Entries for October 2019
In this video, dialect coach Erik Singer explains how to tell similar accents apart, like Australia & New Zealand, Philly & NYC, and North England & South England.
For each pair of languages, Singer provides a word or a phrase you can use to tell accents apart. For instance, ask natives from North England and South England to say “cut your foot” and you’ll know right away which is which.
Singer has done several other interesting videos on language and accents for Wired: 4 Amazing Things About Languages, Accent Expert Breaks Down 6 Fictional Languages From Film & TV, Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 32 Actors’ Accents (and 28 more), and Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 28 Actors Playing Presidents.
See also people sharing accents from all 50 states.
Artist Chris Soal makes these shaggy-looking sculptures out of thousands of toothpicks. Here’s a closeup of one of his works, where you can see the whorls created by the toothpicks:
(via moss & fog)
At the Sebrell Funeral Home in Ridgeland, MS (just outside of Jackson), they perform funerals and cremations for people with HIV/AIDS, some of whom have been abandoned by their families because of their disease or sexual orientation.
In almost one-third of the AIDS-related deaths serviced by Sebrell Funeral Home, the family or next-of-kin will either abandon the deceased entirely or refuse to accept the cremains.
HIV/AIDS is a growing problem in the American South, due to social stigma, poverty, and decreased access to healthcare. In this short documentary, we meet Trey Sebrell, who thinks of caring for all deceased people, no matter who they were in life, as part of his mission as a funeral director.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of my absolute favorite books as a kid and one of first books that we read to our kids (and that they read back to us). I didn’t know this animated version existed until I ran across it on YouTube just now. I just went into the kids’ room to look for the book on the shelf and got a little teary as I searched.
My kids are 12 & 10 now and in an in-between phase of reading. They occasionally still pick up the picture books they loved as little kids but mostly are into graphic novels and chapter books now — Ollie just read Ready Player One and they’ve both been through all 7 Harry Potter books more times than I can count. We haven’t read a picture book together in months and I really miss snuggling up with them and reading Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Oh Say Can You Say?, or In the Night Kitchen. We’ll likely never read any of those books together again. It reminds me of one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard about parenting: one day you’ll pick up your kid, put them down, and never pick them up again…and you won’t remember it happening. *sobs*
From Metrobits, a fantastic resource for all things to do with metros and subways around the world, comes this collection of metro logos (older page w/ larger logos here).
See also metro fonts (names + designers), fare collection schemes, and ratings of the art and architecture of metro stations from around the world (highest marks go to Moscow, Paris, Saint Petersburg, and Stockholm). The Moscow and Saint Petersburg stations are incredible.
How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. “What would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, etc.)?”
From graphic designer Mariyan Atanasov comes Urban Tetris, in which apartment buildings in Sofia, Bulgaria are turned into a massive game of Tetris. If you’ve played a bunch of Tetris in your life, just looking at these images should trigger the familiar theme song in your head. Next: make this actually playable. (via colossal)
In a recent episode of The Art Assignment, they make the case for Impressionism.
The arrival of photography had also revealed new ways of framing images, suggesting the possibility of unbalanced, snapshot-like compositions, long before cameras would reach snapshot size and speed. Some have theorized that now that photography could capture reality so well, painting was then freed from the shackles of realism and could do what paint does best, which is being colorful and tactile, and you know, painty.
This new kind of art also involved more women and represented them in new ways. Berthe Morisot participated in all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions, and gave us remarkable views into the domestic sphere and lives of well-to-do women. Mary Cassatt joined the ranks as well, and became known for depicting women and children as well as her own family. Women of a variety of classes were subjects for the Impressionists, and not just nude and lying on a bed anymore, but shown doing the things they actually do, in the home as well as out in the world, enjoying Paris’s nightlife, and also being it.
I love these little art history lessons.
The system of tipping in America sucks. “Why are we still crowdfunding worker salaries when tippers so clearly do not know what the hell they’re doing?”
In 1978, Kurt Vonnegut gave the commencement speech at Fredonia State College in upstate New York. The speech was published under the title “How to Make Money and Find Love!” in a collection of the author’s commencement addresses, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? In the speech, Vonnegut suggested to the graduating class that the traditional four seasons don’t make sense for northern areas of the country.
