One of the goals I’ve made for 2021 is to post here at least once a month. One symptom of the vast malaise that was 2020 was having my attention taken hostage by the constant drumbeat of crisis and catastrophe. For me, at least, it was like having an eye glued to a peephole— unable …
Tag: science
May 26, 2018: Plastic Fantastic Ekphrastic
In “We Made Plastic. Now We’re Drowning in It”, Laura Parker’s recent cover story for National Geographic, the fundamental point— we make and throw away a lot of plastic, and this very bad— is not surprising; what she (and the photos, by Randy Olson) does most effectively is convey the scale. Because plastic wasn’t invented …
September 8, 2017: You Gotta Represent
Note: I actually mostly wrote this a couple of months ago, before getting derailed by…life, I guess. So, some of the links are a little dated, but looking back over it I decided I was sufficiently satisfied with it to finish it up and post it anyway. I’m doing a lot of reading lately, mostly …
March 22, 2017: If You Build It
There’s a certain kind of person— usually, in my experience, a certain kind of middle-aged male— who will delight in telling you that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and then nod sagely while they wait for your mind to be blown. This occurs to me because the point of this post, in …
January 29, 2017: What’s Your Evidence?
January 29, 2017: What’s Your Evidence? Of the books I read in 2016, a favorite was Rachel Cusk’s Outline. So I was excited to hear that her newest novel, Transit, was a sequel to that book. Both follow the narrator, Faye, through a series of more or less ordinary days taking place around major life …
Recommendations for May 29, 2016
Article: “Sunk” by Mitch Moxley A few years ago, I read somewhere that there are only four countries in the world where most of the music people purchase is made by artists from their own country: the US, the UK, South Korea, and Japan. I don’t know if that’s still true— it seems like China …
Recommendations for July 26, 2015
Kind of a long one this week, so lets get right into it. Fist, while you’re reading you can listen to… Mix: FACT Mix 505 by Alessandro Cortini I’m not sure exactly how much of his own imprint Cortini is putting on the tracks here, though I think it must be quite a bit. In …
Recommendations for July 19, 2015
Obviously, it’s been a while, so this one is a little long, and it goes back a little further than usual to some stuff I’ve had queued up for a while. Article: “To Build a Better Language” by Sam Dean A short history of the artificial and proposed “universal” language Esperanto, occasioned by the availability …
Recommendations for April 10, 2015
We were traveling once again last weekend, and that plus various work obligations proved to be too much for me to get recommendations up last week. But, back on the wagon this week. Song: “Sunshine on My Back” by The National When I saw that The National had released a new song, I immediately thought …
Recommendations for February 21, 2015
Quite a list this week, so I’ll get right to it: Article: “Tempo Shifts” by Colin Dickey It may have struck you at some point how absurd it is that we need a little poem to tell us how many days each month has (and even the poem needs that awkward little coda to deal …