The Morning News

Do art critics have a Catholicism problem? "Many are not cognizant of the hidden tradeoffs in the museum/Church relationship."

↩︎ Hyperallergic 8h

I just set all of these loops running and let them configure in whichever way they wanted to, and in fact the result is very, very nice.

How Brian Eno used very long tape loops in his ambient music to sound like someone “playing the piano with quite intense feeling.”

↩︎ Reverb Machine

8h

New prefixes get introduced to measure the very big and very small. E.g., Earth weighs one ronnagram. An electron? One quectogram.

↩︎ Nature 2d

A French court says a man fired for allegedly failing to be “fun” enough at work was wrongfully dismissed.

↩︎ The Washington Post 2d

Unearthed photographs, taken by prison-appointed photographers, of daily life at San Quentin.

↩︎ The Marshall Project 2d

“If the issue cannot be resolved we would take legal action in the international courts. The case against the Drax family would be for hundreds of years of slavery, so it’s likely any damages would go well beyond the value of the land.”

Barbados plans to make a British member of Parliament the first individual to pay reparations for family’s history of slavery.

↩︎ The Guardian

2d

According to Merriam-Webster, searches for “gaslighting” increased 1740% year-on-year in 2022. "Oligarch" searches spiked 621%.

↩︎ Quartz 2d

"99.9% of people will never get to experience what you will." A review of NASA's social media guidelines for astronauts.

↩︎ Vox 1w

This is the MS Voyager, looking to become the world's first marine spaceport, launching a carbon-neutral "spaceballoon."

↩︎ Space Perspective 1w

Harmonic changes not only make “SICKO MODE” stand out, but its structural complexity makes it more akin to a classical composition than a typical hip-hop hit of the last decade. Justice for the key change!

After 1990, key changes are employed much less frequently, if at all, in number one hit songs. What happened? Rap and computers.

↩︎ Tedium

2w

Fiji's "unprecedented" progress in relocating people threatened by climate change previews some of the challenges still to come.

↩︎ The Guardian 2w

For your weekly wanderlust, another chapter in McKenzie Barney and partner's cycling journey from Cairo to Cape Town. Or, as she summarizes it, "11,000km, 10 countries, 5 months, 1 American, 1 Kiwi."

See previously: Egypt, Sudan. Also some nice reportage and photographs.

2w

Recently sold at auction: Elvis Presley's 1971 Stutz Blackhawk.

↩︎ Mecum's Auctions 2w

From April, headline of the week? "Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him."

↩︎ The Onion 2w

Government crackdowns on online scam compounds—powered by trafficked "cyber slaves"—are stoking chaos in Cambodia.

↩︎ rest of world 2w

Em Cooper's new video for the Beatles' song "I'm Only Sleeping" required her to make 1,300 separate oil paintings.

From an interview with Cooper on It's Nice That: "The song itself evokes such a mesmerising, languid, dreamy state, in a way my job was only to follow its lead with a paintbrush in my hand."

3w

Thanks to Open Culture, we now know Jim Henson made some pretty violent coffee commercials with puppets in the late 1950s.

Up until that time, TV advertisers typically made a direct sales pitch. “We took a different approach,” said Henson in Christopher Finch’s Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.” The campaign for Wilkins Coffee was a hit. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area,” said Henson in a 1982 interview with Judy Harris, “we were the number one, the most popular commercial.” Henson’s ad agency began marketing the idea to other regional coffee companies around the country. Henson re-shot the same spots with different brand names. “I bought my contract from that agency,” said Henson, “and then I was producing them–the same things around the country. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was making a lot of money.”

3w

Glued to the inside of your mouth this very moment (there's a 50% chance) may be plump bacterial caterpillars. They cling to your cheek with paired little holdfasts, like the feet of a tomato hornworm resolutely clasping its stem.

The best first paragraph we’ve read in a while is from an article about bacteria.

↩︎ Small Things Considered

3w

Camilla, the Queen Consort, recently changed her last name to R., which stands for “Rex,” which means “ruler” in Latin.

↩︎ Gawker 3w

The Rooster

The 2023 Tournament of Books Long List