One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on.
Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold!
What comes next? Not spring. ‘Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They’re Unlocking.
Vermonters know these six seasons all too well, although they give the two extra seasons different names. What’s going on right now and will continue into mid-to-late December is “stick season”. All the beautiful fall foliage has fallen off of the trees and we’re left with not-so-beautiful sticks until the snow flies regularly enough to call it winter. Between winter and spring — what Vonnegut calls “Unlocking” — is called “mud season” here. That’s when the dozens of feet of snow that fell during the winter, rapidly thawing ground, and Vermont’s rainy season collude to wreak havoc on unpaved roads and driveways, turning them into mud pits, some of which are impassable for a month or more.
Neither of these seasons is particularly pleasant here. Outdoor activities are curtailed — it’s too cold or warm or wet or muddy for your sport of choice — and restaurants and other local businesses often take a break, leaving residents even less to do. “This may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time”, indeed.
The other day I posted the news that the low railroad bridge that’s famous for ripping off the tops of trucks is finally going to be raised by eight inches, bringing an end to the internet’s viral fun. A reader alerted me to this interesting short documentary about the bridge:
The film features interviews with the man who has been recording all the bridge collisions since 2008, a state engineer who worked on a solution to the problem (a sensor to detect tall vehicles and trigger a stoplight and an “OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN” LED sign), and researchers at a behavioral research lab about how drivers plow into the bridge despite several layers of warning signs and (presumably) the knowledge of the height of their vehicle. (via @ShawnWildermuth)
A 108-Year-Old Woman Recalls What It Was Like to Be a Woman in Victorian England. She was born in 1868, could have “heard stories about Napoleon at her grandpa’s knee”, and lived to be interviewed on color TV.
Here’s the trailer for a five-episode Netflix series called The Devil Next Door.
The series is about John Demjanjuk, who was living in the US when he was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a particularly brutal guard at the Treblinka death camp.
Born in Ukraine, John (Iwan) Demjanjuk was the defendant in four different court proceedings relating to crimes that he committed while serving as a collaborator of the Nazi regime.
Investigations of Demjanjuk’s Holocaust-era past began in 1975. Proceedings in the United States twice stripped him of his American citizenship, ordered him deported once, and extradited him from the United States twice to stand trial on criminal charges, once to Israel and once to Germany. His trial in Germany, which ended in May 2011, may be the last time that an accused Nazi-era war criminal stands trial. If so, it would mark the culmination of a 65-year period of prosecutions that began with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945.
Some facts of Demjanjuk’s past are not in dispute. He was born in March 1920 in Dobovi Makharyntsi, a village in Vinnitsa Oblast of what was then Soviet Ukraine. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1958. He settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and worked for many years in a Ford auto plant.
The Devil Next Door premieres November 4.
The internet is 50 years old today. “In a notebook entry for ‘29 Oct 69’ we can see a particularly important notation at 22:30 (10:30 pm): ‘Talked to SRI, Host to Host.’”
A sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale published 30 years later, piggybacking on a successful TV adaptation? It could have been a disaster. The Testaments is anything but — it’s seen rave reviews (to which I will add my own) and won the Booker Prize. I read it over the course of the last month or so and wanted to share with you some passages I highlighted on my Kindle.
Having done this exercise with three books now (Normal People & In the Garden of Beasts were the others), I noticed that I highlight mostly ideas, passages that resonate with me personally, and beautiful writing. Spoilers are minimal…I weed those out.
In the case of The Testaments, obviously a lot of the book is about totalitarianism & fascism — see for instance how many of Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism you can spot in the excerpts below. #12 figures heavily.
Page 3 (great opening passage):
Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.
Page 9 (You see this most obviously in contemporary religious countries & cultures — women’s bodies are dangerous and must be kept out of sight — but also e.g. in American offices and schools.):
Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us — of our shapely or skinny or fat legs, of our graceful or knobbly or sausage arms, of our peachy or blotchy skins, of our entwining curls of shining hair or our coarse unruly pelts or our straw-like wispy braids, it did not matter. Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge — The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff? — and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God. We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.
Page 14:
What a lot of lies she had to tell for my sake! To keep me safe! But she was up to it. She had a very inventive mind.
Page 24:
Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.
