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Flamenco Duck
Born from marginalized communities, flamenco’s history explores themes of immigrant life, oppression, pride, and injustice,” Flamenco Vivo’s “Comunidad” page explains. But even as Santana champions an art form comprised of Romani, African, Sephardic, and Andalusian traditions, she routinely abuses and discriminates against people of color who work for her, according to lawsuits filed by three former employees. from Famed NYC Flamenco Dance Group Accused of Rampant Racism [Daily Beast]
The core & the periphery
The movement is almost entirely caused by a reaction to the deteriorating conditions experienced in core web spaces and services, particularly on social media networks (the combination of social media with social networks).
This reaction can be conscious or unconscious, with most individuals being semi-conscious of it. Efforts from peripheral inhabitants to convince core inhabitants to move to the periphery are almost entirely spontaneous and disorganized. The intention is short-sighted, missing any long-term strategy for sustainability or retention of new people within the peripheral web. While there are many social and mental benefits to migration, deeper societal issues are never addressed and are often reproduced in the absence of a sustainable organized effort. from The Yesterweb
Slowness is hard for most of us
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
Size Matters, Also Thrust
Tone!!!
When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history. from A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point!
Comics were real good last year
Perfectly fine for everyday use and relatively benign
All those iterations yielded a total game changer, not only replacing the company’s unwieldy 1.8-liter jugs with a handheld design that would work for home consumers, but establishing the soy sauce bottle as a cultural touchstone. The company, well aware of the intense affection its specialty bottles have generated ever since, has fully cashed in on collectors’ enthusiasm. from The Kikkoman Soy Sauce Bottle Is Priceless
“Dar’st thou measure this our god!”
Through most of modern history the idea that the value of a whale was not discoverable through its market price would have seemed silly, at least to anyone operating in that commercial market. But for three centuries whales have occupied a peculiar point where economics and the environment meet, their fortunes tracing the changing relationship between the two. In the 19th century a drop in the demand for whale-based products worked to the whales’ benefit. In the 20th century, though, the supply of whale-based products became much cheaper and demand returned redoubled. Whales became increasingly endangered until societies newly focused on the environmental costs of affluence imposed a worldwide whaling ban. That made them literally priceless. from Where capitalism and conservation meet [The Economist; ungated]
The dream, however, quickly turned nightmarish
“The real toll your behavior is going to take is priceless,” she continued. “How dare you pretend to care about justice involved people? How dare you pretend to care about Black businesses? How dare you sit at the Black leadership table with people who have cried, fought, and hustled to build real businesses and brands with nothing and from nothing…. You frequently talked about letting Black women lead. And even though that was clearly [a] fraudulent narrative you used to gain entry, you weren’t wrong. It’s Black women who will ensure you never do this again.” from Meet the Con Artist Who Deceived the Front Range Tech Community
Swift boating
It is highly unusual for a reputable news organization like The Times to publish an article speculating on a person’s sexuality, let alone a figure of immense cultural significance who has previously denied the insinuations. CNN responds to Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do [NYT; ungated]
It’s the Face in the Floor
I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways. from Saved by Infinite Jest by Mala Chatterjee [CW: depression, suicidal ideation, David Foster Wallace]
Science!
