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Privacy as we think of it is a new (and deeply endangered) thing. → The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images.
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The Positive Lexicography Project is “an evolving index of ‘untranslatable’ words related to wellbeing from across the world’s languages” from Afrikaans to Zulu/Xhosa.
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The 174 videos in the Japanology series cover everything from mushrooms to swords to cram schools and Shinto shrines. Clamorites might enjoy starting with stationery. [Thanks, Reader B.]
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This poet is riding through Denver delivering dreams to doorsteps. Nightmares cost extra.
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Wikipedia: The Text Adventure turns Wikipedia into an interactive, text-based game. Zorks!
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Is the tilde the sarcasm punctuation mark we’ve been looking for? → The Internet Tilde Perfectly Conveys Something We Don’t Have the Words to Explain
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Fascinating to think that the first inventors to record sound never listened to it…they were only interested in the visual picture… → At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared
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On squicks and squees and re-imaging the (tagging) vocabulary of porn → Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? :: Balances well with The More Things Change, which examines how, with sex and sexual practices, the more things change, the more things, well, change.
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A Piece of Work is everything you wanted to know about modern and contemporary art but were afraid to ask … In this 10-episode podcast series, [Broad City’s] Abbi [Jacobson] looks for some answers in lively conversations with curators, artists, and some friends, including Hannibal Buress, Tavi Gevinson, RuPaul, and Questlove.
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Today in 1850, a 30-year old Persian merchant known as the Báb (birth name: Sayyed ʿAli Muhammad Shirāzi) is executed for apostasy in Tabriz, Iran. Accounts differ in drama—members of the Baha’i Faith (of which his teachings were the forerunner) tell a story in which the firing squad’s bullets sever his ropes and the Báb disappears…finally being found in another part of the barracks calmly dictating to his secretary—but all agree that the first volley harmed neither the Báb nor Anís, a young follower, who had been suspended 10 feet above the ground for the execution, and they both had to be rounded up, re-bound, and finally killed by a second volley.