Page 31:
I regarded my reflection. The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.
Page 44:
I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.
Page 46:
We’d had three modules in school on Gilead: it was a terrible, terrible place, where women couldn’t have jobs or drive cars, and where the Handmaids were forced to get pregnant like cows, except that cows had a better deal. What sort of people could be on the side of Gilead and not be some kind of monsters? Especially female people.
Page 57:
By this time I was feeling glum, which is one of the effects a birthday can have: you’re expecting a magic transformation but then it doesn’t happen.
Page 63:
“Dear Aunt Lydia,” he said, beaming from behind his enormous desk. “Thank you for gracing my humble office. You are well, I hope?”
He did not hope that, but I let it pass. “Praise be,” I said. “And you? And your Wife?” This Wife has lasted longer than usual. His Wives have a habit of dying: Commander Judd is a great believer in the restorative powers of young women, as were King David and assorted Central American drug lords. After each respectable period of mourning, he has let it be known that he is in the market for another child bride. To be clear: he has let it be known to me.
Page 66:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
Page 73:
They didn’t make a big fuss over the funerals of women in Gilead, even high-ranking ones.
Page 82:
More alarmingly, my breasts were swelling, and I had begun to sprout hair on areas of my body that we were not supposed to dwell on: legs, armpits, and the shameful part of many elusive names. Once that happened to a girl, she was no longer a precious flower but a much more dangerous creature.
Page 83:
The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.
Page 87:
Cleaning up things such as blood and other substances that came out of bodies was part of women’s duty of caring for other people, especially little children and the elderly, said Aunt Estée, who always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? She didn’t finish the sentence.
Like mud in the sun, I thought. That’s what was inside my head: warmed-up mud.
Page 106 (This reminded me of the disturbing games invented by children in Nazi concentration camps.):
The most popular singing game among the younger girls was called “Hanging.” It went like this:
Who’s that hanging on the Wall? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
It’s a Handmaid, what’s she called? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
She was (here we would put in the name of one of us), now she’s not. Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
She had a baby in the pot (here we would slap our little flat stomachs). Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
The girls would file under the uplifted hands of two other girls while everyone chanted: One for murder, Two for kissing, Three for a baby, Four gone missing, Five for alive and Six for dead, And Seven we caught you, Red Red Red!
And the seventh girl would be caught by the two counters, and paraded around in a circle before being given a slap on the head. Now she was “dead,” and was allowed to choose the next two executioners. I realize this sounds both sinister and frivolous, but children will make games out of whatever is available to them.
The Aunts probably thought this game contained a beneficial amount of warning and threat. Why was it “One for murder,” though? Why did murder have to come before kissing? Why not after, which would seem more natural? I have often thought about that since, but I have never found any answer.
Page 124:
They said calm things like You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.
Page 143 (another form of the banality of evil):
Hour by hour we watched vans arrive, discharge their quota of women, depart empty. The same wailings from the new arrivals, the same barking and shouts from the guards. How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.
Page 144:
All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.
Page 148:
You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.
Page 148:
Every once in a while there would be a scream or a series of shrieks from nearby: brutalization on parade. Sometimes there would be a prolonged moaning; sometimes a series of grunts and breathy gasps that sounded sexual, and probably were. The powerless are so tempting.
Page 158:
You must understand that I was not anybody in my own right — although of the privileged class, I was just a young girl about to be confined to wedlock. Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.
Page 212 (this made me laugh out loud):
If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as used to be said; though in the present day the idea of God laughing is next door to blasphemy. An ultra-serious fellow, God is now.
Page 215:
“Yes, the thought-experiment penises can get out of control,” I said. “They take on a life of their own.”
Page 226:
The Commander advanced, arranged his face into a jowly smile, and stuck his mouth onto my forehead in a chaste kiss. His lips were unpleasantly warm; they made a sucking sound as they pulled away. I pictured a tiny morsel of my brain being sucked through the skin of my forehead into his mouth. A thousand such kisses later and my skull would be emptied of brain.
Page 236:
This was comforting to me as far as it went, but I was on the verge of crying again. Kindness sometimes has that effect. “How?” I said. “How can it ever be well?” “I don’t know,” said Aunt Estée. “But it will be. I have faith.” She sighed. “Having faith is hard work sometimes.”
