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“136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dali, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs.” → Salvador Dali’s Rare Surrealist Cookbook Republished for the First Time in over 40 Years. Thanks, Reader M.!
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Fascinating history of movable type in China…400 years before Gutenberg. → Johannes Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife
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For those of us who don’t have \$625 to spare (or \$300 for a used copy), behold Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Headword search, definitions and etymologies are free, advanced search tools (including the ability to search for words by meaning, history, and usage), full historical citations in each entry, and a bibliography of over 9,000 slang sources for \$60 per year. See also: an interview with Green on Wordnik and the Quartz story “This man has spent 35 years compiling entries for a 132,000-word online slang dictionary that you can search for free.”
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I’m revealing one aspect of my peculiar nerdery here, but…you might enjoy Your Postal Podcast, “a monthly podcast highlighting USPS news, events and activities.”
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In Cinephilia & Beyond—an epically good site that I can’t believe I’d never come across before—a jaw-droppingly great piece on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Via Reader A.
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Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem. An old article, but—as it always does—the famous Trolley Problem get me thinking. Then a Facebook friend reminded me of the wonderful video series ► Justice with Michael Sandel that delves into this and many other philosophical conundrums. See also: the Justice web site including community discussion forums that one can hope are better than the YouTube comments.
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Today in 1854, playwright, poet, novelist, essayist Oscar Wilde is born in Dublin, Ireland. Known for his sharp wit—fairly characterized as both razor and rapier—Wilde authored required reading for page and stage, most famously The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with a seemingly endless stream of epigrams and one-liners. Not one to shy away from controversy, Wilde would attempt to sue the wife of a homosexual lover for libel only to see the evidence her side dug up used against him. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency,” an experience from which he never really recovered, though it inspired two more important works, “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written from self-imposed exile in France. Wilde would die destitute in a Paris hotel at just age 46, saying on one of his last forays outside of his room, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” For more on Wilde’s life, I highly recommend Richard Ellmann’s unsurpassed biography.
WEB
Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
Links: October 9, 2016
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If I were a rich man, one of these would be mine. → Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments
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Awesome photo series and story, shared simply and directly. → I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa.
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I’ll have the ampersand pizza…and tattoo. → Miscellany № 77: amperbrand.
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I’m not sure I’m buying what they’re selling even though I’m watching. → Why television writing has become the new home of verbal complexity
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Is “Snarxism” a thing? Is it killing conversation? → The Snarxist Temptation
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@DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot from an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) postdoc that uses neural networks trained on Donald Trump’s speeches and debate language to create Tweets that are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing. Pair (or rinse your palate) with @AMightyHost, which uses data sources including WordNet and Wikipedia to invent new fleets inspired by the catalog of ships in The Iliad.
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It hurt me more than it hurt them… → Kids Are Judgmental, Morally Pure Little Jerks
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On CBC’s q, an episode in which graphic designer Christopher Rouleau and writer Anne Trubek discuss the question Is handwriting obsolete in the digital age? Also, Every Day Commentary writer Anthony Sculimbrene takes issue with Trubek, Trubek responds and then Sculimbrene has one more go.
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Today is Leif Erikson Day in the United States, as established by the US Congress in 1964. Believed by many to have landed in North American more than 500 years before Columbus, Erikson established a settlement in an area he called Vinland (named after the abundance of grapevines found there) that was likely in the north of Newfoundland (though Cape Cod makes a persistent claim as well…and why not?). October 9 marks not any particular day of Erikson’s life, but the arrival of the Restauration in New York City, commencing the first organized immigration from Norway. Leif Erikson day is a state holiday in seven US States including, naturally, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Links: October 2, 2016
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“A Massive Crowdsourcing Project Is Digitizing Thousands of Coded Union Telegrams, and Unearthing Astonishing ‘Emails'” → Archiving the Civil War’s Text Messages. There’s more in Slate, including an example of a coded and decoded message. [Thanks, Reader C.!]
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Last summer we shared a bit about the Lituya Bay Megatsunami. Now, via Reader B., comes Damn Interesting‘s fantastic story about that terrifying event.
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ListiClock tells time using “a BuzzFeed list for every second of every day.” Speaking of lists (and when aren’t I?), here’s a useful Wikipedia List of common false etymologies of English words. And a not-so-useful List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.
