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Jeff Daniels Loves His Guitar, And Talks About Other Things
So, Jeff Daniels recently visited the Kelly Clarkson Show [13m]. It was an entirely lovely and kind visit full of humanity. But the real surprise is his confession of the love of playing guitar, having written a zillion original songs, and his performance of a song about how the guitar is his best friend and he moves Clarkson to tears with his performance. It's entirely unexpected, and I'm sorry to have spoiled it for you, but how else could I have gotten you to watch this interview?
Am I too small to be recognized as a small press?
The vague idea that “we’re all in this together” comes at the expense of the smaller organizations and most marginalized writers.
There are inspiring local stores that love and stock indie books and are essential allies to smaller presses making this choice despite the commercial obstacles to it... But many independently owned, noncorporate bookstores aren’t willing to work directly with SPD or individual publishers, which would require more labor but offer better terms than Ingram. They don’t value independently published, noncorporate books enough to push back on or find alternatives to [Ingram].
Critical Hominin Theory
"The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred". A reconsideration of pre-human ancestors from biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks.
Thoughtful paper about ChatGPT
This paper describes an old and a new way to think about ChatGPT.
Borges and AI is the title; the authors take a high-level view of the entire potential corpus of ChatGPT, guided by a few of Borges' stories that explore universes of infinite possibilities.
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]
"All I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work"
When these endeavors, some of which resulted in unauthorized adaptations of both his books and his own persona, came to light, occasionally exploding into unprecedented legal battles, the ever-resisting Salinger was regarded sort of as a cantankerous ghost of an author—a once welcome houseguest rattling dusty chains at the unassuming newcomers he thought were messing around with things he left behind .... Yet his belief that total ownership is not relinquished with public publication, as well as his radical enforcement of copyright law and reliance on the right to privacy, revolutionized the role of the “author” in modern culture, and consequently helped preserve both his identity and his works as masterful and mythic American originals. from Phonies: J.D. Salinger and Wielding Copyright as Self-Protection
The Central Characters in These Films are Everyday People
In these films, sexuality pervades, not as a troublesome interloper, but as an all-consuming directive; like hunger, it is dangerous only when thwarted. It refuses to be relegated to the shadows. Like buried trauma, sex demands an audience. The perennial discourse of the plot-relevant sex scene—does it or does it not exist, and should it?—can find no footing here: sex is the plot, and it does so much more than titillate. It communicates. There is not just the soft-focus romantic lovemaking we’ve come to expect on-screen; there is also fucking for anger, shame, sorrow, and all the ugliness of which we fear to speak in the light of day. There is transgression and discomfort. There are real taboos hard at work between the sheets. What there aren’t, though, are thrills. These sex tragedies are downbeat, enervating to the last frame. Call this genre the “erotic bummer.” from In the Mouth of Sadness: On the Erotic Bummer [LARB; ungated]
Joan Didion, the Death of R.F.K. and a Mystery Solved
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
"In the past, moments of national trauma had provided an opportunity for unity and cohesion. But Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that’s not too different from the one we’ve come to recognize today. " Fascinating thought piece (NYT) about Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne's reaction to RFK's assasination while in Hawaii.
Mental Illness is Not In Your Head
What do we have to show for a century of psychiatric research?
In a review of recent books by Anne Harrington and Andrew Scull, the historian of medicine Marco Ramos follows the changing fashions in twentieth and twenty-first century psychiatry--from eugenics to brain dissection to lobotomies to psychoanalysis to DSM to Big Pharma to psychedelics--and offers an unsparing assessment of the field's ethical record, scientific discoveries, and public health achievements.
King of the Delta Blues Liars
Digging into Robert “Mack” McCormick’s archives to find out what he had learned about Robert Johnson uncovered a writer far more complicated and problematic than his subject.
A lifetime of old-fashioned research repeatedly failed to deliver multiple projects, yet the one everyone was after was a completed manuscript on Robert Johnson.
Texas Monthly finally gets to write the story about the story.
