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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]
The Eternal Jukebox
This web app lets you search a song on Spotify and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song.
The rate of catastrophes appears roughly constant over time
One argument against using historical base rates is that the present is so different from the past (e.g. due to technology) that base rates are meaningless. While today’s world is indeed different from the past, base rates can help sharpen rather than neglect these differences, by clarifying what’s actually new. For instance, the mere presence of technology cannot move us far above the base rate, because many technologies have been developed throughout history and none has caused a catastrophe in the sense defined above. Instead, we should look for technology that shares properties with the historical drivers of catastrophe: epidemics, famines, wars, political turmoil, climate changes, natural disasters, invasive species, and humans. from Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes
Trapping Jughead
She spent a month trying to help stray dog whose head was stuck in a jug [CW: happy ending]
Live shamelessly
The ancient Cynic outlook was negative, but the Cynic did not become trapped by their negativity, or use a negative outlook on life as an excuse for doing nothing, for giving up on life, or for giving in. Cynic negativity was not associated with the idea that if everything is bad, nothing can be done, so let’s do nothing. Rather, Cynic negativity spurred the Cynic into action. Negativity was employed in a quest to become free of unnatural restraint, and to conjure a less servile state of mind. Negativity released the Cynic from social obligations, and social ties, and allowed the Cynic to think differently about the world around them. from How to live like a Cynic
Free Money
What if the money you accumulated in life died with you? What if actuaries determined the amount of money people need to live a comfortable life, and earnings were capped there? What would a world look like in which the ardor of one’s work — not just luck and geography and privilege — determined a person’s wealth? from What If Money Expired? [Noema; ungated]
“Sounds ill ey gahl” … “Eh, kinda.”
“We’ll do it a few times,” Josiah remembers thinking. “We’ll cause trouble for a little bit, and then we’ll just forget about it. We’ll stop.”
from The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story [Wired; ungated]
A crucial part of the ideology of work-discipline
Our own perceptions of our current period of distraction therefore need to be seen in a longer perspective. Concentration is a social, learned behaviour that is more necessary in some contexts than in others. The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multi-episode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to. from The big idea: are our short attention spans really getting shorter? [Grauniad; ungated]
It's forever, this time I know
On Saturday night, Kiss closed out the final performance of their “The End of the Road” farewell tour at New York City’s famed Madison Square Garden. But as dedicated fans surely know — they were never going to call it quits. Not really. from Kiss say farewell to live touring, become first US band to go virtual and become digital avatars
For many of today’s students, the stakes are higher
A campus plot might not be as high-stakes anywhere else in the world, because the stakes of the real world would be totally different. Nash Jenkins, author of Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, said the campus itself “provides a sort of infrastructure that makes emotional intensities more coherent and less solipsistic.” But this is no longer entirely true, as the borders between the campus and “real life” are much more porous, and the campus is open for public scrutiny. from Is the Campus Novel Dead? [Esquire; ungated]
The new, sweet oranges quickly displaced the bitter variety
The word for orange and its cognates in several Indoeuropean languages arrived in Europe via Persian (نارنگ nārang then, and نارنج nārenj nowadays). At the same time, in Persian oranges are called پرتقال (porteqāl) which literally means... Portugal! Why is that? from Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
Finance is messy because the world is messy
But crypto kept growing until the control systems could not ignore them any longer. And the control systems cannot continue to avoid knowledge of the crimes. So, so many crimes. Many of them are what crypto advocates consider as utterly inconsequential, like serially lying on paperwork. And also Binance gleefully and knowingly banked terrorists and child pornographers. That’s not an allegation; that has been confessed to. There is no line a Bond villain will not cross. They will cross them performatively. from The Bond villain compliance strategy
Warm, but nuanced
Imagine a future that doesn't have to resort to the sledgehammer of social compulsion - no mandates and worse, and no risk of poorly designed and implemented mandates that arguably make things worse - because the infrastructure of public health is woven into the fabric of civilization. These worlds are possible, and a medium amount of funding into bio-defense could make it happen. The work would happen even more smoothly if developments are open source, free to users and protected as public goods. from My techno-optimism by Vitalik Buterin
Your Favorite Thing Sucks
What intrigues me about musical anhedonia, and the 5 percent of the human population who supposedly suffer from it, is the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that 5 percent is an underestimate. I strongly suspect there are a lot more than four hundred million people out there who would rather opt out. from Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters, an excerpt from Listen by Michel Faber
A study on the banality of evil
Racist, white supremacist, and far-right violence is on the rise. But while far-right actors often try to maintain a public image of normalcy, it is sometimes useful to look into their private spaces in an attempt to understand how their hate festers, evolves, and breeds when no one is looking. HowHateSleeps seeks to peek behind the curtain to look into these private sanctums. All images have been pulled from public court records except where otherwise indicated [CW: evil]
“What’s that thing with the fire?”
