Photos
Our Frasier Remake
Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My Coffee with Niles in different styles. The results are sublime.
The plastipelago: Indonesiaâs encounter with the âplasticeneâ has led to a naĂŻve and hasty government effort to rebrand waste as an asset
This alchemic-like ambition to turn discarded plastics into new objects can also be seen at the hands of government agencies. One such example, is the efforts of the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (MoPWH) to incorporate discarded single-use plastics into road tar for building national roads in the country. According to Danis Sumadilaga, the head of the Agency for Research and Development at the MoPWH, mixing plastic waste with asphalt will result in stronger and more stable roads.
While it is certainly better to have wild plastic discards sequestered inside a road, rather than scattered in the environment or buried deep inside animalsâ entrails, this development undoubtedly erects a speed bump on the road towards the nationwide ban on single-use plastics. In other words, mixing single-use plastics with asphalt makes plastic appear as unproblematic. To return to the concept of Plasticene, the plastic road is representative of both the human alterationâthe plastificationâof the environment, and the blind assumption that the circular economy can coalesce economic growth with sustainability.
Hokusai and Contemporary Art: Pop Art, Superflat, and Beyond
Talk delivered by Kendall deBoer, curatorial assistant, Department of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Image by Yoshitomo Nara
You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you’re up in the rarefied atmosphere and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.
Michael Gambon’s most iconic performance will always be Eddie Temple.
Humanity's mutilation of the tree of life
During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. Today there is a species that should know it is not able to wait millions of years for its life-support systems to be restored after a mass extinction. Ironically, the scale that speciesâ activities is the sole cause of todayâs biological holocaust.
What is crystal clear is that the trajectory of the dimming future of civilization will be directed in part not just by the overall loss of biodiversity but by the pattern of our mutilation of the tree of life.
Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120)
Apple TV+ has taken down the paywall on their anthology series Extrapolations until Monday 25 September. Important but harrowing viewing about how the next few decades might unfold, with some great actors involved. Worth checking out this weekend.
Thanks to Oreo Speedwagon II for the heads-up.
A language is a dialogue with the environment⊠it captures the essence of that place where it developed better than imported languages. Being able to know these couple dozen words for different types of rain that Hawaiian has, that English doesnâtâŠthat’s something that’s just, I think, really meaningful to be able to experience. It always gives you more. You see more colors in the spectrum. It’s a richer experience.
Hawaiiâs Native language nearly vanishedâthis is the fight to bring it back
Chile's experiment with cybernetic management
In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at their disposal. âI know that I am making the maximum effort towards the devolution of power,â Beer told the audience. âThe government made their revolution about it; I find it good cybernetics.â Beer stressed that the tools he was developing in Chile were the âpeopleâs toolsâ and that his systems were designed for and in consultation with Chilean workers. Critics from the Chilean opposition pushed back and equated the system to a new form of government surveillance that would lead to increased government control and abuse.
Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism
This article is a few years old, but provides a good overview of Cybersyn.
Wildfires and xenophobia
Twitter/X really is the new Gab:
“Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. âWeâre at war,â Papadakis has been filmed saying. âWhere there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.â
On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed âhuntingâ and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.”
While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants
The last of the fungus
“Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman for $300. Two weeks of unusually good days like this would bring in roughly the average income for a Tibetan household for an entire year.”
An excellent article about the fascinating, valuable and doomed prcatice of collecting catepillar fungus. I saw some of this in the highlands of Bhutan when I was there for work in 2016, where its also prized for traditonal medicine.
The Last of the Fungus - A young scientistâs quest to transform a dying way of life