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Jealousy, a fake love letter and a cursing acrostic that fooled the boring biographer…this little gem of a story has it all.
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Novelist Mauro Javier Cardenas chooses 9 Novels with Really Long Sentences…and not (only) the usual suspects! I imagine you Clamorites could come up with more… [Thanks, Reader B. and Maybe-a-Reader M.]
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Katexic favorite Marian Call is touring the west coast (of the US). If you can’t make one of those dates, you can always listen to (and purchase) her music on Bandcamp. Bonus: Marian talks a bit about—and performs a few songs with—her typewriter “Madeleine” (named after Madeleine L’Engle).
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Courtesy of auto complete, play Google Feud.
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I can already hear the cries of “but it’s not art!” → Amalia Ulman—The First Great Instagram Artist Lives Many Fake Lives
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Today in 1897, poet and Robert Frost Medal award winner (his feud with Frost notwithstanding) Wallace Stevens is born in Reading, Pennsylvania. A Harvard graduate, Stevens spent most of his life working as an insurance company executive and composing, mostly late in life, the poems that would establish him as one of America’s greatest (and poorly imitated) poets and the bane of high school students everywhere, banging their heads against their thick literary anthologies, tormented by visions of jars, blackbirds, ►ice cream and ►the nothing that is.
Links: September 25, 2016
- A web meander filled with treasure: a moving memory palace episode about Washington Phillips and a 1920s musician who left 18 tracks and a trail of myth and legend in his wake. For a taste, listen to Phillips’ ►Lift Him Up…and then just try not to listen to the whole playlist.
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Part of the Washington Phillips mystery was whether or not he played a dolceola, a “fretless zither” that looks like Schroeder’s miniature piano in Peanut. Turns out, he didn’t, but it’s a fascinating instrument. Fun to watch Andy Cohen demonstrate one of those little guys…even more to download (free!) Leadbelly’s Huddie Ledbetter’s Best featuring dolceola accompaniment by Paul Mason.
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I have zero desire to go to Burning Man. But—wow!—Victor Habchy takes some stependous photographs of the event.
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Speaking of amazing photography: Voyages follows six photographers to remarkable spots around the world.
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“…some of their findings run counter to received wisdom about the origins of creativity and how to foster it in human minds” → Scientific American on Where Creativity Comes From.
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Listen to a pop song in the style of The Beatles composed (mostly) by an Artificial Intelligence system called FlowComposer. More examples of AI compositions at the links.
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From American cheese to vaccines: 100 Objects That Shaped Human Health.
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“I made a troll honeypot on Twitter. It posts opinions on a couple dozen topics, then, when people respond to it, responds at random from a list of 18 possible replies.” » Botsplaining.
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Today in 1897, writer, terrible postmaster and Nobel Prize laureate William Cuthbert Faulkner is born in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, W.C. Falkner, had not only published a best-selling novel but was also a decorated Civil War colonel, eventually ousted for recklessness. In third grade, Faulkner was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied, “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy.” We have that desire and the constant penury of his hard-drinking writer’s life—-and the fact that at just 5′-5″ tall he was refused enlistment during World War I—to thank for some of the finest novels and short stories in the English language. In addition to his literary fiction, Faulker famously moved to Hollywood to write, as he put it, the two types of movie he was familiar with, “newsreels and Mickey Mouse cartoons,” a part of his life fictionalized in the Coen brothers film Barton Fink. Faulkner would write or re-write many screenplays including To Have and Have Not, the only film to have two Nobel Prize winners (Faulkner and Hemingway) associated with it and The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks…rather successful despite both Hawks’ and Faulkner’s claims afterward that they still didn’t know who the murderer was.
…I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
—William Faulkner
—from his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech
MoMA Exhibits from 1929 to Today
The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has created an archive with images from every one of its exhibitions from the very first “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh” installation (pictured above) in late 1929 until today. Awesome addition for the MoMA, which has already put images of more than 70,000 works online.
Links: September 18, 2016
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Behold, the Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine, just one kind of vending machine I’d consider placing in my office. And living room.