A perfectly executed Bananas Foster takes about three to four minutes to prepare. But a restaurant flambé requires additional time to allow the person who orders it to overshare about the one other time they ordered a flambé at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the south of France. Someone at the table will also invariably ask, “Have you ever burned anyone before?” (Thankfully, I have not — but I’ve definitely sent errant chunks of flaming banana out of the pan a couple of times like rogue fruit meteors, causing momentary bouts of panic and a few singed linens.) Every time a pan spiked with sugar and alcohol combusts, flambé sales go viral. One order and the entire restaurant goes up in flames. from Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur
I don't know whether I have any more of these in me
The industry side of the game is called the Company, but I came very, very close to calling it Capitalism because the tobacco industry isn't exceptional. The way it pursued profits at the expense of human lives wasn't some kind of mustache-twirling villainy. It is the consequence of capitalism and its incentives. And even if I ultimately decided to swerve from the name, I did want to reflect those incentives – the unsustainable and amoral pursuit of maximum profits, of infinite growth. from Doubt Is Our Product, or A Game About Tobacco Disinformation by Amabel Holland
Ge-brew-tlichkeit
The beer garden’s family-friendliness helped to promote beer as a temperance beverage and a “healthy” alternative to spirits. Over the course of the 19th century, the temperance movement had come a long way from promoting moderation to calling for total abstinence of all alcoholic beverages. To German Americans, temperance was more than a mere political issue; it symbolized cultural conflict that threatened their lifestyle and value system. For the brewers, their ethnic interest was greatly reinforced by their economic interest. from A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and German American Immigration
The whole thing is a complete disaster
Among seasteading enthusiasts, the excitement about the crypto ship was intense. A slew of promotional videos and a marketing website promised it would be for “everyone from digital nomads to YouTube influencers, start-up teams and established businesses”. Friedman took to Facebook, boosting Ocean Builders by name and adding: “So glad liberty activism has advanced from Guy Fawkes violence to peaceful exit!” He posted too soon. from The fake hitman, the crypto king and a wild revenge plan gone bad [Financial Times; ungated]
Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story
For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. from Poets in the Machine
We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves
Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone. from Loved, yet lonely
I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it
Loneliness is not only a feeling of a gap between oneself and others—it is a feeling of an active separation. The world pulls away and I turn from it, from the feeling of rejection, and step into open space. Arguably, if indeed we are born into loneliness, then one measure of what we call living is the ongoing attempt to overcome that isolation. That’s how we develop intimacy and its profound resolve in the face of that impossible distance. The risk lies in the fact that we might fail. The reward is that we all do, at times, succeed in our attempts to throw bridges out to the unseen shores deep in the hearts of others. from So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman [The Paris Review; ungated] CW: loneliness, depression, drugs, alcohol, suicide
Has a man ever looked more ran through than Daniel Craig?
ambassador Daniel von der Craig trying to decide if the EU is "concerned" or "deeply concerned" [nitter]
Reflex Holiday
The pope, it turns out, is a Bowel Guy
Everyone is giving him things. This, to me, seems crazy. Why would you give something to the pope? He has like four things, and one of them is God. Imagine if I kneeled down in front of him and presented him with a critical essay about his 2015 prog rock album titled ‘Notions of Sleep and Alertness in Bergoglio’s Wake Up!’ Actually, one guy does get down on his knees and then sets off a wave of other people all getting down on their knees. I guess that’s how the whole thing started in the first place. from When I Met the Pope by Patricia Lockwood [London Review of Books; ungated]
“The truth of the world is exhausting.”
Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas.
Some obscure and mysterious mix of expected and unexpected
Regardless of how we understand “timelessness,” that vague but irreplaceable quality we take to inhere in any classic, a good joke comes as close as possible to embodying its reality in the written word.
"The sun still succumbs to a nightly recession into darkness"
Increasingly, it becomes clear that no one really knew Joyce. In all the versions people had of her, there seemed to be so little room left for who she really was. Whether it was self-preservation or sheer lack of genuine care that kept Joyce from opening up to anyone in her life, it seemed like loneliness was always bound to catch her. from Why Did Joyce Carol Vincent Die Alone?
That feel of convenience has always been a trick of perception
Perhaps an even larger issue than the problems that self-checkout directly creates is the set of behaviors its presence can enable—from executives, from employees, and from customers. Retail executives, looking for any available corner to cut in order to juice short-term profitability, took self-checkout’s proliferation as a license to trim store staffing to the bone. Many stores are now messier, their shelves go unstocked for longer, and customers have a harder time finding the products they’re looking for or employees to answer their questions. Retail jobs, which have long been low-paying, precarious, and unpleasant, are now even worse. from Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment [The Atlantic; ungated]
A favor economy
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with relying on praise from authors and notable figures to decide which books are worthy of industry attention, most authors secure blurbs not based on the merit of their work alone, but rather who they know. And as is the case in all walks of life, who you know is often directly linked to the level of privilege you carry within that community. In this way, blurbs can demonstrate which authors are the most connected within the industry, perhaps more than whether or not a book is actually “luminous.” from 'A Plague on the Industry': Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System [Esquire; ungated]
Buggin' out
In North America, nearly all songbirds feed insects to their young. But since 1970, the number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29%, or roughly 2.9 billion, which scientists theorize is tied to having fewer insects in the world. Some research also has linked insecticide use with declines in barn swallows, house martins, and swifts .... “Nature is just eroding away very slowly,” Wagner said. As insects disappear, “we’re losing the limbs and the twigs of the tree of life. We’re tearing it apart. And we’re leaving behind a very simplified and ugly tree.” from The collapse of insects
Webring Out Your Dead
Some of us may view these options as exciting. Others may recoil. Still others may simply shrug. No matter your reaction, though, you will almost certainly leave behind digital traces. Almost everyone who uses technology today is subject to “datafication”: the recording, analysis, and archiving of our everyday activities as digital data. And the intended or unintended consequences of how we use data while we’re living has implications for every one of us after we die. from The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry
Big Flag Post
How Do the World’s Largest Flags Actually Fly? ...
Massive flagpoles are all the rage, and hugely divisive ...
The Big Flag ...
Flags as big as football fields: The story of giant American flags ...
Why do they need such a big flag? [MeTa]
A murky engine of influence
The list is as much a cultural signifier as it is an accurate index of what the public is reading. The tagline makes it easier for readers to find a book within today’s info glut and makes it easier for an author to convince a publisher to let them write another one ... “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she says. “It has a cumulative, rich-get-richer effect, if you’ve managed it successfully.” Sales come and go, but a NYT bestseller bio line is forever. from The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list
A Kind of Kinky Turing Test
This adds another layer: Beyond just being financially dominated, the user is further made lesser by the fact that they’re being dominated by something that isn’t even trying to seem human ... “A lot of kink and submission also has to do with ‘depersonalization.’ I think that being dominated by AI is just a way to feel further separated from one’s human identity,” Witt-Eden explained. “By interacting with an inanimate computer program, one also becomes an inferior object.” from Welcome to the Kinky World of AI Financial Domination