The lessons of “low and slow”
My research has revealed that lowriding flourished in the southern California region—post WWII—and represents part of a larger movement characterized by individualized expression via car customization where returning veterans had more expendable income to personalize and modify their vehicles in unique ways .... Within the dominant mainstream culture, the practice of car modifications was embodied in high performance muscle cars best characterized as hotrods that are described as fast and mean. In contrast, Chicano car enthusiasts modified and customized their vehicle with a unique cultural aesthetic that honored ingenuity where vehicles came to be understood as artistic canvases on wheels and where the practice of car cruising down the boulevard brought forward a low and slow attitude bringing forth the creation of stylized and customized vehicles that shaped Chicana and Chicano culture. from The San Diego Lowrider Archival Project
Why I shake my fist when Netflix whacks a woman we never see
My dead sister-in-law was a human being. She could not emulate a Hallmark movie mom. Nor can her humanity be flattened into a corny hologram smiling over the people who miss her. She isn’t some straightforward Saint Mary watching over all of us. Rachel was complicated and messy and so was her life and her relationships. She gave with her whole heart and, even as her body failed, strived to carry the crushing weight of trying to do it all. It’s exactly this nuance and pressure that dies with these wife-mom characters. from ’Tis the Season to Kill the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie Trope
But Johnny was gone
(The West Des Moines Police Department declined to release its full investigative case file, because the Gosch case is still an active investigation involving state and federal authorities, and declined to make any current investigators available for an interview. It also declined to answer my extensive list of questions about the case. But the agency did send me a statement, which read, in part, “We understand how deeply this case has affected the family, the community, law enforcement officials and the nation. This case will remain open, and we won’t stop investigating until we have closure and answers as to what happened to Johnny Gosch.”) from An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case [CNN] [CW: CSA, kidnapping, corruption, conspiracy]
The companies themselves are bullshit
For much of this century, optimism that technology would make the world a better place fueled the perception that Silicon Valley was the moral alternative to an extractive Wall Street—that it was possible to make money, not at the expense of society but in service of it. In other words, many who joined the industry did so precisely because they thought that their work would be useful. Yet what we’re now seeing is a lot of bullshit. from It's All Bullshit [The Baffler; ungated]
The timeline coming together
as someone who is Extremely Online™️ and a self proclaimed meme connoisseur here is a ranking of my top internet moments / memes of 2023 by Annie Wu [X; nitter]
An annual exercise in humility
As awesome as we are, on occasion we're reminded that other people are also kind of great. Which is why we at Bloomberg Businessweek practice an annual exercise in humility called The Jealousy List. Put simply, these are the stories so well executed by folks at other outlets that we wish we’d published them. from Jealousy List 2023 [Bloomberg; ungated]
An evil vanquished so completely it has been all but forgotten
Cretinism and goitre were among the great medical mysteries of 19th-century Europe. The overlap of the conditions was a source of fascination, as was their geographical specificity. Scientists, medics and armchair experts flocked to the Alps, seeming to discount nothing in their investigations: landscape, elevation, atmospheric electricity, snow melt, sunlight (too much and too little), ‘miasma’, bad beer, stagnant air, incest and ‘moral failure’. ... In 1876, a list of the most promising theories was published; it featured forty different hypotheses. from A National Evil [LRB; ungated]
Weird Trumps
This belief in tarot as a revealer of hidden truths is not the survival of some ancient tradition. It’s a modern idea grafted on to something that was originally intended as a bit of fun. Tarot was a card game played in a fairly recognisable way, with the players laying down a card to compete for the highest value in a series of tricks – but with 20 or so ornate picture cards, depending on the set, to complicate the scoring. These were so beautifully crafted, so visually splendid, that their designs now obsess and befuddle people centuries after it was first played by Renaissance courtiers. But tarot is no more mysterious in its origins than Happy Families. from Dr Terror deals the Death card: how tarot was turned into an occult obsession [Grauniad; ungated]
"The Times hereby demands a jury trial for all claims so triable"
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. [so many previouslies]
Bird’s Not Real
Bird was once valued at more than $2 billion and seemed to epitomize a shiny future of clean urban transport. But ridership slumped during the pandemic—and so did Bird’s shares after its 2021 stock market debut. In late 2022, after a series of business setbacks, the company warned investors that it could go bankrupt. It was booted from the New York Stock Exchange in September of this year for failing to consistently maintain a market cap of $15 million. As the company scrambled to survive, it has squeezed its fleet managers harder. On December 20, their situation became more uncertain when Bird announced it was filing for bankruptcy. from Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird [Wired; ungated]
Every pun is a crossing
Crossword lovers, like joke lovers, have a quick-draw inventory of memorable puzzle themes; Ghogre describes a quip puzzle that featured the answers pig-tight, bull-strong, and horse-high—old cowpoke parlance for what a good fence should be. Ghogre had never seen a pig, and, as he told me, “We don’t have fences.” from Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive? [The New Yorker; ungated]
“I love you, but you are not serious people.”
