Sunday, August 15, 2021
WHAT'S AUTHENTIC?
— @stephaniehshih quoting LA Times headline
Saturday, August 14, 2021
In 2010 I moved into an unoccupied house in Bayview, San Francisco that had been a semi-secret neighborhood gambling shack for 40 years. It took me about 3 days to realize that Bayview was the best place I ever lived. In 2017 my marvelous art-school teaching colleague George McCalman (@tuffgee) told me he was designing a series of posters featuring Bayview residents. (Was it an art project? An ad campaign? I never asked and I still don’t really know.) George knew I loved Bayview and invited me to have my picture taken for the series by his friend Jason Madara (@jasonmadarastudio). I said sure, why not. A casual thing, no payment. A year later, hundreds of “I AM BAYVIEW” posters appeared suddenly on bus stops & train stops all over the city. Of the 40 or so Bayview people featured on 30-ish different posters, I think I was the only white guy. A few days after the posters went up, an anti-gentrification Facebook group took a snapshot of just the poster featuring my face and made it their profile picture, captioning the image “shame is dead.” This post was viewed & hate-shared thousands of times, spawning anger across social media. Much of the internet commentary was along the lines of “Who the HELL is this entitled tech-bro douchebag and where the HELL does he get off claiming HE IS BAYVIEW?” (That’s a paraphrase.) I remember feeling sad about the anger, but also getting it. (The phrase “I am Bayview” is not something I had ever said or would ever say. Nor was I aware that this phrase would appear on the poster. And I know I look like a dork because spoiler alert: I Am A Dork.) I remember wishing that everyone could know the full story behind the posters. I remember wishing that positive attention could be paid to the 96% of Bayview residents on the posters who are not white. I remember wondering: How much money went into this massive campaign? Who paid out that money and who got paid? What were the agendas of the project, explicit and implicit, and whose agendas were they? Was it considered a success by all? Some? None? At the peak of the hubbub, I took my 9-year-old son on a walk to look at & ponder one of the vandalized posters. These photos are from that walk.
— @mcmubria
Friday, August 13, 2021
A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom.
— Wikipedia via @huffmatt via @depthsofwikipedia
Thursday, August 12, 2021
The Space Shuttle had almost no room for iteration because there were people on board. So you couldn't be blowing up shuttles. So that's a big problem.
— Elon Musk, "Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 2], Everyday Astronaut
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
To some extent, a news story doesn’t feel real until it’s been replied to with an endless series of memes reflecting all the different hot takes that are possible.
— Brad Troemel, Replacement Theory: How memes rendered commercial art obsolete
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
He complained that "the Americans have great accumulated expertise of photography of the region due to the fact that they have been doing it for so many years. They can even distinguish between houses that are frequented by male visitors at a higher rate than is normal."
— Peter L. Bergen, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Monday, August 9, 2021
THE CORICANCHA, one of Cusco’s most mesmerizing megalithic sites, features this finger-tip-sized precision stone.
— @accidentalmystery
Sunday, August 8, 2021
As the historian Brian Dippie has astutely observed, "the belief in the Vanishing Indian was the ultimate cause of the Indian's vanishing." Metamora was just one of dozens if not hundreds of literary productions by which the fate of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Chickasaws was made acceptable to the American public by virtue of its very inevitability.... Did they suspect that white New Englanders' valuable opposition to Indian removal depended on the illusion that there were no more Indians in New England?
— Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Saturday, August 7, 2021
Elaine Scarry has argued that the lingering evidence of a war's destruction documents and reinforces its ending: "The very endurance of the record partly explains why the outcome is abided by."
— Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Friday, August 6, 2021
“They’ve been selling privacy to the world and making people trust their devices,” Mr. Green said. “But now they’re basically capitulating to the worst possible demands of every government. I don’t see how they’re going to say no from here on out.”
— Jack Nicas, "Apple’s iPhones Will Include New Tools to Flag Child Sexual Abuse," The New York Times
Thursday, August 5, 2021
I asked you to go to the Green Day concert
You said you never heard of them
You said you never heard of them
— Weezer, "El Scorcho," playing at Fenway before Green Day
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
He's singing opera.
— Lily on Billy Joel
Tuesday, August 3, 2021
My artistic idol is the carpenter who carved this image so high up in a church, people didn't know about it for 800 years
— @MadelineHorwat1 reposted by @everyverything
Monday, August 2, 2021
If I die, your word "treachery," is almost as important as my wound, since you alone survive to make meaning of my death. War is a contest of injuries and of interpretation. As the literary critic Elaine Scarry has argued, war "differs from all other contests in that its outcome carries the power of its own enforcment."
— Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Sunday, August 1, 2021
Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all.
— Wikipedia
Saturday, July 31, 2021
Oil paintings are lovely but so hard to fit in your pocket.
— Connecticut Historical Society Museum wall text about portrait miniatures
Friday, July 30, 2021
Sir, there is something on your chin.
— Note Biden held up
Thursday, July 29, 2021
This is his claim to fame.
— Dad on the information written about Thomas Leach only saying "• Captain Leach, who sailed out of Salem, died at sea in 1828 • Took son at age 9 out as a cabin boy and chastised him for wearing mittens"
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
William F. Galvin has held the office since 1995.
— "Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth," Wikipedia
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Mr. Hirst is selling a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each of which corresponds to a physical dot painting, for $2,000 each. A year from now, the collectors of the series, called “The Currency,” will have to decide whether to keep the NFT or the painting; whichever one they don’t choose will be destroyed.
— Paul Sullivan, "A Painting or an NFT of It: Which Will Be More Valuable?," The New York Times