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"It makes me feel some type of way"
In previous years, Moore might have sent out a text to family and friends seeking donations for the uniform. She might have asked the school if she could pay in installments. But this year, for the first time, she can cover it all herself. That’s because she has an extra $500 a month coming in — not from a third job or a side hustle but from the City of Chicago, which gives her the money to spend or save as she chooses. It’s part of an audacious new philosophy of government aid, an experiment of sorts that seeks to find out whether infusions of no-strings-attached cash can begin to break the cycle of poverty. from What $500 Means to Zinida Moore
The size of the bet up against the size of the market seems irrational
The pool of podcast listeners is growing, but the flood of shows on various streaming platforms makes it tough to break new hits. Facing competition across genres and formats, Spotify found that exclusive podcasts generally don’t draw subscribers away from its rivals. Podcast costs at the company rose €29 million in the first half of this year. from Spotify’s $1 Billion Podcast Bet Turns Into a Serial Drama [WSJ; ungated]
But That Myrrh Lasts You Only So Long
What if my dad was, like, Bill Of Nazareth, just, like, a guy with a truck and a snake? From Nepo Baby by Megan Amram [The New Yorker; ungated]
I Need His @
The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, combined with a cultural belief that anything public is fair game to exploit for clout, now means that all it takes is one random person on the internet to target you and lead a crowd in your direction. from The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech
Another Time at Bandcamp
Just go outside, and see
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. From The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure [Wired; ungated]
A New Age of Copper
But there was a darker side to his innovation. What it meant in practice was that rather than burrowing into a mountain, following a rich seam of ore deep into the earth, miners would now essentially demolish the entire mountain to extract its metal. This was not just mass production, but ‘mass destruction’. from The Discovery of Copper
All The Best Colas Have Chinese Spies
Anytime a company lays someone off, there’s a possibility the person will take something with them. Coke, holder of the world’s most famous trade secret, was particularly attuned to that risk. It had an intelligence-bureau-style classification scheme, like other corporations that deal in proprietary information, and it had software that tracked employees’ data use. That summer, as more and more employees learned they were leaving, the data loss prevention system began to ripple with alerts. from The Plot to Steal the Other Secret Inside a Can of Coca-Cola [Bloomberg; ungated]
Clothes are Always Tangled in Broader Social Struggles
Instead, the version of prep that persists is the democratized, constantly reinvigorated version that these three works trace. Always a multiracial, multiethnic project, prep has been shaped by striving women and queer people as much as by the insouciant WASP college men supposedly synonymous with the style. Troublingly, white nationalists in polos and khakis are perhaps the latest group to claim prep, clearly to blend in with people who would look askance at brown shirts and steel-toe boots. The style’s insistent spread beyond campus has spawned so many reinventions and remixes that it can be hard to pinpoint any longer exactly what qualifies as prep. If prep is everywhere, can we still recognize it as distinct? from We're All Preppy Now [The New Republic; ungated]
International Terroirists
For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago. from Wine’s True Origins Are Finally Revealed
New York Has a Soft Spot for Fabulists and Operators
Perhaps, in this era of impostor syndrome, everyone feels like they’re pretending to be someone other than themselves. So the real artistes of the medium, the ones who go all the way—they fascinate us. from Kyle Deschanel, the Rothschild Who Wasn’t [Vanity Fair; ungated]
Increasingly Industrialized, Abusive, and Faked
The Disturbing Secret Behind the World’s Most Expensive Coffee [CW: abuse of animals ]
The Ultimate Phantasmal Machine
The magical credo, “what we think we are”, has a positive and a negative aspect. On the positive side, it promises a world subdued to will. On the negative side, it threatens the possibility of becoming a captive to one’s own thought. If the world is to be subdued to thought, then thought must itself be subdued to will; but that is an unwinnable struggle if “you can no more keep a thought to yourself than you can hold a monopoly in the sunshine”. If your thought can penetrate and control everything, then it can also penetrate you, leaving you merely transparent, the will-less vehicle of thought, spilling in all directions, rather like radiation. from Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts
Thousands have been tricked this way
It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency. Crypto bros like to claim they were somehow helping the poor. But it seemed none of them had bothered to look into the darker consequences of a technology that allowed for anonymous, untraceable payments. From ‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text [Bloomberg; ungated]
To resort to such a crude tool shows how afraid and threatened they are
We Analyzed 1,626 Banned Books...Here's What We Found ... [data] ... Eight Authors on How It Feels to Have Their Books Banned [includes fashion notes]
I'd say, 'How's it going?' And he'd say, 'Fine--fine.'
