Bookmarks (452)

The Shanti Sena Mini-Manual pretty accurately sums up the way the Rainbow Family of Living Light deals with violent situations when they arise at Gatherings. A gatherer shares a 'hipstory' about a personal experience involving the use of Shanti Sena. Michael Niman wrote an article about the technique. Niman also wrote a book about the Rainbow Family. There are a lot of different camps...

Xi Jinping Aims to Rein In Chinese Capitalism, Hew to Mao's Socialist Vision Mr. Xi's conviction: Chinese socialism under sole control of the party will prevail over U.S.-style capitalism. ...when the Chinese Communist party celebrated its centenary on July 1, Mr. Xi donned a Mao suit and stood behind a podium adorned with a hammer and sickle, pledging to stand for the people. After...

The Writers Guild of America "Find a Writer" search is fun. IMDb has a ton of ads these days and the WGA site is, in contrast, calm and text-based. See TV and movie writing credits for writers such as Naren Shankar, Gretchen J. Berg, Glen A. Larson, Susannah Grant (the writer of Erin Brockovich), Jane Espenson, Callie Khouri (the writer of Thelma and Louise,...

America is a pyramid scheme. "It relies on people buying into the American Dream and then working hard to get to the top. But of course - almost no one does. Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor." So reads the buried lede in Anne Helen Petersen's insightful interview with Meg Conley where they discuss 'LulaRich,' a...

How the world got Abiy Ahmed and Ethiopia so wrong "In less than two years, Abiy has gone from darling of the international community to pariah, condemned for his role in presiding over a protracted civil war that, by many accounts, bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region." Biden Threatens New Sanctions Against Ethiopia...

Award-winning Cherokee writer, activist and journalist Rebecca Nagle [ᎪᎯᏂ ᏓᏆᏙᎠ. ᏣᎳᎩ ᎠᏰᎵ ᎨᎳ.] has focused the second season of her This Land podcast (previously, previouslier) on a Texas foster care case that is turning out to be something much more ominous: a far right federal trojan horse using Native children, and aiming for the wholesale dismantling of American Indian rights in the U.S. Episodes,...

Patricia Lockwood (LRB, 08/12/2021), "Pull Off My Head": "Is Bear one of those 1970s books about growing out your armpit hair? Kind of, but not only. Is it a metaphor for our relationship to nature? Fuck off." Marlena Williams (LitHub, 10/23/2020), "Sylvia Plath... Nature Writer?": "'The Fifty-Ninth Bear' taught me about the darker, sulfuric thing bubbling under the surface of love, and I became...

Originally postponed for renewal by the pandemic, garment brands and global unions have come to an agreement on workplace safety. The original accord grew out of a response to several factory fires in Bangladesh in 2010 where workers were killed due to unsafe working conditions. The deal has only been renewed for two years, and many major US brands, such as Walmart, the Gap,...

Stephen Sondheim was being stymied by historical events. After the truly massive success of Into The Woods, he delved into darker subjects for his next show, 1990's Assassins. An exploration of the American Dream and the broken people it fails, the show opened Off-Broadway just a month before the First Gulf War began. Public sentiment during wartime didn't favor criticism of US culture, and...

After a 35-year run leading Chicago's most prestigious theater company, Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls is to resign, effective at the end of the current season in August 2022. Falls' decision, which he said was not made under any kind of internal or outside pressure, brings the exit of Chicago theater's premier auteurist director, an unusually eclectic artist known throughout the world of...

"We have to be willing to let someone else make mistakes and do it worse sometimes." Marissa Lingen reminds us that it's important to step back from particular volunteer jobs if you've been doing them for a long time -- for your own sake, and for the health of the organization. And: "Also of concern, and very hard to bring up: sometimes A's skills...

Adia Victoria's version of "You Was Born To Die" (feat. Kyshona, Margo Price, & Jason Isbell) knocked me flat. She's one of the seven women of color set to open Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit's upcoming series of concerts at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Sound up, enjoy the YT jukebox. Brittney Spencer: covering Landslide Mickey Guyton: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Amythyst Kiah: Black Myself...

