Month: March 2018
March 31, 2018
-
Thought
Done!
Hi, allies! On this #TransDayOfVisibility, why don't you consider putting your pronouns in your profile, or a link to your https://t.co/tREavTg4ue (e.g. https://t.co/NWH5lQ3xKy)? It helps normalize our pronoun sharing, AND it marks you as a✨Probably Good and Safe Person✨ to us!
— Trans. Daneel Olivaw (@mspowahs) March 31, 2018
-
Thought
“how to pare down and beautify your home in preparation for your death so that you do not overburden your loved ones with too much stuff and ugliness after you go.”
Swedish death cleaning and the anorexic home | Literary Review of Canada
https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/02/swedish-death-cleaning-and-the-anorexic-home/
-
Bookmark
Perry Chen Says He Wants To Revitalize Kickstarter. Employees Say He’s Doing the Opposite.
Joel Barhamand for BuzzFeed News
Since founder Perry Chen took back the reins at Kickstarter, the company has landed in a period of turmoil set in motion by the person most equipped to steer it in a new direction: Chen himself.
Founders of successful startups hold something akin to mythical status… -
Bookmark
LEGO’s new TIE Fighter for Solo: A Star Wars Story shows how sophisticated the toys have become
In 1999, Danish toy company Lego made a huge announcement: it had signed a license with Lucasfilm Ltd. to produce a series of toys based on the Star Wars films, the first time in the company’s history that it made such a deal. The move wasn’t without major qualms within the company; for decades, it…
-
Bookmark
Why Have We Soured on the ‘Devil’s Advocate’?
In 1990, a lawyer named Mike Godwin made what would become a famous observation: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability that someone will draw a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 100 percent. The internet has changed pretty significantly since then; its fascists, for…
-
Bookmark
Wikimedia Foundation receives $3 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make freely licensed images accessible and reusable across the web – Wikimedia Blog
Photo by Ajepbah, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE . The Wikimedia Foundation, with a US$3,015,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , is leading an effort to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest repository of freely licensed educational media. The project will support…
-
Bookmark
“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made
The power of Stanley Kubrick’s classic is bound up with the story of its making. Photograph from Photofest Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space…
-
Bookmark
Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos | Quanta Magazine
Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a…
-
Bookmark
Selling Politics Like a Lifestyle Brand
There’s a small stack of Planned Parenthood T-shirts in Rebecca Davis’s closet, each one acquired at a volunteer event with the organization. Davis is a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and even became a member of its activist council last year, but those shirts are gathering dust. “It’s not…
-
Bookmark
Rebecca Solnit: The Myth of “Real” America Just Won’t Go Away
Watching the film Phantom Thread , I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people around him. I kept looking at the other characters—his sister who manages his couture business, his seamstresses, eventually the furniture (as a…
-
Bookmark
Beyoncé’s Triumphant Homecoming at Coachella
Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, her most comprehensive retrospective to date, underscored not only her Southernness but the global black vernacular that continues to shape her. Photograph by Andrew White / Parkwood Entertainment On Saturday, around 9 p.m. , Pacific Time, I logged on to the…
-
Bookmark
Review: Beyoncé Is Bigger Than Coachella
INDIO, Calif. — Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon, than Beyoncé’s headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night.
It was rich with… -
Bookmark
Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?
A look at the available evidence
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.
Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an… -
Bookmark
The Cult Brand Whisperer Behind Casper, Allbirds, And Birchbox
In 2013, the patent for finasteride, the active ingredient in male-pattern-baldness medication Propecia, expired. This might seem an unlikely development to send ripples across the nimble, young world of startups, but within a couple of years, a handful of entrepreneurs were zeroing in on hair loss…
-
Bookmark
The future of mobility will be multi-modal, shared and zero emission.
This interview is published in The Beam #5 — Subscribe now for more on the topic
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur who became famous for co-founding Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. The successful entrepreneur wasn’t about to stop there, going on to co-found Buzzcar, a… -
Bookmark
Opinion | Sometimes a Broken Glass Is Just a Broken Glass
It is tempting to think that a work of great art appears in the material world complete and perfectly formed, like a rainbow or an egg, that every note or phrase or scene or brush stroke has been placed just so and for good reason. It is tempting to think that geniuses know what they are doing.
But… -
Bookmark
It’s official! Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit! | Wordnik
You may remember when we first announced we had started the process of becoming a not-for-profit corporation, with the mission of collecting and sharing data for every word in the English language. Our mission remains the same, but now our status is official.
Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) organization,… -
Bookmark
The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers – MEL Magazine
In the year 2000, a time traveler reportedly walked among us. He was from the year 2038, but he drove a 1967 Chevy Corvette. His sweet time ride disrupted gravity using a twin singularity system. This time traveler arrived in present day to stop a civil war in the U.S. He did so by contacting the…
-
Bookmark
Opinion | A Smorgasbord of Solutions for Global Warming
Opinion Thinking about Earth Day, I did a Google search for “global warming solutions.” Up popped a slew of “what you can do” lists from leading scientific and environmental organizations. When I dug in, however, I found the suggestions rather general — “reduce emissions,” “stop deforestation,”…
-
Bookmark
The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny
Hulu The Handmaid’s Tale is a difficult show to appreciate right now. After following the plot of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book in its first season, its second season piles on a series of additional horrors, all set in the future nation of Gilead — a religious theocracy that kills and tortures women…
-
Bookmark
The Passionate Photo Colorizers Who Are Humanizing the Past
Banana docks, New York, ca. 1890-1910. Marina Amaral Last week, a striking image circulated online: a grainy triptych of registration photos of a 14-year-old Auschwitz prisoner named Czesława Kwoka. Auschwitz’s prisoner photos were all shot in black-and-white, but this one is rendered in soft color…
March 30, 2018
-
Thought
I’m like 70% sure that office shrimp lunch story is made up
-
Thought
Discovered in 1994, so they’re 30,024 years old now
The exquisite Chauvet horses were created over 30,000 years ago #IceAgeArt pic.twitter.com/sF37jJKSNM
— The Ice Age (@Jamie_Woodward_) March 30, 2018
-
Thought
The new Casey Musgraves album is fantastic
-
Thought
This is a great track. Check it out! pic.twitter.com/hSkEyGoqoq
-
Thought
“Colourised photographs collapse time, flatten it, make a continuous present, if only for an instant, and our traditional defences against the past wobble. We can feel that it was real.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/tom-crewe/short-cuts
pic.twitter.com/cNlIZnqXEo
-
Thought
“An individual army ant is practically blind and has a minuscule brain that couldn’t begin to fathom their elaborate collective movement.”
The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges – Nautilus
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-simple-algorithm-that-ants-use-to-build-bridges-20180226/
-
Thought
“When hundreds of “lone wolves” are reading the same websites, talking to each other, consuming the same stories, picking up easily accessible weapons, and killing the same targets, they have become a pack.”
How White American Terrorists Are Radicalized
https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-white-american-terrorists-are-radicalized
-
Thought
“People lying on the Internet because they think it’s hilarious Day” is almost upon us.
-
Bookmark
Canonize: Creating a Personal Canon Template – Brendan Schlagel
I love the idea of the “personal canon”: an encapsulation, in list form, of those things that have most shaped you. A sort of annotated bibliography of influences. Over the past few years I’ve come across several excellent examples of people using a corner of their personal websites to provide such…