Douglas [Adams] enjoyed being a famous writer, but he loathed the process of becoming one. That entailed writing. He just hated doing it. It was hard work and lonely. He was a man who coped badly on his own; he needed company. Without it, he could fall into a kind of listless vacancy. from The Berkeley Hotel hostage [The Bookseller; ungated]
I can’t even hope to be nothing
In translating Pessoa’s heteronyms, one thing we see clearly is the influence of reading on Pessoa’s plural and inquiring mind. I have no doubt that reading more than writing was his primary and long-lasting literary occupation. His marginalia are of great interest; so are his many influences. This is to say that the more we know about what Pessoa read and when, the better equipped we are as translators of his works—especially to see more clearly his poetical diction, meters, and rhythms at the core of each heteronymic voice. from Fernando Pessoa’s Unselving [The Paris Review; ungated]
Perhaps the revolution was the pair of running shoes all along
Yet if the generational pop sociology of The Big Chill has enduringly shaped both cultural constructions of American generations and our political understanding of the baby boomers, it obscures as much as it reveals. from You Can Always Get What You Want: On “The Big Chill” and American Politics [LARB]
Overstuffed and Increasingly Ornery
When you think about food too much, it becomes grotesque: meat in pools of its own juices, tangled spaghetti with clams like small scabs. I hadn’t felt hunger in weeks, but it was my obligation to eat. I felt heavy moving between kitchen and table as the guests got drunker and drunker, as they slumped in their seats but egged each other on to finish the crémeux. I watched Maria lowering a fat chunk of glistening steak into the dog’s mouth. The dog barely even registered the meat, just ate it dutifully. He was inured to it; every night he was pumped full of veal and velouté. Of course, the guests were also worried about the constant indulgence. They liked to look horrified as I brought out each new course, but really they were enthralled. They were paying for pleasure. They didn’t need to finish their plates or worry about what failing to do might signal to the kitchen. from La Dolce Vita
The Evidence for Better-Than-Human Performance is Starting to Pile Up
Human beings drive close to 100 million miles between fatal crashes, so it will take hundreds of millions of driverless miles for 100 percent certainty on this question. But the evidence for better-than-human performance is starting to pile up, especially for Waymo. It’s important for policymakers to allow this experiment to continue because, at scale, safer-than-human driving technology would save a lot of lives. from Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?