"Impairment phenomenology is different from other kinds of phenomenology in that it does not assume a subject in command of their own faculties." Scholar Jonathan Sterne has written a forthcoming book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment; the introduction is now available (PDF, 54 pages, 2.5MB). The introduction briefly explains what phenomenology is, and discusses disability simulations, Sterne's own experience of thyroid cancer...

[wikipedia] Sir Clive Marles Sinclair (30 July 1940 – 16 September 2021) was an English entrepreneur and inventor, most commonly known for his work in consumer electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He passed away on the morning of 16 September 2021 after a long illness. [Guardian] Sinclair was most famous for inventing the tiny, affordable ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum computers....

Let Me Say This With As Much Sensitivity As I Can: Wow, That's a Lot of Dead People and Crime. Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate on the long, strange history of disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh's family.

With so many disasters pumelling the UK simultaneously—Brexit, Covid, GB News—it's nice to see that our most famous sponge monarch has decided to share her innermost thoughts with us as a balm to a broken nation. Queen Elizabeth II is now issuing a digital newsletter, defiantly written in her own hand and controversially available to aristocrats and commoners alike, and it's a true delight....

Let the arguing begin. Rolling Stone first published its 500 Greatest Songs list in 2004, when the iPod was relatively new and Billie Eilish was three years old. Music has changed immeasurably since, so they remade the list from scratch.

An ongoing twitter thread exploring the lowest it's possible to spend to get a million of something. "Manufactured products only, must be ordered by specific quantity written on the pack or in singles ('pack of 10'). Must not be ordered by volume ('ml')."

Enough with the GDP — it's time to measure genuine progress - "Unlike GDP, the Genuine Progress Indicator is designed to measure economic performance from the perspective of ordinary American households, not corporations or Wall Street investors."[1,2] Use of the GPI in federal decision-making processes would correct many of the shortcomings of relying on GDP by differentiating between government and consumer expenditures that are...

eBooks vs Printed Books: Which are better? The history of the book starts with the development of writing, paper and printing. Now there's an ongoing debate over which is better - e-books or paper books. 1. Experience: Ebooks Are an Abomination How Reading ebooks Changes Our Perception (and Reviews) Paper Books vs eBooks Statistics, Trends and Facts [2021] This survey shows that people prefer...

"The Federal Signal Thunderbolt siren is one of the most famous 'older sirens' in the history of sirens." Check out the high-low fire signal on this one in Sarnia, ON, one that's flooded, in Maysville, OK, one on full alert in Seminole, OK, an alternate wail in Saint Paul, NE, an unwell example in Riceville, IA, or watch private owners of various Thunderbolt models...

Behind Lil Nas X's Royal Met Gala Looks [6m27s YouTube video from Vogue] I thought it was fun to watch him have fun with very expensive clothing. Also, great looks!

Skylark, a 1941 popular song with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Hoagy Carmichael and the jazz stylings of Ella Fitzgerald...

"If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence." Clive Thompson's "Rewilding Your Attention" (Medium) is a brief reflection on the value of seeking out idiosyncratic content. Time to go...

""'Oh my God, please tell the truth,'" she recalled saying as Meyer spoke. "I was on my hands and knees, going, 'Please tell the truth, Urban, please.'" Urban Meyer would fail Courtney Smith that day, and he wasn't alone. Defector's conversations with Courtney and those who are close to her, as well as the examination of hundreds of pages of records from law enforcement,...

The Labyrinth (of Jareth) Masquerade Ball is an annual dance and narrative theatrical event, based in Los Angeles and inspired by the As The World Falls Down sequence from Jim Henson's Labyrinth (Fanfare). Photo galleries of attendees' elaborate costumes from the last seven years: '13 '14 '15 '16 '17 '18 '19. (The ball is planned to return in 2022 after two years of health...