Page 272:
Standing on the tarmac there was a double line of men in black uniforms, and we walked between the lines, arm in arm. “Don’t look at their faces,” she whispered.
So I focused on their uniforms, but I could sense eyes, eyes, eyes, all over me like hands. I’d never felt so much at risk in that way — not even under the bridge with Garth, and with strangers all around.
Page 272 (a character’s initial impression of Gilead):
What am I doing here? I thought. This place is weird as fuck.
Page 279:
Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader. Listeners are inclined to believe neither.
Page 316:
He has another kind of book, less respectable: vintage pornography, as I knew from having examined it. It is a genre that is tedious in bulk. The mistreatment of the human body has a limited repertoire.
Page 317:
And how easily a hand becomes a fist.
Page 343 (I thought “gang aft agley” might have been some sort of weird Kindle typo, but it’s a reference to a Robert Burns poem.):
I’d thought I had everything in order, but the best-laid plans gang aft agley, and trouble comes in threes.
Page 388:
I was buying time. One is always buying something.
And finally, a short passage from Atwood’s acknowledgements, in which she reminds the reader that all of the events in this book and in The Handmaid’s Tale have actually happened somewhere in the world before:
The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.
That’s what makes these books truly chilling and essential.
I love this photograph by Peruvian photographer Jheison Huerta. It’s a shot of the Milky Way above the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia. After it rains, the thin layer of water transforms the flat into the world’s largest mirror, some 80 miles across. Beautiful.
See also The Entire Plane of the Milky Way Captured in a Single Photo. (via astronomy picture of the day)
More details on Elena Ferrante’s next novel. Title: “The Lying Life of Adults”. US pub date: June 9, 2020. First line: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.”
As part of their Nov 2019 issue focusing on women, National Geographic asked a group of women six questions:
What Is the Most Important Challenge That Women Face Today?
What Is the Greatest Hurdle You’ve Overcome?
What Was Your Breakthrough Moment?
What Needs to Change in the Next 10 Years?
What Is Your Greatest Strength?
What Advice Would You Give Young Women Today?
The interviewees include Jacinda Ardern, Melinda Gates, Roxane Gay, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Goodall, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. When asked about the most important challenge facing women today, the answer was almost universally “lack of equality” (although Laura Bush turned it into an opportunity to worry about boys being left behind educationally in the US). Here’s Jane Goodall’s answer:
In so many developing countries, women have no freedom. In poor communities families tend to provide money to educate boys over girls. In many cultures women have no access to family planning, have numerous children, and are solely responsible for their care. For these reasons not only women but children — and thus our future — will suffer.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote this about her breakthrough moment as a student in Nigeria:
It was when I was nine years old, in the third grade, and I remember this very clearly. My teacher had said that the child with the best results on the test that she gave would be the prefect. So I got the best result — and then she said, ‘Oh, I forgot to mention, it has to be a boy.’ I just thought, Why? It would make sense to have said the class prefect has to be the child with the best grades or the child with some sort of useful skill. But the idea that this position of prestige and power in the classroom was reserved for somebody by an accident of being born a particular sex — that was just strange. So my sense of righteous indignation flared up, and I said to my teacher, ‘That makes no sense.’ That was the first time that I spoke up about sexism. It didn’t work, but it was the moment for me that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
Oprah Winfrey on what she perceives to be her greatest strength:
No question, it’s connection to other people. You know, I’ve interviewed rapists and murderers and child molesters and all kinds of people who have done terrible things — but I can put myself in the space of where they are in that moment and meet them where they are. So my ability to connect to where you are in that moment — not to the thing that supposedly defines you — that’s one of my great strengths. I think that had I had the love, the attention, the family surroundings that would have nurtured and supported me in the way that I thought I needed, I wouldn’t have it. I think that this connection and yearning to know the heart of other people came from my own sense of loneliness, my own sense of wanting to be understood and know that whatever I’m feeling, somebody else has felt it too.
Morgan Neville is directing a documentary movie about Anthony Bourdain.
CNN Films, HBO Max, and Focus Features are partnering on the still-untitled film, which is produced by Neville’s Tremolo Productions. Focus will release the documentary first in theaters before a television premiere on CNN, followed by a streaming bow on the soon-to-launch HBO Max, coming in 2020. Dates for the release have yet to be announced.
