- Yaas! → America can thank Black Twitter for all those new words
- Do You Even Bake, Bro? (subtitle: How the Silicon Valley set fell in love with sourdough and decided to disrupt the 6,000-year-old craft of making bread, one crumbshot at a time) is a fascinating article both on its face and because of its deep, neo-romantic assumptions about enjoyment and authenticity (and sometimes gender).
- Centuries of Sound is “an attempt to produce an audio mix for every year of recorded sound. Starting with 1860, a mix is posted every month until we catch up with the present day. The scope is moreorless everything, music of course, but also speech and other sounds…”
- Paper engineer and artist Matthew Shlian is back in Colossal with fabulous new paper sculptures || Previously: 2016 paper sculpture gallery & Geometric Paper Sculptures || See also: Paper Animation Film Fest 2018.
RIP Ricky Jay, the best close-up (and old-school, scholarly) magician ever. You can’t go wrong with this 1993 profile: Secrets of the Magus.
“Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.” → The New Evolution Deniers (and the comments) perfectly illustrate the maddening paradox of Quillette.
I’ve said many times that Ear Hustle is one of the best podcasts/audio shows out there. It’s still true, so you should go listen. But the most current news is: co-host Earlonne Woods just had his sentence commuted!
“It seems to me, as just a layman and an amateur, that the internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices.” → A new (to most of us) David Foster Wallace interview || See also: Maria Bustillos on coming to terms with the art, life and legacy of “damaged or criminal” artists like Wallace.
Meet Birds Aren’t Real, QAnon disinformation parody as performance art (I’m waiting for the Bards Aren’t Real parody of the Shakespeare deniers) || Previously, The Wizard of Q considered QAnon as a kind of sprawling new form of the novel.
Today in 1942, Enrico Fermi creates the first nuclear chain reaction, turning an abandoned squash court underneath the University of Chicago football stadium into “Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1),” a primitive nuclear reactor that generated a half-watt of power. The success of CP-1 lead directly to the production of enough plutonium to produce the atomic bombs that would end World War II and usher in the nuclear age and the ensuing Cold War.