February 16, 2017

Rather than watch the news on Inauguration Day, Kara Walker started painting “The Crossing,” an enormous new take on Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” / The New Yorker, Wikipedia

For the Front National’s Marine Le Pen to become president in France, with its directly elected two-round presidency, she needs to win an absolute majority of votes cast. / The Economist

“Nothing made me stand out more than my size. Every sidewalk, tram car, and restaurant chair made it clear that in the land of the very tall and very slim I was a sphere, like Violet Beauregarde in yellow, rolling around and taking up more than my share of space.” What it’s like to be an overweight American in Europe. / The Cut

The infamous swoops of instant wealth aren’t just for individuals anymore: Eight semifinalists are competing to win $100 million from the MacArthur Foundation. / Chicago Tribune

Michael K. Williams, known for Omar on The Wire, Freddy Knight on The Night Of, Chalky on Boardwalk Empire— and countless character roles in many shows and movies—asks himself, Am I typecast? / YouTube

After all, with it we could... —Build a better time capsule. You can use it to encrypt information that is impossible to decrypt until a specific moment in the future. / Wired

Whether Trudeau rehearsed this as a stunt or not, it’s actually kinda helpful. / YouTube

“Mathematically, entanglement in time is identical to entanglement in space, and we have no qualms with information traveling in all directions across space.” It’s hard for us to fathom, but if you choose option c), time travel, then quantum physics actually starts to make sense. / Quanta

“In order to account for the results of our new experiment, the unknown mechanism would need to have been set in place before the emission of the starlight that Handsteiner’s group observed, back when Joan of Arc’s friends still called her Joanie.” Tangled up in q? Experimenters explain how they increased our certainty of quantum entanglement by a factor of “ten million billion.” / The New Yorker

For decades, physicists contended that demonstrations of quantum entanglement were biased by observation. In an ingenious twist on an old experiment, researchers turned to ancient starlight from distant quasars to randomize the polarity of the particles used in the experiment. The results, however, stayed the same: / The Atlantic

The experiment doesn’t rule out an alternative entirely, but the primary exception would be a little bit spooky itself: determinism. If the state of the universe now is dependent on the state of the universe when the quasar emitted the photon used to randomize the experiment, that would also explain the results. / Wikipedia

So we may have to pick between believing in a) a concept Einstein found so reprehensible he basically disowned it; b) a totally deterministic universe depends on the one before it; c) time travel. / NPR

Here’s the simplest explanation for what you’re seeing that we could find: / Wired

“Unlike the typical labor surplus created by demographic shifts or technological changes, the humanities almost unilaterally controls its own labor market. New faculty come from a pool of candidates that the academy itself creates, and that pool is overflowing... Why? Why are professional humanists so indifferent to these people?” Turning the tools of criticism on the academy’s adjunct system, which can only be described as intentionally cruel. / Chronicle of Higher Education

For your Thursday wanderlust, in case you haven’t had too much snow already—or simply need it to be void of people, more mysterious, with castles and trains, and in the Alps—here’s one of the more impressionistic “road trip” films we’ve seen. / Adventure Journal

“It had happened so many times before. The woman rose up, made powerful by beauty, and then found herself falling, her beauty fading, her power eroding, her ugliness as she tried to cope with this loss providing spectators with the reassuring feeling that such power is never really worth having, if losing it looks like this.” Sarah Marshall’s profile and consideration of Anna Nicole Smith is one of the more incisive pieces of writing we’ve come across in what feels like a very long time. / BuzzFeed

A neural network weaned on 6,000 lines by Kanye writes a rap song. / boingboing.net

“We’re doing a poor job of educating patients on risk-benefit analysis. In some cases, when it comes to genetics, we’re placing a lot of weight on some things that have very small overall effects.” Fighting the good fight against snake oil, pseudoscience, and health bunk: a look at the genetics junk coming your way. / Gizmodo