Neville is the director of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the Fred Rogers documentary that may have made you cry recently. It will be interesting to see what this film can add to the extensive self-documentation that Bourdain put out into the world through his books and TV shows.
NPR’s Anya Kamenetz shares six tips on how to talk to your kids about the climate crisis. Step 1 is to break the silence:
He says, despite the fact that the climate crisis literally affects everyone on earth, too many of us are sitting alone with our worries, our faces lit by our phone screens in the middle of the night. “We seem to be more scared of upsetting the conversation than we are scared about climate change.”
Mary DeMocker, an activist and artist in Eugene, Ore., is the author of The Parents’ Guide To Climate Revolution, a book focusing on simple actions families can take both personally and collectively. “The emotional aspect is actually, I think, one of the biggest aspects of climate work right now,” she says.
Asked what feelings parents tell her they are grappling with, she ticks off guilt, distraction, confusion. And the big one: fear.
See also 8 Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom.
An alternate version of the ABC song that slows down the LMNOP part is currently going viral because of a tweet by Noah Garfinkel: “They changed the ABC song to clarify the LMNOP part, and it is life ruining.”
I tracked down the original video from 2012:
The alternate arrangement is by Matt Richelson, who runs a popular YouTube channel and several websites dedicated to offering free materials (songs, lesson plans, etc.) to help kids learn English. Here’s what Richelson says about his version of the ABC song:
About the slow l,m,n,o,p: I teach young learners of English as a foreign language, and have found this way the most effective for teaching the letters.
I love the ellemmennohpee bit as much as anyone, but his reasoning is solid.
The Millennial Raven. “Once upon a midnight dreary, Tinder swiping, buzzed and weary, I asked Siri about my sushi ordered one hour before.”
Each year since 2014, a group in Japan holds a Halloween event where people come dressed not as witches, Avengers, or zombies but in everyday “mundane” costumes. This year’s costumes include “woman who forgot to take out the trash” and “woman who showed up to a BBQ with no intention of helping out”. My personal favorite is “guy who face-swapped with a Starbucks cup”:
You can see more costumes from this year on Twitter #DPZ or Spoon & Tamago. See also some of last year’s costumes, including “a girl who just gave blood and now can’t do anything for a few minutes” and “guy at the office whose turn it is to empty the shredder”.
I’m not much for Halloween, but this I could get into.
One Page Dungeon generates small dungeon layouts for RPG adventures (Dungeons & Dragons, etc.) You can just throw all that graph paper in the recycling.
See also Auto-Generated Maps of Fantasy Worlds, Fractal Terrain in Javascript, and the Medieval Town Generator. (via @pomeranian99)
A fun analysis of the on-screen graphics of TV broadcasts of baseball. “Outs come in threes, not twos. If you must represent it by a series of faux light bulbs, you should have three bulbs.”
Ever since I read this tweet the other day, I can’t unsee Munch’s The Scream as a painting of a spaniel dog. (The tweet’s photo has been doctored but I can still see it in the original above.)
Have we considered that it’s possible that Munch was just trying to paint a spaniel, but he was a bit shit, and then people got excited about it so he went along with it?
You’re welcome!
I know a lot of teachers read the site. Here’s how educators are using the NY Times’ 1619 project to change how slavery is taught in schools.
For his project 31 Days of Wizardry, Jaremi Carey has been dressing up as a different Harry Potter character each day in October and posting the results to his Instagram. These are great. Strong Cindy Sherman vibes when you view them all together. And his Dobby! He’s only done one of the main characters so far though (Hermione on polyjuice)…perhaps he’s saving Dumbledore, Harry, Ron, and Voldemort for the final days?
Carey previously did a similar 365 Days of Drag project in 2016. (via @rel_games)
Every month or two for the past couple of years, I’ve shared the movies, books, music, TV, and podcasts I’ve enjoyed (or not) recently. Here’s everything I’ve “consumed” since last month. It’s a little light because I’ve been working and a full rewatch of The Wire took some time. Stuff in progress includes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the kids and I are reading it together), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, and the second season of Abstract.