There’s no better way to emphasize this general feeling than to break down the most important events of 2023 to their molecular level. (Although, as you’re about to see, “important” is a relative term; the word “most” is far more key here.) To recap the language that this year gave us—the seemingly ranch, the rizz, the ice cream yes yes yes—so that we can truly see just how constant, how compelling, and how bizarre our current existence is. Without further ado, these are the 84 sentences that defined 2023. [CW: almost entirely US-focused]
The key is the right words
I couldn’t decide. Hmmm, I replied, then commented that I should have a ready answer. He wasn’t the first to ask, and I’d had time to think about the question. Plenty of time—years, in fact. So why didn’t I have a convincing reply? Probably because my answer felt inadequate. It wasn’t, after all, some verifiable claim I might make about Spanish customs or the Spanish character vs. the American. Rather, my feeling that it was so easy in the States to communicate with people in offices, shops, or on the street, with neighbors, friends, and family, compared with the struggle it often is to understand and be understood in Spanish. And my trouble with the Spanish language couldn’t, surely, be the essential difference between life in the States and life in Spain? Talk about solipsism! from Lighting a Match by Clellan Coe
Each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire
The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness. No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. From A Blood Meridian Christmas
A little more of what vulgar people call stuffing
While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin.
The watermelon is for everyone
I like this idea of sweet watermelons coexisting with bitter ones, each type influencing our perceptions. The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds. Cultures throughout the ages have, and still do, interpret the watermelon as a symbol of good luck and fertility, a plant whose great fecundity might be shared with you. But in the United States, more than a century of racial denigration has cloaked and clouded this primordial symbol of solidarity, generosity, and abundance, transforming it into something almost unpalatable for many Black people. Of course, the watermelon itself is not to blame, but throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, it has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future. from Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows
Un projecte col·lectiu d’il·lustració que ret homenatge a la New Yorker
THE BARCELONIAN is a collective illustration project that pays homage to the legendary THE NEW YORKER through the covers of a nonexistent magazine. More than 100 artists illustrate their relationship with the lived city, with the city of their loves and hates, to show us corners, scenes, anecdotes and episodes from the multiple perspectives of their unique view.
Icahn seen clearly now the gains have gone
Also: Consultants Consult, 'Sad' Goat, God-given Middle Finger, Orca Moms & more in The 2023 Headline of the Year Nominees [X, nitter]
The harshest judgments came from strangers
Age-gap discourse, which is aimed primarily at older men dating younger women, grew out of that movement’s concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent. But it also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — “Believe women” — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them. from They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them? [The Cut; ungated]
“Is this a place full of buffoons?"
"Lance is one smart motherfucker,” says Kim Cruz, my Lyft driver, of Lance Gilman, the mastermind behind the industrial park. With his trademark Stetson and salesman smile, Gilman has been the not-so-secret power center in northern Nevada, a one-man mini-government that seems to run local politics, corporate affairs, and other hijinks from the same cell phone. He’s been an elected county commissioner for the past decade, helping to write the regulations and codes for the land his development company owns and conducting business from a trailer behind the Mustang Ranch, the famous brothel he also happens to own, where we have now arrived. from A Nevada Tale: Tesla, Google, and the Mustang Ranch [Alta; ungated]
The soul of a library is something really complex
Here in the Manuscripts Room, the space itself looks the same, but it does not sound the same; depopulated, it is oddly quiet. Loudly quiet! This quiet is completely different from the constant rustle of ambient noise that counts as what we could call “library quiet.” Today, the distinctive energy of the Manuscripts Room is nowhere to be found: on a typical day, staff and readers alike are focused, on the clock, working swiftly and deeply, using fragile materials that are, by definition, unique and irreplaceable. This distinctive energy is the product of a thrilling alchemy of two forms of raw materials: readers, and the works in their hands. Absent readers, absent works, the reading room is just a room. from How to Lose a Library
The God of the Exodus story took sides
In the United States today, organized Christianity is mostly associated with restrictions on reproductive autonomy, countermajoritarian and white nationalist agendas, and an embrace of free enterprise economics (even though it has also played a central role in civil rights and progressive movements throughout U.S. history). A Theology of Liberation, by contrast, represents a tradition that put religious reflection at the heart of the struggle of the global poor. By embodying ambition instead of compromise, it also offered an alternative to the schismatic tendencies of multicultural liberalism. from Salvation Now