How to Say What You Need to Say in Another Language. "You know those language textbook dialogues? Where people seem to talk more about silverware ("the fork, the knife") and what color things are more than any real person ever does and, having mastered these locutions, you get off the plane in a place where the language is spoken and can barely figure out...

In which a guy decries Sally Rooney, praises Ottessa Moshfegh, ties himself into a knot about Philip Roth, dumps on Ben Lerner, and includes the names Toni Morrison, Raven Leilani, and Zadie Smith.

There is no real guidebook for a woman alone in her home. No one threw me a shower. To give me pots and pans. The ones I'd left behind and couldn't afford to replace. No one to give me hammers and socket wrenches. No one told me about furnace filters or gutter cleaning or caulking. There was only me and a house and a...

Apartments Built on an Assembly Line [ungated] - "The pandemic put a general crimp in housing construction, but made a California factory that churns out prefabricated housing extra busy."[1,2] Mr. Holliday, who co-founded the factory with Larry Pace, said doing it this way, versus constructing a building on site, also cuts costs by as much as 30 percent. In the Bay Area, where the...

Money Is the One True God - Music video for the Blake Mills song, featuring amazing currency animation by Lachlan Turczan.

Over the years in China, "little fresh meat" celebrities and male beauty bloggers have disrupted the traditional image of what it is to be a man. But recently, Chinese cultural authorities have announced a purge of "morally flawed celebrities." Setting the frame was a widely promulgated blog essay on the "grit and valor" returning to Chinese culture that "will no longer be a paradise...

For Gawker, Bennett Madison writes about being a fabulist: "Help! I Couldn't Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published" Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move; after all, it was unpaid and I wouldn't even get a byline out of it. On the other hand, it was easy and creatively fulfilling.

The Grub Street Diet: Leon Neyfakh Always Waits Too Long to Eat. "Not to be dramatic, but this is something I genuinely hate about myself."

2021 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition – with links to annual Nikon Small World galleries back to 1975.

"We argue that the reason so little progress has been made against obesity and type 2 diabetes is because the field has been laboring, quite literally, in the sense intended by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, under the wrong paradigm. This energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional...

SCJN: aplica en todo el país despenalización del aborto. Abortion Is No Longer a Crime in Mexico. (NYT) Both these links came from my inbox, where I received this from a Latin America News Dispatch newsletter: MEXICO: Mexico's Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that criminal penalties for people who receive abortions violate the country's constitution. The ruling opens the way for people facing...

That time Rae Spoon cancelled their tours due to COVID-19 and then found out they had cancer I only met Rae Spoon once, when they were just starting to tour superioryouareinferior. That 2008 album is a lot of things, and haunting is one of them. If there was ever a perfect encapsulation of what it feels like to live in a place where the...

At the Miami Hurricanes home opener, a cat dangles for its life and then is rescued. 2LYT

The Maddox family walked and rode freight trains from Alabama to California. They came to California with $40 dollars and a dream. They worked the fields and orchards. When they decided to play music, they became the Most Colorful Hillbilly band in California. I first saw the Maddox Brothers and Rose perform when I was about six years old. I knew who they were...

Debarkle traces the history, events and subsequent consequences of the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy Kerfuffle at the 2015 Hugo Awards "Six years later, the differences and similarities in stance between the members of the so-called Evil League of Evil revolved around the same framing of world events as they had used for the Hugo Awards: that powerful "elites" were siding with left wing ideologues to...

The Public Domain Review introduces the 1913 parody children's book railing against modern art, The Cubies' ABC. (Including full text scans from the Internet Archive.)

Patti LuPone, Marin Mazzie, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Bernadette Peters, and Elaine Stritch all take the stage and take a turn singing some Sondheim. Thirty minutes of diva delight, with David Hyde Pierce to introduce them.

Finitism and Physics - "A brief precis: Gravitational collapse limits the amount of energy present in any space-time region. This in turn limits the precision of any measurement or experimental process that takes place in the region. This implies that the class of models of physics which are discrete and finite (finitistic) cannot be excluded experimentally by any realistic process. Note any digital computer...