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As a long-time Alaskan, I’m quite familiar with artifacts of Chinook Wawa: North America’s Nearly Forgotten Language…you might be too. See also: the usual (happy) concoction of enhancement, addition and nitpickery on the article over at Languagehat.
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By now you’ve all heard about Banksy’s self-destructing/shredding art. I’m enjoying the clever spectacle (and assume the conspiracy was deep). Now, Banksy has released a video showing how he did it and the reaction as it happened. Pairs with: Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe.
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There’s a lot to admire in Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories, so I was interested to learn more about her in this New York Times Magazine profile. I found myself alternately intrigued and enraged by her thinking and her off-putting, unrecognized privilege.
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Continuing to feed my own addiction with typewriter-y links, the most recent rabbit hole opened up when I learned that Barbie typewriters had hidden cryptographic capabilities. Then I stumbled across this lavishly illustrated excerpt from Typewriters: Iconic Machines from the Golden Age of Mechanical Writing. See also: How Margaret Atwood Learned to Type && Somewhat related, this heavily-illustrated thread on “well-designed/beautiful keyboards.”
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An interesting new (two-decades long!) project commencing → Massive trove of centuries-old undelivered mail seized by British warships going online. Thanks, Reader B.!
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Austin Kleon is pretty much always great (life, art, writing…it all seems so straightforward when he explains it), but his recent entry about finding your way with maps—with many quirky examples—was exceptional. More for you: An Incomplete Atlas of Fantastic Maps
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Did you know that Shockwaves from WWII bombing raids reached the edge of space‽
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A feast for your eyes this week: John T. Unger’s life-size, hyper-detailed anatomical mosaics && Aleksey Kondratyev’s “Ice Fishers” photos && Shortlist | The Architectural Photography Awards 2018
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I kind of can’t stop watching this ► deer accidentally re-creating the indelible—and not always in a good way—Phil Collins drum lick (and that tongue…I’m starting to think the deer knew just what it was doing).
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Today in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America institutes a new, parent-focused film rating system with descriptors G, M (later PG-13), R and X (later NC-17). The system, as problematic as it can be, was certainly better than the three-decades old system it replaced, the Hays Code, which was based on an evaluation of the morals of a film. Incidentally, the X rating only came to be associated with porn after it was adopted (and often augmented with a few more to make the mythical XX and XXX ratings) in the 70s by the porn industry as a kind of advertising; before then, various films had received the X rating, including A Clockwork Orange.