- 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.