Tuesday 16 June 2015

Trivia (should have been 1 March)

Full Steam Ahead: 1913
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Full Steam Ahead: 1913
“Panama Canal excavation, 1913”
Copy negative; Harris & Ewing glass plate
View original post

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Depression Is an Allergic Reaction to Modern Life
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Depression_rain
While the symptoms of depression are marked by changes in the brain, the cause of the disease may ultimately lie in the body, specifically in a family of proteins called cytokines that set off inflammation.
Continue reading and discover that the is in the headline is an overstatement! Even the URL uses may.

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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
FBI as literary critic
From the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement, among the most influential readers of black writers were the men of the FBI… more

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The Literary Origins of 15 Words
via Stephen’s Lighthouse by Stephen Abram

View the infographic here

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Why you're so busy
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Economist’s feature on time-poverty is an absolute must-read, explaining the multi-factorial nature of the modern time crunch, which combines the equivalence of time and money (leading to leisure hours that are as crammed as possible in order to maximize their value), the precarity of the American workplace (meaning that affluent workers work longer hours), and the pace of electronically mediated communications (which makes any kind of refractory pause feel like a wasteful and dull eternity).
And of course, as always, women and poor people have it even worse.
Continue reading

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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Sad songs
A pop song’s life on the pop charts is short, even brutish. Maybe that’s why a strain of sadness has long run through the songbook… more
Reading this is a time suck -- great!

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Creative People Use Multiple Personality Traits to Help Their Process
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker
Creativity
Creative folks are a series of extremes – even contradictory at times. They have the capacity to be overly critical of their work and then switch to having a high sense of self. It’s hard for psychologists quantify the “creative process”, organising all of these emotions and thoughts into a concrete method, though, many have tried.
Continue reading

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Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw
via 3 Quarks Daily; