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Zach Urbina
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In like with you.
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Albert Tomlinson - Wait For Me
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Postcard from Roberto Bolaño to Enrique Lihn, 1983
I’m a big fan of Roberto Bolaño. This is so cool!
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“Then she hurried off, bum lolloping, to make sure all was in order.”—
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Today in words I want to say and say and...
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Star Wars Poster Design - by Josef Ortiz
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rhamier because yolo
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Marlene Dietrich
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Herbert Ponting
[View from inside a curved ice grotto. Taylor and Wright stand at the entrance looking up. The ship ‘Terra...
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Leonard Cohen - Anyhow
Dreamed about you baby
You were wearing half your dress
I know you have to hate me
But could you hate me less? -
Tag Results
82 posts tagged brilliant blog
Don’t Know Why I Love You
“ It is tempting to dismiss music as a purely cultural phenomenon and rock as an aberration of 20th-century culture. That is pretty much the explanation musicologists and cultural theorists have favoured as they dissect the arcane details of who-copied-what-from-whom, interpreting the history of popular music in a mumbo-jumbo of postmodern critique.
By contrast, an evolutionary biologist starts from the assumption that things don’t happen by themselves, especially things that dramatically increase your risk of dying, as rocking out certainly does. Anything as popular, exciting, sexy, deadly and - most of all - as difficult to do well, needs an explanation. But we need to ask the right questions.
Asking how making and listening to music affects the reproductive fitness of individual musicians and audience members can only tell us part of the story. We also need to consider other evolutionary processes that have operated on individuals and their genes that might predispose something as sexy and dangerous as rock to shake, rattle and revolutionise the modern world.
No sane person would argue that rock is not cultural: it is well known that rock arose in the 1950s out of existing musical traditions including rhythm and blues, folk, blues, jazz and country. It spread through learning and imitation, assisted by a special blend of social and economic circumstances that arose soon after World War II and the spread of technologies like commercial radio, record players and television. But even though rock is a quintessentially cultural phenomenon, it grew in the soil of our evolved biology. That is what makes it so utterly compelling, and why, a decade into the 21st century, it is still going so strong.” continue reading | Cosmos Magazine
[title: Mick Jagger][image: Iori Tomita]
My body is a mason jar, transparent as a jellyfish
“ Maybe there’s a physical experience that goes along with being powerful,” says Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell University, who cowrote the paper with Michelle M. Duguid of Washington University. “For people who are less powerful, maybe other people and objects loom larger, and for the powerful everything else just seems smaller.” Plenty of research has shown that taller people are more likely to acquire power; taller people make more money, on average, and are more likely to be promoted. But our research is the first to show the reverse may also be true power also makes people feel taller.
In one experiment, subjects came to the lab in pairs. First they had their heights measured. Then they were given a leadership aptitude test and told that, based on their feedback, they would each be assigned to play the role of the manager or the employee. They were given fake feedback, then randomly assigned a role. After that, each person filled out a questionnaire with personal information, including eye color and height. People who had been told they would be the manager, with complete control over the work process and power to evaluate the employee, said they were taller than the actual measurement. The subject who had been told they would be the employee gave a height that was more or less the same as their real height.
Other experiments found similar results—that people who feel powerful overestimate their height. So maybe Carl-Henric Svanberg really did feel taller than the people affected by the Gulf oil spill. The results may also explain why diminutive leaders might still behave like people twice their height—they actually feel taller.” continue reading | Psychological Science
[title:Andrea Gibson]
The walls of the known, the boundaries were close at hand.
“ The most famous missing person of the late nineteenth century was surely Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1847 with over a hundred crewmen while navigating a section of the Northwest Passage. Over the next thirty years, forty-one expeditions set off to find him, or some relic of his trip, and at the insistence of Lady Franklin, more men had died searching for Lord Franklin than on the original expedition. Eventually, word trickled back that the ships had been caught in the shifting Arctic ice and the men had starved and some had been cannibalized.
It’s been speculated that of the nearly one thousand explorers and crew who have traveled to the Arctic, only a quarter have returned. In an 1895 address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, S.A. Andrée proposed an expedition to the North Pole that would risk only three lives, avoiding the crushing ice floes by using a mode of transportation that promised to be safe, quick, and relatively comfortable.
He would travel by balloon.”
continue reading | Brain Pickings
[title: Alec Wilkinson]
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.
“…in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.
The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away.
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Anthropologist Wade Davis claimed to have identified the ingredients of the bòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.
I won’t say much more about the ‘neurotoxin’ theory of zombification, not least because it was brilliantly covered by science writer Mo Costandi and I couldn’t improve on his fantastic article which will tell you everything you need to know.
But on the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.”
[title: Djuna Barnes][image: Phil Noto]
Success and failure are the same imposter
“ No old-world icon is safe. Just in recent weeks, both Kodak and Sears have percolated back into the news, offering headline writers a dilemma borrowed from the classic Saturday Night Live Weekend Update line, “Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”
How long have these companies been dying? Yes, it was a surprise sometime a long time ago, that digital media was challenging Kodak and that Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, and later Amazon were making life difficult for one of America’s retailing pioneers.
Ask an American in 1990 if they could imagine a world without Kodak. Or a shopper of a world without Sears. Now, in 2012, it’s a lot easier to imagine. These are companies ebbing away, drip by agonizing drip. Which reminds us, of course, of the newspaper industry, and the question still on some lips: Can you imagine a world without newspapers? Now two years into the tablet, it’s much more easily imaginable. I always laugh when asked the question, “Will newspapers exist in 2015 or 2020?” Papyrus is a durable medium. It’s just that digital is rapidly replacing print, and in the process rapidly restructuring the nature of news ownership, news creation, news employment, and more. We’ll have some kind of print for the rest of our lives, but it will be the sidecar to the revving engine of digital news and information, as more and more publishers call it quits on print.
We like to think of change in the world as an on/off switch. This….or that. In fact, the world changes both in an instant and agonizingly slowly.” continue reading | Nieman Journalism Lab
[title:Rudyard Kipling]
Daniel Starr-Tambor’s Mandala, is a musical palindrome with more than 62 vigintillion individual notes, it’s the longest palindrome in existence — by far. At the accelerated tempos of the Solar System, it would continue without repetition for over 532.25 septendecillion years — a sort of soundtrack for near-infinity.
This remarkably dimensional musical composition created by assigning each planet in the Solar System a particular note along the natural harmonic series, starting with Mercury’s B and going all the way up by two octaves and a ninth to Pluto’s C#.