The Wire. Over the past two months, I rewatched all 5 seasons of The Wire. It very much holds up and is still the best TV show I’ve ever watched. Season 4 in particular is fantastic and devastating. Even season 5, which seemed a bit outlandish at the time with the serial killer plot, is great. (A+)
Downtown Abbey. Not great but it’s always nice spending some quality time with the Crowley family. (B+)
Mario Kart Tour. There’s something deeply un-Nintendo about this game. The use of all of the casino-like iOS tricks to keep you playing (and hopefully spending money on in-game currency) runs counter to the DNA of the company. $70 for 135 rubies is $20 more than the Switch version of Kart is going for right now on Amazon — ridiculous. And remember that the original Wii periodically suggested taking a break if you’d been playing for awhile? Still, racing in Mario Kart is always fun. When they turn networked multiplayer on, it might be a game-changer. (B+)
Peanut Butter Falcon. Feel-good? Eh. More like heavy-handed treacle. And LeBeouf’s character treats the kid with Down syndrome like a normal person but is creepy and borderline abusive to a girl he likes? Yuck. (C)
Succession. I hate that I love this show so much. (A)
1619. Very good podcast, particularly the third episode about the birth of American music. (A-)
Transparent Musicale Finale. I was skeptical about watching a 2-hour musical to end the series, but I ended up liking it a lot. My god, that last song though… (B+)
Parasite. Downton Abbey a la Bong Joon Ho. (A-)
Bottle Rocket. Rough but many of Anderson’s trademarks are already on display here. (A-)
Diego Maradona. Another examination by Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy) of how talent and fame can go wrong. (A-)
Kevin Alexander on the Beginning and End of America’s Culinary Revolution (House of Carbs). Listened on a rec from a friend because Alexander’s book sounded interesting, but the bro-ness of the host is almost unbearable. What if the discussion about food was more like sports radio? No thank you. (C-)
Joker. The pre-release coverage of this movie being dangerous or problematic was mostly overblown. (B)
The new MoMA. Full review here. (A-)
Silence and the Presence of Everything (On Being). Really interesting interview with an acoustic ecologist. More here. (A-)
The Testaments. A sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale could have easily gone wrong. This very much did not. (A-)
Tonic. I used this for a few days but the recs weren’t great so I stopped. (C-)
Amazon Go. A marvelous and unnerving experience for this law-abiding introvert. Shopping without interaction was cool, but walking out without paying felt like shoplifting. (B+)
Machine Hallucination. Impressive display, like being immersed in an IMAX movie. But not sure it’s worth the $25 entry fee. (B)
Liberté, Égalité and French Fries (Rough Translation). How do we define work and community in the age of global mega-corporations? This story takes an amazing turn about 20 minutes in. (B+)
Past installments of my media diet are available here.
The 20 defining comedy sketches of the past 20 years. My two faves: More Cowbell and Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks.
Shannon Downey regularly goes to estate sales to buy unfinished embroidery projects and then completes them — “there’s no way that soul is resting with an unfinished project left behind”. At a recent sale, she found a quilting project begun by a woman named Rita who had recently died at the age of 99.
Downey doesn’t quilt but wanted to finish the project, so she asked her Instagram followers for help. Hundreds of people volunteered. Read about the progress of the project so far here on Twitter or keep up with it on Instagram at #ritasquilt. (via @nhannahjones)
Farewell to the Can Opener Bridge. Durham, NC is finally raising a low overpass that destroyed hundreds of too-tall trucks and a source of viral videos for more than a decade.
Really good review of the new MoMA by Alexandra Lange. “The expanded Museum of Modern Art is so big, you may need GPS, and you’ll definitely need a snack.”
In a piece for the NY Times, obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Lisa Harris shares her experience of a typical day at her practice, where she and her staff provide abortions.
My youngest patient of the day is 14 and here with her parents. The oldest patient is 41, here with her husband. As on all days, my patients come from every walk of life. Most have children already; many have arranged their appointment so that they’ll be done in time to pick them up after school. They assure me, again, that they are certain about their decision.
By the end of the day, I’ve seen 17 people, and made sure each received the care and time she needed. After counseling, two others left without having an abortion. One decided to continue her pregnancy and become a parent. Another appeared to need more time to think about it, and I encouraged her to do that. I support all of my patients’ decisions and needs; doing so is core to my work.
