2015 List of “Best of” Lists

Source: The Year in Fungi – The New Yorker

Five mycological highlights from 2015, including banana killers, rainmakers, and the zombie cure.

Source: Top 25 News Photos of 2015 – The Atlantic

The past year has been a series of tumultuous news stories, from the massive migration crisis and the war and terror those migrants are fleeing, to historic images of faraway Pluto, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting same-sex marriage, and widespread protests about continued inequality.

Source: The Year in Drone Video: Real Estate, Architecture, and Cities – In the Air – Curbed

Source: Ten LGBTQ News Stories the Mainstream Media Ignored in 2015

Truthout recaps some of the LGBTQ stories the mainstream media missed, ignored or just plain got wrong in 2015.

Source: The Most Intriguing LGBT Characters of 2015 | GLAAD

A handful of characters caught the eye of viewers and critics alike this year by telling unique and exciting stories, here are some of the (mostly) new LGBT characters in 2015 that stood out from the crowd.

Source: The Lives They Lived – The New York Times

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

Source: The 10 Best Feminist Quotes of 2015

Source: The best book cover designs for 2015

Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year’s picks.

Source: The Year That Was and Wasn’t – The Morning News

We asked writers and thinkers to tell us: What were the most important events of 2015—and what were the least?

Source: Highlights from 2015 | Gender Spectrum

Source: The best (or worst) news media corrections of 2015

A compilation of the best, or worse, or most convoluted, or contrived, or outrageous, or downright silly media corrections.

Source: Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Source: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2015 | Village Voice

Source: Top 15 classes of 2015 | Northern Illinois University

Continue Reading2015 List of “Best of” Lists

‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

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An amulet, a treasure hunt, and a legion of readers mobilized by the false patterns our brains create to make sense of the world around us. 

[…]

When you look at a rock formation or a car grille or the moon and see a face, that’s a form of apophenia—pareidolia, the construction of coherent visual or auditory stimuli from noise. The Rorschach test: apophenia. Horoscope adherents who see correlations between their star charts and their lives or personalities are engaging in apophenia too. When several unrelated things go wrong in a single morning, it’s apophenia that tells you that you must be dogged by a curse. Most attempts to anticipate what will make newborns stop crying are tinged by apophenia. And if you know anyone who’s convinced herself she has food sensitivities she doesn’t have, based on a supposed pattern in how she feels after eating, feel free to tell her she suffers from apophenia (though you shouldn’t expect it to go over too well).

Source: ‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

Continue Reading‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

The series has garnered the reputation of being the most bigoted show on television for its inaccurate, undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans, as well as its gross misrepresentations of the cities of Beirut, Islamabad- and the so-called Muslim world in general. For four seasons, and entering its fifth, “Homeland” has maintained the dichotomy of the photogenic, mainly white, mostly American protector versus the evil and backwards Muslim threat. The Washington Post reacts to the racist horror of their season four promotional poster by describing it as “white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”. In this forest, Red Riding Hood is permitted to display many shades of grey – bribery, drone strikes, torture, and covert assassination- to achieve her targets. She points her weapon of choice at the monochrome bad guys, who do all the things that the good guys do, but with nefarious intent.

[…]

At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

Source: “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

Continue Reading“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

2015-10-13 Recently Read

Down the Rabbit Hole
The rise, and rise, of literary annotation

Press Rewind
by Brendan Fitzgerald
What one journalist learned by vicariously sitting in on David Carr’s master class—with only his teacher’s reputation, extant syllabus, and students’ recollections to guide the way.

Press Play
David Carr’s journalism syllabus – “Making and distributing content in the present future we are living through.”

Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree

How the Tiny Graywolf Press Became a Big Player in Book Publishing

The Trick to Acting Heroically

Why We Say ‘Car Accident,’ and Why We Need to Stop

More Titillated Than Thou: How the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market

Why you should never make your bed

YouTube ‘Dancing Baby’ Copyright Ruling Sets Fair Use Guideline

The Duke, The Landscape Architect And The World’s Most Ambitious Attempt To Bring The Cosmos To Earth

The Best Google Web Font Combinations

Continue Reading2015-10-13 Recently Read

Dream Journal Illustrated: Construction Cat and Warehouse Mice

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Crazy dream about construction, beer and a cat. Woke up sneezing and now I have a bloody nose. In the dream these children were playing with mice they found. A hole in the wall went to a warehouse next door.

Construction Warehouse Dream

Continue ReadingDream Journal Illustrated: Construction Cat and Warehouse Mice

Dream Journal Illustrated: British Library’s Gutenberg Press

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I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

The British Library let me run off a bunch of flyers on their Gutenberg printing press.
I don’t think they have a Gutenberg press.
And whatever I playing with wasn’t a Gutenberg.
but.
Yes, I dream in moveable type.

Cat at the British Library

Continue ReadingDream Journal Illustrated: British Library’s Gutenberg Press

Dream Journal Illustrated: Astronaut at Japanese Mall, with Bear

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Last night’s dream: I was an astronaut and was in Japan (which looked like a futuristic Glendale Mall). I bought a training manual and a sandwich, but hadn’t learned yen-to-dollars yet, so I paid $60 USD for the two. I still had my big poof of hair and had concerns about fitting it under my helmet. There was also something about a bear, and, towards the end, a conversation with a friend in New Orleans about his newborn. I can’t even begin to analyze that mess.