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Some fascinating visualizations of creativity and US cities using Kickstarter project data that both confirm and deny some common sense (and anecdotal) evidence. Dig in!
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An intriguing letter (in both language and detail) from Clyde Barrow—to former gang member Raymond Hamilton—in Bonnie Parker’s hand, is up for auction. At a $40K estimated price, it’s just a little too rich for me. But you can see and read the letter on the auction web site.
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Speaking of letters and correspondence: I’m not sure how I missed the amazing looking book Pen to Paper: Artists’ Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art until now! See an illustrated review and then just try to resist it. Clamorites interested in handwriting (and “hand-thinkers and hand-folders”) should make the Handwritten site a regular stop.
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An interview with John McWhorter, on the release of his new book Words on the Move, including notes on language drift and “literally” (literally).
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I’m not a massive sports fan, but…this: When a guy comes in ninth and still wins an Olympic medal, you know the drug problem in sport is bad.
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LOOK/HEAR “explores the relationship between scenes and soundscapes, looking and hearing. A system of aural and visual signals generates shifting typographic forms and triggers associations about people and environment.”
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Why Is the Basic Marble Notebook Made by So Many Brands Still So Popular?. Since 1886!
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Take a minute to check out these mesmerizing and varied examples of How Mapmakers Make Mountains Rise Off the Page.
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Today in 1851, the first issue of The New-York Daily Times (later to become simply The New York Times) is published, selling for just one penny. Originally a Monday-Saturday publication, the NYT would add a Sunday edition in April 1861 to accommodate US Civil War news. In 1914, the NYT—now famously branded with publisher Adolph Ochs’ jab at the salacious newspapers being printed by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer: “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—would become a global newspaper thanks to dirigible delivery to Europe. Known today both for its journalistic qualities and its forays into technology from its web presence and archives to its paywall, the NYT reported in 2013 that revenue from subscriptions eclipsed that from advertising for the first time in many decades. For all of its relative prominence online and in social media, the NYT isn’t even the highest circulation newspaper in the United States (it lags behind both USA Today and The Wall Street Journal), much less globally, where it is just inside the top 40.
Links: September 11, 2016
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The harrowing, moving story of the not-so-forgotten “Falling Man” of 9/11.
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An amazing 35-minute “paraphrase” of Blade Runner composed of 12,597 aquarelle (water colored) frames.
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Some of Rolling Stone’s 20 Great Hip-Hop One-Liners really are rather clever.
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From Reader C. comes news (and a review) of a “choose your adventure” app that riffs on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. » A Midsummer Night’s Choice. Side note: I own paper copies of the two Ryan North “choose your adventure” versions of Shakespeare mentioned at the head of the review: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. I haven’t used the versions yet, but I highly recommend the books.
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This makes me a little queasy. → Beer to be made from yeast swabbed from Roald Dahl’s writing chair
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“…a documentary portrait of artists, writers, and collectors who remain steadfastly loyal to the typewriter as a tool and muse […] movingly documents the struggles of California Typewriter, one of the last standing repair shops in America dedicated to keeping the aging machines clicking […] a thought-provoking meditation on the changing dynamic between humans and machines, and encourages us to consider our own relationship with technology, old and new, as the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience redefines who’s serving whom, human or machine?” → California Typewriter
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How to Keep a Zibaldone, the 14th Century’s Answer to Tumblr
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Choose your tagline: “I’ll take one with extra cheese and norovirus” or “Burrito Drone is the name of my new band.” → Alphabet and Chipotle Are Bringing Burrito Delivery Drones to Campus
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Today in 1792, in the early days of the French Revolution, the 45.5 carat Hope Diamond—one of the most famous jewels in the world—is stolen while King Louis XVI and his family are in prison. The Hope Diamond, which was cut from a much larger stone called The French Blue that was among those worn by Marie Antoinette, would reappear in the early 1800s; King Louis XVI didn’t fare as well…he was brought to the guillotine just a few months after the diamond disappeared. The blue/violet color of the diamond is due to trace amounts of boron. Though supposedly cursed—and there have been quite a number of brutal murders, suicides and other deep misfortunes among the various owners of the gem—Harry Winston, the diamond’s final owner, mailed it to the Smithsonian in a brown paper bag for $2.44 in postage and later died peacefully of old age.
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