This was a typical day, and on the way home some of it plays back in my mind. A mother of three crosses herself and then takes the mifepristone pill she requested. Another requests a copy of the ultrasound picture for her memory box. After the abortion procedure, one asks to see what had been in her uterus and is relieved that the fetus is less than an inch, so much smaller than she had imagined.
See also What Illegal Abortion Was Like in the 1960s and Harrowing Illegal Abortion Stories from Before Roe v. Wade.
These U.N. Climate Scientists Think They Can Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion. The plan involves rehabbing 900 million hectares of land to sequester a massive amount of CO2.
MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado reports on an improved gene editing technique that can rewrite DNA without actually cutting the DNA (which can damage and introduce errors into the genome). It’s called “prime editing”.
Today, in the latest — and possibly most important — of recent improvements to CRISPR technology, Liu is introducing “prime editing,” a molecular gadget he says can rewrite any type of genetic error without actually severing the DNA strand, as CRISPR does.
The new technology uses an engineered protein that, according to a report by Liu and 10 others today in the journal Nature, can transform any single DNA letter into any other, as well as add or delete longer stretches. In fact, Liu claims it’s capable of repairing nearly any of the 75,000 known mutations that cause inherited disease in humans.
From the abstract of the report:
Prime editing substantially expands the scope and capabilities of genome editing, and in principle could correct about 89% of known pathogenic human genetic variants.
See more coverage of this story at Nature, Scientific American, and Wired.
Vaccines!! WHO has announced that 2 out of the 3 wild poliovirus strains have been eradicated. The other type is only found in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conflicts are hindering vaccination efforts.
Last week, the beloved NYC eating establishment City Bakery closed its doors due to financial troubles.1 Rachel Holliday Smith dug into what happened for The City. It sounds like the company over-expanded, couldn’t get out of the debt it took on, and got into a series of increasingly bad lending situations.
One of those bad deals was borrowing $75,000 from a financial services firm called Kalamata Capital Group and promising to pay back $105,000. That’s a 40% interest rate, firmly in loan shark territory. But this is the bit that really got my eyebrows heading north (especially the bit in italics):
In a statement, the chief operating officer of Kalamata Capital Group, Brandon Laks, said the company “is truly sorry City Bakery decided to close” and stressed that many Kalamata Capital Group employees loved the establishment.
He said KCG made amendments to the funding agreement as City Bakery struggled and “without KCG’s capital and amendments, City Bakery would have closed, and jobs would have been lost, much sooner.”
“Unfortunately, many small businesses close and it is a risk KCG takes when we help fund and support these businesses,” he said.
Let’s be clear here: City Bakery was primarily a place for folks who can afford $5 croissants, but this is one of those instances where capitalism has become deeply disconnected from the people it’s allegedly supposed to benefit. All those KCG employees that loved City Bakery? Meaningless bullshit. A local lender that wants to invest in the community and its businesses doesn’t charge 40% interest. City Bakery needed some solid financial advice, a plan for getting out from under their debt (if possible), and a loan with decent terms. All KCG did was give City Bakery more rope to hang themselves and called it “support”.
Update: A couple people have pointed out that we don’t know the length of the loan and so cannot calculate the annual interest rate. Even so, as the article details, these “merchant cash advance” loans are under increasing scrutiny for being predatory:
As the Duncans soon learned, tens of thousands of contractors, florists, and other small-business owners nationwide were being chewed up by the same legal process. Behind it all was a group of financiers who lend money at interest rates higher than those once demanded by Mafia loan sharks. Rather than breaking legs, these lenders have co-opted New York’s court system and turned it into a high-speed debt-collection machine. Government officials enable the whole scheme. A few are even getting rich doing it.
What’s CRISPR Doing in our Food? “Senior scientist Dennis Romero tells us the story of CRISPR’s accidental discovery — and its undercover but ubiquitous presence in the dairy aisles today.”
Nikon has announced the winning entries in the 2019 Small World Photomicrography Competition. Here are a few of the winners that caught my eye:
From top to bottom, cells undergoing mitosis by Jason Kirk, a frozen water droplet by Garzon Christian, and a housefly eye by Razvan Cornel Constantin. Check out the rest of the winning entries here. (via in focus)
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