then he wrapped dental floss around the paper, tracing grooves made by the inserted screw. Finally, he removed the screw, leaving a accordion-like ridge in the middle of the once-straight straw. Voila! he had created a straw that could bend around its grooves to reach a child’s face over the edge of a glass.
Both straws and corrugated tubing had long existed, but no one thought to put them together until Friedman’s malt shop eureka.
Seeing with your ears, the importance of sound design in film
Using a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Munich that features very little dialogue, Evan Puschak shows how much sound design contributes to the feeling and tension of a film. I love the two head fakes Puschak does with the sound at the beginning of the video. It’s like, oh wait, he fooled me a bit there, so I need to pay more attention.
The surprisingly great mashup of Pearl Jam’s Jeremy and Footloose by Kenny Loggins
If you were to name a pair of songs that would absolutely not sound good mixed together, Pearl Jam’s Jeremy and Footloose by Kenny Loggins would be a good place to start. But as DJ Cummerbund’s mashup Jereloose, the two songs actually go surprisingly well together.
But what’s actually blowing my mind is that Footloose and Jeremy were released only 7 years apart. Maybe it’s because I went from 5th grade to my first year of college in that span, but the cultural distance between the two seems much greater than just 7 years.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set their Doomsday Clock to 11:58, the closest it’s been to midnight (aka nuclear war) since 1953. Spoiler: it’s because of our dipshit President.
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s most memorable games
In this video from the New Yorker, chess granmaster Garry Kasparov talks through his four most memorable chess games: two against Anatoly Karpov, one against Viswanathan Anand, and the final game in his rematch against Deep Blue, in which he gets wrong-footed by a move that the computer didn’t know how to make. Even if you’re not a huge fan of chess, it’s instructive to hear Kasparov talk about the importance of what’s happening not on the board — things like body language and confidence.
See also Scrabble pros recount their best and worst plays.
Ursula K. Le Guin and “gender ghetto” of the Golden Age of science fiction
Science fiction great Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday at age 88. Le Guin was the subject of this long New Yorker piece from a couple of years back, but I’d like to also direct your attention to a short piece Le Guin wrote for the magazine in 2012. In it, she describes how her editor submitted a short story of hers to Playboy under the name of U.K. Le Guin and then informed them after it was accepted that the writer was a woman. Playboy then requested to run the article under her initials so as not to frighten their male readership.
Unwilling to terrify these vulnerable people, I told Virginia to tell them sure, that’s fine. Playboy thanked us with touching gratitude. Then, after a couple of weeks, they asked for an author biography.
At once, I saw the whole panorama of U.K.’s life as a gaucho in Patagonia, a stevedore in Marseilles, a safari leader in Kenya, a light-heavyweight prizefighter in Chicago, and the abbot of a Coptic monastery in Algeria.
We’d tricked them slightly, though, and I didn’t want to continue the trickery. But what could I say? “He is a housewife and the mother of three children”?
I wrote, “It is commonly suspected that the writings of U.K. Le Guin are not actually written by U.K. Le Guin, but by another person of the same name.”
Game to the last, Playboy printed that. And my husband and I bought a red VW bus, cash down, with the check.
Yessss. BTW, if you’re wondering where to start with Le Guin, both the NYPL and Jo Walton at Tor recommend A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, the description of which reads:
A lone human ambassador is sent to Winter, an alien world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants can change their gender whenever they choose. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters…
The astounding growth of China’s subway system, 1990-2020
In 1990, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had only a handful of subway lines. In the early 2000s, growth in the number of cities with subways started to increase dramatically, as did the number of lines in the bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. As of 2020, more than 40 Chinese cities will have subway systems. Check out this time lapse map by “transit nerd” Peter Dovak (who also did these Mini Metros maps):
In this time, Beijing and Shanghai in particular have ballooned from nearly nothing into the world’s two largest, in both length and annual ridership. The timeline of their expansion alone is mesmerizing.
Meanwhile, the NYC subway system is…
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