But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.
—Lauren Oliver
—found in Pandemonium (2012)
anomie
anomie · /ˈanəmi/ · /AN-ə-mee/. noun. Hopelesness because of, or characterized by, a breakdown in the social or moral standards in an individual or society. Isolation and anxiety caused by a lack of social control or regulation. An absence of accepted social values. A borrowing, with French spelling, of anomy (lawlessness, violation of divine law), from Greek anomos (without law). Not to be confused with anomia, a kind of aphasia rendering one unable to recognize everyday objects.
[Read more…]Links: September 20, 2020
- September is Suicide Prevention Month. In the US in 2018, the most recent year of reliable statistics I could find, there were 132 deaths by suicide and 3,865 attempts every day. The simplest thing you can do on a personal level is be there. On a larger scale, supporting mental health awareness and treatment (and reducing armed police responses to mental health crises), fair housing, and universal health care could drastically decrease these numbers. ※ A radio segment I recorded on The Language of Suicide · Previously, Marie Howe’s poem “The Gate.”
- Robin Sloan’s beautifully realized work of short fiction → Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate
- A unique movie recommendation site → Cinetrii
- Learning to live with singular they → All My Pronouns
- What a world. And what people in it. → Buying Myself Back When does a model own her own image?
- This week’s CuriosityCluster → Good Movies As Old Book Covers · The Art of Penguin Science Fiction · Russian Book Jackets: 1917-1942 · Marvel turn album covers by Nirvana, Blondie and The Clash into comic book covers · Four Classic Prince Songs Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Covers
- Dutch develop ‘living’ coffin made of mushroom mycelium
- Jalapeño Noir → Taco Bell Is Getting Its Own Wine to Pair with Chalupas
- More than what you might expect from the title → Not So Simple: Notes from a Tech-Free Life
- Today in 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sets sail with a five ship fleet on what would become the first successful circumnavigation of the world. Of the 270 who set out with Magellan, only 18 or 19 (accounts vary) men, on one ship, would return in September 1522. Not among those returning: Magellan himself, who was killed the previous April in the Philippines by Mactan islanders who didn’t take well to the expedition’s attempts to convert them to Christianity. Regardless of the political intrigues before and during his last voyage, or the colonialist expansions to come that he helped make possible, Magellan was rightly famed for his navigational abilities; the next successful circumnavigation, by Sir Francis Drake, wouldn’t be completed until nearly 60 years later. ¶ Magellan’s name lives on in the Strait of Magellan, the Magellanic Clouds, NASA’s Venus-mapping spacecraft Magellan, and of course, ▸ gellin’ like Magellan.
AUTOMATIC
Trump, QAnon and The Return of Magic
From the maker of the excellent ▸ Everything is a Remix comes ▸ Trump, QAnon and The Return of Magic, the best, in-depth explainer I’ve found of the madness that is QAnon. ※ ▸ In Search Of A Flat Earth is a great look at how conspiracies and conspiracists like Flat Earth(ers) are and are not like QAnon. · I needed some help understanding Why Right-Wing Conspiracies Are so Obsessed With Pedophilia. · And then we have One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation.
Withheld
RBG (because too soon)
Responses: September 20, 2020
- Reader B: “Love the foof-a-quotes.”
- A different Reader B. re: Beryl Markham’s West with the Night — “One of my absolutely favorite books.”
- Reader M. writes in re: statements like ‘Today in 1501, in the early morning hours…’ — “I always wonder about the actual nature of ‘today’ and the shift of 11 days when the Gregorian calendar was initially adopted in 1582 (and eventually more widely so) .. hence my cognitive dissonance with the phrase, ‘today in’ any date on or prior to October 4, 1582, anywhere, and any date somewhere else after that without also providing the Julianness or the Gregorianness of the calendar. ¶ Anyhow, this is my dissonance, most perfectly illustrated by the fact that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date in the same year, but Cervantes died 11 days earlier than Shakespeare.” — Believe it or not, this came up in the first few months of this newsletter and I finally decided I liked the style of the construction more than the literal accuracy. Plus, what’s 11 days between friends (and more than 400 years :)?
- Reader S.: “Thanks for the link to the Miranda July article, you and I have talked before about our shared adoration. But…her Dad is Richard Grossinger ??? ¶ Explains a LOT. — I knew of Sacred Hearts Books, but not Grossinger. It does indeed explain a lot about July’s beautiful weirdness.