Japanese Mall, Astronaut, Bear

Continue ReadingDream Journal Illustrated: Astronaut at Japanese Mall, with Bear

This is why I no longer read anything from DC Comics

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This is a scene from the brand-new video game Batman Arkham Knight, in which Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), after she has been injured and is in a wheelchair, is held captive under the control of the Joker, and is made to kill herself in front of Batman. The scene is “Fake” in that she’s “not really dead” but the scenario is played out to torment Batman in the game so he will become enraged.

And Batman’s reaction – “Scarecrow was punishing me.”

Because this is all about Batman, of course. Never mind that they just used an iconic character from my childhood as grief bait for Batman to get his revenge.

If you are not aware of what “the Killing Joke” is – it’s a controversial, sadistic storyline written for DC Comics by Alan Moore in 1988 where the Joker tortures and rapes Barbara Gordon (Batgirl), then leaves her paralyzed in order to give Batman and Commissioner Gordon anguish. This story entered her “canon,” and Barbara became the wheelchair-bound computer geek Oracle for years and years after, and other women took over the character of Batgirl. Only recently have they “retconned” the storyline to make Barbara Gordon into Batgirl again – except that they left “The Killing Joke” in her storyline and just fixed her paralysis.

Batgirl in Arkham Knight

Women have been angry (with good reason) with the KJ storyline ever since because it takes one of the strongest female superheroes and turns her into a damsel in distress for Batman to rescue. And it’s still part of her storyline today, complete with all the torture scenes intact (although they tone down the rape scene pretty drastically so it’s not as clear anymore that it happened.)

This and the Amazons being killed off in Wonder Woman are two of the worst ideas that DC Comics has ever had, and they continue to double down on those stories instead of recognizing how offensive they are.

So as much as I still love Wonder Woman and Batgirl, to me the idea of them is removed from anything happening at DC Comics today, and I read Marvel Comics instead.

Continue ReadingThis is why I no longer read anything from DC Comics

2015-05-27 Recently Read

Wikipedia: Mudra
A mudra is a symbolic or ritual gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism. While some mudras involve the entire body, most are performed with the hands and fingers. A mudrā is a spiritual gesture and an energetic seal of authenticity employed in the iconography and spiritual practice of Indian religions. The classical sources for the mudras in yoga are the Gheranda Samhita and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika states the importance of mudras in yoga practice.

The New Republic: The Ghost of Cornel West
By Michael Eric Dyson
President Obama betrayed him. He’s stopped publishing new work. He’s alienated his closest friends and allies. What happened to America’s most exciting black scholar?

Hazlitt: The Girls on Shit Duty
By Anna Maxymiw
A weeklong trip filled with deep-fried shore meals does funny things to a man’s insides. When you have to clean up the grisly aftermath, all you can do is laugh.

Elle: ‘Yoga Pants Are Ruining Women’ And Other Style Advice From Fran Lebowitz
“Sartorial tirades from one of the most tailored and opinionated dressers in all of New York City.” – In other news, I want to be Fran Lebowitz someday.

Wall Street Journal: The Cult of Fornasetti: 5 Designers Choose Their Favorite Pieces
For the opening of a massive exhibition devoted to the work of Piero Fornasetti, the Italian artist known for emblazoning design objects with imagery, we asked fans like Kelly Wearstler to pick stand-out pieces

New York Times: Pulitzer-Winning Author Tells Gloversville Library Thanks for the Memories
Mr. Russo grew up going to the Gloversville library, one of the nearly 1,700 built with Carnegie money. “I have such fond memories of the place, going there Saturday mornings with my grandfather or mother, who would wait forever for me to pick books,” he said in a telephone interview. “I just have this feeling that if it weren’t for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.”

Feminist Frequency: ‘What I Couldn’t Say’ Panel at All About Women
Anita Sarkesian – ‘I was invited to speak on several panels about feminism and the impacts of online harassment at the 2015 All About Women conference taking place annually at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a video of my speech for the panel entitled, “What I Couldn’t Say.”’

Continue Reading2015-05-27 Recently Read

2015-03-15 Recently Read

Cool stuff I’ve read recently.

Andrew Keir: Split ink Fountain Printing
ypically when printing, a single colour only is used in each ink fountain (pictures to follow), and while gradients can be printed using modern process colour printing – the standard mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and black found in your average home/office printer – printing methods like letterpress are typically limited to solid colours as a wooden or metal block stamps a colour into the paper stock, a method which doesn’t allow blending of multiple densities and layers of ink. By blending inks directly in the fountain, split fountain printing allows for some wonderful effects in letterpress and screen printing which otherwise wouldn’t be achievable, combining blends of colour with the more exotic stocks and debossing effects that aren’t available with standard offset printing.

Susan O'Malley Poster

The Morning News: Cities Don’t ♥ Us
Our urban future is upon us, city planners tell us, but residents’ on-again, off-again relationship with their surroundings makes them want to say goodbye to all that.

London Review of Books: Why didn’t you just do what you were told?
Jenny Diski
A few years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the to-ing and fro-ing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story.

‘Why didn’t you just do what you were told?’ he asked.

Priceonomics: The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman
When Marilyn vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.

Washington Post: Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.
Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free.

Continue Reading2015-03-15 Recently Read