B is for Bomb
Among the virtues of bees you may not be aware of is their knack for detecting bombs. How? Science! Also: Pavlov
The journey of your life
Et In Arcadia Ego
The urban fog that has trailed shibboleths of progress to the Pacific Rim hovers over a reflection in once-clear water that looks final in its murkiness: finding the barbarisms of modernity exacerbated and multiplied on the outer cusp of the American continent, settled under the false assurance of beginning anew, we can no longer dispute that the monsters are us. It is through [Lana] Del Rey, a moody transplant with a made-up name, that this lineage finds its most opportune and poignant expression. A damsel in distress inured to the fatalism of our time, her songbook is a secular Revelation for the coming fall, illusions of redemption having all but burned out. from California Gothic [The Baffler; ungated]
These are anxious questions
The most illuminating way to analyze the function of criticism is, first, to situate its authority, or lack thereof, within the politics of the state; second, to relate it to the institutions of cultural production and distribution; third, to orient it to the intellectual practices by which the genre is produced; and fourth, to credit it as the product of the critic’s idiosyncratic mind. To narrate the authority of criticism in all its richness and variety requires starting from the inside of this arrangement, from the critic’s mind, and working our way outward, to the contexts in which criticism circulates. from The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, by Merve Emre
Maybe We're Fished For
Pynchon and Gaddis are “wild talents” not in Fort’s original sense, but in their daring willingness to incorporate such exotic material into their novels, which previously had been confined to science fiction, fantasy, and occult novels. At any rate, it is an extraordinary coincidence that two of the greatest American novels of the 20th century evoke Charles Fort, of all people, despite what he thought of coincidences. from Wild Talents: Pynchon, Gaddis, and Charles Fort by Steven Moore
In order to succeed in a hypercapitalist society, we must focus
What is distraction? Maybe it is just the need to be diverted: from the direction you originally set out on, from what it was you thought you wanted to do. After all, to desire something requires projecting yourself into the future—how do you know you’ll still want it when you get there? And along the way there are so many attractions, way stations, spots of time. Even an annoyance can be a pleasure: a fly keeps buzzing around your head while you try to write the next sentence, a ringtone interrupts the movie, and—it’s you. Just this one time you’ve forgotten to turn your phone off. If only the world would stop bothering you, you could finally get down to work. from In This Essay I Will: On Distraction [The Paris Review; ungated]
Bond Age
So deep are American cities’ reliance on bonds that without access to them, most would simply be unable to provide even the most rudimentary social services. When lockdowns spread in the spring of 2020, slowing cities’ revenues from sales taxes and user fees to a trickle, the Federal Reserve stepped in almost immediately to offer $500 billion in short-term municipal debt financing. The measure, called the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), backstopped the market as it “imploded in real time.” from Bond Villains
Cell Phones
“What did I do,” he began. He took a deep breath. Without visible emotion, he described gaining access to bank accounts belonging to Sidney Kimmel and to the doctor in Alabama, using their funds to buy gold coins, and shipping the coins to Atlanta. “I got possession of it,” he started to say, when one of his attorneys cut him off. “I think that’s enough,” the lawyer said. The judge accepted this, then shook his head. “If you would have taken the ability and knowledge you have and put it towards something that was legal and right—” he said, in Cofield’s direction. “I would be investing my money with him,” one of the lawyers said. from How a Man in Prison Stole Millions from Billionaires [The New Yorker; ungated]
MiniFilter
Thankfully, there are still off-the-beaten-path pockets of astonishment out there and I thought it might be nice to gather some of them together. So, here is a selection of online things I love, and that other people I asked love – old and new stuff that is fascinating, beautiful, edifying and, above all, fun. Maybe one or two of them might give you a bit of internet joy back, too. from
Fish doorbells! Historic sandwiches! 50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web – picked by an expert
[Grauniad; ungated] CW: sadly, lacks all MetaFilter]
Monotype-oly
Fonts are a ubiquitous commodity. Every font you see — on your computer screen, a street sign, a T-shirt, or your car’s dashboard — has been crafted by a designer. With 4.5k independent artists selling on MyFonts today, many struggle to attract customers and to make a living in an oversaturated market. It’s only getting harder, as designers must compete with and abide by the terms of one company that’s approaching behemoth status: Monotype. from Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly
A Technology of the Self
A Writing Studies Primer attempts to supplement and enhance the necessarily instrumental nature of a handbook for composition courses by cultivating students’ awareness of writing as a culturally determined act. This is great. But, teeming with factual errors and underpinned by a triumphalist Eurocentrism, it only embraces the surface relativism of liberal values, which ultimately needs history to be quaint so that the surface relativisms of modernity can emerge as modernity’s greatest distinction. from Slanting the History of Handwriting
Notes on a Criminal Conspiracy
We are not in the Eighth dimension, we are over New Jersey
My criticism of the empty atom picture isn’t meant to shame people’s previous attempts to describe atoms and molecules to the public. On the contrary, I applaud their effort in this challenging enterprise. Our common language, intuitions and even basic reasoning processes are not adapted to face quantum theory, this alien world of strangeness surrounded by quirky landscapes we mostly cannot make sense of. And there is so much we do not understand. from We are not empty by Mario Barbatti
When It Came To drinking, I Was Damn Good At It
The subject of all great literature is either about redemption or its loss. Soteriology—that is the branch of theology that concerns itself with salvation—is the only worthy topic of prose, poetry, or drama. Whether you take any of that God stuff literally or not is irrelevant to this discussion. Noble, heroic, and good people corrupted or degenerated; sinful and wicked men made whole—either/or—those are the narratives which should concern any genuine art, because the turmoil within an individual mind, the canker and possible curing of the soul, is the only drama commensurate with the broken, flawed, limited, damning, painful, horrible, and beautiful experience of being trapped in a human body and a human life. from Darkness Visible [Ungated] [CW: alcoholism]
Meanwhile, the world … shrugs.