You Know the Advertisement of the Man
For the time, it would certainly have been subversive and risky to base the country’s most prominent symbol of haughty masculinity on Leyendecker’s own gay lover. Their forbidden love was in everyone’s faces in the ads of one of the country’s most prominent clothing manufacturers and on the covers of America’s favorite conservative magazine, though it remained hidden in plain sight—so much so that few sources even mentioned Leyendecker’s homosexuality until fairly recently. The Arrow Collar Man specifically, and the Leyendecker Man more generally, became the model of style, sophistication, and masculinity. What Maketh a Man: How queer artist J.C. Leyendecker invented an iconography of twentieth-century American masculinity by Tyler Malone
it’s nice when it’s nice I’m sure it’s super horrible when it’s horrible
I was trying to explain the plot of The Matrix to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really fighting for what was real. And this young person was just like, “Who cares if it’s real?” People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art. It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the nonvalue. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us? from Keanu Will Never Surrender to the Machines [Wired]
The Departed Queen
When amateur chess player Dana Mackenzie sat down against International Master David Pruess in the last round of the 2006 Western States Open, he was outrated by 345 points, making the game a huge mismatch on paper. The game took a strange turn when as early as his sixth move Mackenzie gave up his queen for only a bishop and knight, a preposterous speculative sacrifice that seemed incredibly unlikely to work, especially against a player much more skilled than him. But what his opponent didn't know was that Mackenzie had already practiced this position against his computer a hundred times.
Time Sync
CERN engineer Daniel Valuch discusses synchronizing a pendulum clock with the ALPHA Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock.
Recommendation for a sleep dress?
I seem to remember a comment in the last few months on AskMe for a sleep dress on Amazon that was long enough not to ride up and/or cool (temperature-wise) to sleep in. I'm not finding it on searches on AskMe or on Amazon. Help?
It starts in 2023...
A simple tale about how things are going to go. Six parts, just keep hitting "Next".
Long Roads Full of Switchbacks and Roundabouts
Like the novel itself, this essay has digressed. I set out to describe what it can be like to write a novel and why I think it’s worth all the work and uncertainty, and the same with reading them. Somehow I wound up wondering how we can all tolerate each other. from Why Write a Novel, Why Read a Novel, and Why Now? by Suzanne Berne [LitHub]
An Inappropriate, Indispensable Form
Weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. from The Weak Novel by Lucy Ives
Alan MacMasters: How the great online toaster hoax was exposed
For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.
“Now you're playing with power!”
Someone Named Gumball Uploaded All 285 Issues Of Nintendo Power To Archive.org
“All 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.” [via: Kotaku]
The archaeology of shipwrecked Lego
This is the story of what happened when a container full of precisely 4,756,940 pieces of Lego washed off the cargo ship Tokio Express during a storm off Land’s End in February 1997.
"Even harder to find are examples of the 4,200 black Lego octopuses that had also been on board – they are almost impossible to spot when caught up in seaweed. As Tracey reminisces in the book, she found her first octopus back in 1997, not long after the cargo first went missing, but did not discover another one for a further 18 years."
madeleine_basketball.avi
The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater.
Brian Feldman published an investigation into the origins of a classic viral video, identifying the kid knocked down by an errant full-court shot and talking to him years later. But then he kept digging—and ultimately revealed that memories, even when they're broadcast on national TV, can be faulty.
I realized I was a bit of a sentimental hoarder
« Buy storage », they advise, « back up », save, save, save. All Is Not Vanity. An essay by Noga Arikha.
on the more complicated end of state desserts
Within the United States of America, regionally beloved goodies are also a thing. It's easy to see how history has played a part in that. In corn-laden Midwestern states like Nebraska, sweets involve popcorn. In whiskey-filled Kentucky, you'll find bourbon in the candies. Sampling these recipes easily illuminates a part of a state's food culture — hopefully, a delicious one. For your next road trip, don't forget to leave room for dessert. Here are the absolute best desserts in every US state.
Aurora Ave. Past & Future
To Improve a STROAD: How One City Is Reimagining an Orphan Highway // Aurora Avenue in Seattle
- CityNerd (20m)
So today's video is a case study on an orphan state highway, State Route 99 in north Seattle, AKA Aurora Avenue. We'll do a field visit and look at all the ways Aurora fails the people who live, work, and play there, examine the legacy of north Seattle's substandard urban infrastructure, and look at recent improvements to transit that might be a starting point for a better future.
Finally, we'll talk about how advocacy groups, the City, WSDOT, and King County Metro are coming together to reimagine the street, and how Aurora attracted $50 million in this year's state infrastructure package to make real changes on one of the street's most challenged segments.
Surviving recession: tips from a pro
Macron sounds gloomy. The founder of Huawei sounds a bit doom-y. In these trying, potentially recessionary times, the Daily Beast's Cherie DeVille offers advice in A Porn Star’s Guide to Surviving the Recession. "Whether you’re a porn star, a secretary, or a freelance copyeditor, diversify now. Nobody will have a safety net to catch you besides yourself. Diversification is your safety net."