One of the great unsolved murders in Berlin
When I spoke to people from East Berlin who remembered the Hanno Klein case, they were generally inclined towards the view that the letter-bomb must have been sent by men involved with West Berlin’s construction companies: businessmen who were keen to be seen as dominant figures and now found themselves dismissed by Klein. People who would have liked a piece of the action but kept finding Klein standing in their way. People driven by greed for profits and fear of losses. from The Killing of a Berlin Power Broker [Granta; ungated]
John Waters' Christmas Cards, 1964 - Present
Every year, John Waters sends a personally signed Christmas card to a select list of friends [Xitter; Nitter]
A mix of death and cheese
Devotion to dairy has taken different forms throughout the Alps’s secluded valleys. “A popular culture of the cow … traverses all moments, objects, and events of the mountain peasant,” wrote Preiswerk. In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too, could mourn. Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots, as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark). from The Valley of the Cheese of the Dead
Goodbye, ADIEU
The only man unaccounted for was Alan
This story is one of painful probabilities and possibilities. A husband, father, son, and brother either died in a horrific accident or used that accident to flee the life he was living. Either way, he would probably no longer be alive today. His family is forever left with pieces of a puzzle that can’t be made whole. The shapes that fit together over time weren’t always pretty. The gaps may be uglier still. from The Truth is Out There [Atavist; ungated]
To think of fanzines is to think of our younger, stumblebum selves
Zines, at their most glorious, are indifferent to dignity, reckless in the statements they reel off, determined to make a virtue of their limited resources. Back in 1978, the editors of a book called Copyart likened the photocopier to a “magical machine,” something that produced the “unplanned” and “unexpected.” All the magic in Copy Machine Manifestos is from another time, another country. from Copy Machine Manifestos
There are pieces here only a billionaire could acquire
It is a coup then for the Tate to show such extraordinary (and extraordinarily expensive) pieces, and undoubtedly a benefit to the gallery-going public. A closer look at Gregor Muir’s job description reveals an emphasis not on curating, but on directorship of Tate’s international collection, which encompasses “[nurturing] and [expanding] the Tate’s existing international networks including the established acquisitions committees.” The show’s collaboration demonstrates success in this respect. Yet it sets a worrying precedent, especially given what feels like a lack of transparency into the monied roots of the show. from What We Lose When Curating Follows the Money
Moscow v Kyiv, now with Brussels
Putin tells Russia his war objectives are unchanged but EU to open membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova [BBC]
The Hole
“Is this the land that time forgot?” Lopez gets animated as he recounts the time, money and energy he’s sunk into his home and the neighborhood. His wife wants to move. Then, he softens as he explains why he stays. “I stay here because it’s quiet. It’s peaceful,” Lopez says. “This place, it’s idyllic.” from The Tiny NYC Community Forgotten for Decades [Bloomberg; ungated]
An idol with feet of clay whose demolition is long overdue
It is tempting to think that a career as long and productive as Kundera’s would finally assume a distinctive unity. But looking closely at the life and work has the opposite effect: what stands out are various ruptures and intimations of underlying incongruence, from Kundera’s disavowal of most of his early work in poetry and drama to his vacillation over the wording of his later texts, as well as his initial refusal to allow his late, French texts – from La lenteur (1995) to La fête de l’insignifiance (2013) – to be translated into Czech. from The Two Milan Kunderas by Alena Dvořáková
Cocteau Twinge
Poetry is not holy just because it speaks of things that are holy. Poetry is not beautiful just because it speaks of things that are beautiful. If we are asked why it is beautiful and holy, we must answer as Joan of Arc did when she had been interrogated for too long: “Next question.” from The Secrets of Beauty by Jean Cocteau [The Paris Review; ungated]
Years ago I dreamt that something would happen here
Jessica Hawkins vs. Karahnjukar Spillway [CW: advertising]
Laden down by the DOOM crew
To celebrate the 30th birthday of DOOM, here's a thread of everything that I've found that DOOM can run on. Some are real, some... maybe not. It's up to you to figure out which 😉 [X; nitter]
“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”
There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place. There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it. from Christmas on the Moon by Harrison Scott Key
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with Ruth
“Suddenly, I had this huge pile of body parts.”
“It’s something that we’re not supposed to like, we’re not supposed to be interested,” she says of the broad appeal of guts and gore. But she found that thinking about actual bodies in all of their vital carnality really brought the historical characters she had been studying to life. from History’s Five Best Body Part Stories [Nautilus; ungated] [CW: body parts, amputation, gore, history]
Endangered Fox?
A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. [via Hacker News]