If one of the major narratives of 21st-century Hollywood has been the steady erosion of what were once referred to as midrange studio movies—films produced and aimed at a level somewhere between blockbusters and the indie/art-house scene—the increasing indistinguishability of theatrical and VOD aesthetics, in combination with the severe narrowing of theatrical release windows, has resulted in a crowded yet intangibly barren cinematic landscape. from Did You Even Know This Movie Exists?
“Let’s leave one island in Alaska for the cattle"
On the surface, Alaska as a whole appears an odd choice for cattle: mountainous, snowy, far from lucrative markets. But we’re here in June, summer solstice 2022, at “peak green,” when the archipelago oozes a lushness I associate with coastal British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. The islands rest closer to the gentle climate of those coasts than to the northern outposts they skirt. So, in the aspirational culture that Alaska has always embraced, why not cattle? from The Republic of Cows [Hakai]
“A Guy in an Ashcan Sending Messages”
Forty years on from the magnificent album sequence that began with Swordfishtrombones, collaborators and fans including Jim Jarmusch and Thom Yorke discuss Waits’s journey from bar-room balladeer to conductor of the ultimate junkyard orchestra from ‘All these bulletproof songs, one after another’: remembering Tom Waits’s extraordinary mid-career trilogy [Grauniad; ungated]
You were looking, O king, and lo! there was a great statue
It has struck me lately that the recurrent frenzy of destruction of prized objects in popular culture may tell us less about our current relationship to the past than it does about our fears for the future. After all, each effort a culture makes to preserve an object of admiration involves a wager about how later generations will need access to material that is already in some measure outmoded. If every museum may be understood to indicate something about what a culture anticipates or hopes will happen in the years ahead, to depend on a secular prophesy of value, the loss of protection, the acceptance of injury, even the cheerful anticipation of acts of violence may in turn need to be understood to be forceful indications of fundamental changes in values. from In The Age of Artpocalypse; Beauty and Damage on TV
Haulin' Bees
As the U.S. crept toward an overreliance on mono-agriculture, it eroded native pollinator populations, forcing the country to rely more and more on a species (European honeybees) that is both invasive and increasingly unstable. We strip the land to make more of the same crops and in doing so refortify our economic tentpoles and hasten our agricultural demise. The more the system grows, the more it precipitates the upheaval of the very thing it is most reliant on. from America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem [The Ringer]
The Trouble With BigAg
Since 2020, Americans have experienced rising food prices while farm closures have ticked steadily upward. Inflation and supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic have been explicitly or implicitly blamed in the news. However, the inflation narrative overlooks a more endemic, structural problem with the industry at large. from The Cartel That Controls the US Meat Industry
A Cautionary Tale
Yet within the sport, and even for the larger world, the Giants remain a cautionary tale: a high-profile example of what can happen when prejudice derails a talented organization or team, when discord and distrust become everyday elements in a workplace. Instead of dominating the big leagues with their core of talented Latino and African-American players, the Giants were perennial also-rans for most of the 1960s. from Giant Missteps
...But This Is Real
It's Hard
The tension at the heart of the natural proofs barrier is that the task of distinguishing high-complexity functions from low-complexity ones is similar to the task of distinguishing true randomness from the pseudorandomness used to encrypt messages. We’d like to show that high-complexity functions are categorically different from low-complexity functions, to prove P ≠ NP. But we’d also like for pseudorandomness to be indistinguishable from randomness, to be confident in the security of cryptography. Maybe we can’t have it both ways. from
Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge
One of the First Parts I Remember Noticing was the Section on Mermaids
Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books. The rest of this post is a few thoughts on why. from Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful by Benjamin Breen
The Trust Game
It makes sense to be wary of scams: you should not reply to your spam emails, no matter how much you’d like to help a prince retrieve millions from his trust fund. But there are costs to excessive scepticism, too, for both the self and the social order. A diverse body of evidence from psychology and behavioural economics can help us understand those costs. On a personal level, the fear of being suckered can encourage someone to be risk averse, to avoid the kind of cooperation that is essential to any new venture. At the systemic level, the stakes of distrust are even higher. from ‘Wait, am I the fool here?’ [Grauniad; ungated]
Grief is Not an Exclusive Club
Adults have spent years immersed in our culture’s troubled relationship with death. We may not like the various boundaries this relationship imposes, but we have been conditioned to accept them. For children, it’s different. from Notes from Grief Camp by Mitchell Consky [The Walrus; ungated]
The People Selling Drugs Here Are Merely Pawns
In a nearby town square, a skinny child in a Steph Curry T-shirt climbs a tree. A few blocks away, a three-wheeled mototaxi whizzes by, a San Francisco Giants sticker affixed to its bumper ... More extravagant emblems of San Francisco appear unexpectedly and often, alongside crumbling adobe huts, stray roosters and heaps of singed garbage. Handsome new homes, some mansions by local standards, some mansions by any standard, rise behind customized iron gates emblazoned with San Francisco 49ers or Golden State Warriors logos. from This is the Hometown of San Francisco’s Drug Dealers [SF Chronicle]
Cat-Scam
Yet the case still might have fizzled if not for the presence, in Tulsa’s Riverside Street Crimes Unit, of an officer with the improbable name Kansas Core ... the cat racket was hardly a choice assignment. “There’s this ‘We don’t care about catalytic converters, because it’s a property crime’ ” camp at the department, Staggs says. “It’s not a sexy crime. It’s not the robberies and the homicides.” When the previous commander gave Core the case, it wasn’t exactly hazing, but it wasn’t far off. “I’m pretty sure that lieutenant basically was like, ‘Core, you’re the up-and-coming guy,’ ” Staggs says. “ ‘Your last name is Core, and all the criminals call these cores. Here you go.’ ” from How Tulsa cops brought down a $500 million catalytic converter crime ring [Bloomberg; ungated]
The Particularities of Political Action Disappear in an Opalescent Wash
There are two ways of reading the central Maríasian lesson that we are nothing more nor less than the stories we tell about ourselves. In its negative form, it admonishes us that life is a brittle, insubstantial thing, a story that goes on falsifying itself day after day. In its positive form, it posits that we are constantly inventing ourselves afresh—indeed, that there is something fundamentally life-affirming in the phantasmal nature of the self. from Empty Suits by Bailey Trela
Laying Cable
There's only one internet, but strains can show when it connects countries that are at odds, for example when the Chinese government blocks Google and Facebook or US companies sever their connections to Russia's internet. These techno-political tensions have spread to the world of subsea cables. from The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet
The Songwriters Remain the Same
Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence ... How often has a top 5 hit been written only by women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.