All comedy is Black
"theGrio's celebration of Black Comedy Month begins with the history of the Black artists who created modern comedy", and continues with "How Richard Pryor killed the white comedian"
Hank Green Explains the Climate Bill
"This is a big problem, that no one person understands all of. But in this video you're going to go from understanding more than like, 80 or 90% of people, to understanding this more than 99% of people. And it's only going to take you like 15 minutes". (SLYT 22:23)
He responded, “Your cost of compliance is not my problem.”
But Benford says the first complaint that put the couple on the city’s radar came from a white neighbor in 2003. “That lady would ask me to come help her move things, or fix something,” Benford says. “She’d ask for rides to and from the bus stop. Come to find out she was reporting us to the city the entire time.” Radley Balko for Nashville Scene with an extensive investigation into the explosion of Metro Code violation reports largely targeting Black and low-income home owners in the city.
When and how Big Mike replaced Michael
In "The Life of a South Central Statistic," Danielle Allen wrangles with the life and death of her cousin, Michael. While she went on to receive two PhDs, he was convicted of robbery and attempted car jacking. When he was released, she tried to help him get a second chance. (This is an excerpt from Allen's forthcoming book, Cuz. )
“It’s kinda the squeak I was looking for,” Curtis said softly.
The Weird Analog Delights of Sound Effects.
"Roden estimated that only twenty per cent of sounds onscreen are generated by the actual objects represented. This presents certain challenges: when a sound cannot be described by its referent, language starts to falter. Over time, Roesch, Roden, and Curtis have developed a lexicon to describe what they want. Sounds are poofy, slimy, or naturale; they might need to be slappier, or raspier, or nebby (nebulous). They are hingey, ticky, boxy, zippy, or clacky; they are tonal, tasty, punchy, splattery, smacky, spanky. They might be described phonetically—a “kachunk-kachunk-kachunk,” or a “scritcher”—or straightforwardly (“fake”). Tools, too, have their own names. Shings make shiny metallic sounds—a sword being drawn from its scabbard—and wronkers give the impression of metal sliding across a hard surface. “Like, chhhrtz,” Roesch clarified."
“time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE”
A revolution in time
is a short essay by archeologist and historian Paul J. Kosmin about how the Seleucid Empire invented the practice of an endless year count, still used in calendars today, replacing the regnal or cyclical year naming schemes. And by making it possible to think about the future, it led to the idea of the end of time, the apocalypse. If you want to learn more about Kosmin’s ideas, you can watch his lecture, listen to an interview [iTunes link], or buy his book Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. Finally, here are a couple of reviews of the book, by G. W. Bowersock [PressReader link] and John Butler.
There was good money to be made as a beatnik
Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer.
Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them.
"But I knew that all was not ok."
Maria Farrell wrote advice for people struggling with the effects of COVID in 2020: "Indefinitely Ill – Post-Covid Fatigue: What to do when your body forgets how to be well": "Because I really only want to say one thing; if you have had Covid-19 (tested or not), and are getting to a month or two on and still feel like you’ve been hit by a bus, please, for the love of God, rest." Last year Ada Palmer wrote about a bad turn in her health: "the resistance to taking medical leave came from me, not others." This month Farrell wrote "Settling in for the long haul": "about how I habituated, or; how I learnt to lie not with my words but my deeds" when coping with life-changing chronic illness.
Бортовые Часы Космические
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. The clock, manufactured in 1984, contains over 100 integrated circuits on ten circuit boards. Why is the clock so complicated? In this blog post, I examine the clock's circuitry and explain why so many chips were needed. The clock also provides a glimpse into the little-known world of Soviet aerospace electronics and how it compares to American technology.
Fire Island Soundtrack
A couple moved into a house on Fire Island and found 20 years worth of cassettes, documenting DJ sets and party soundtracks from 1979-1999.
Over 200 tapes are being digitized and uploaded to MixCloud.
The Rise, and Fall, and Rise Again of Polyester
Somehow, polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It reinvented itself thanks to advances in materials science, and did it so successfully that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.
How Polyester Bounced Back
Short story involving children seeing an alternate world in the holes of stones
Short Story Filter. I remember a short story that I read in a sci-fi story anthology back in the mid 90's that I haven't been able to find since.
There are a group of three boys, one of them substantially younger, who play out in a big field. One of the older boys tells the younger boy, as a joke, that if you look through the hole in the middle of a stone, you can see into another world of some kind. Mysterious circumstances then occur.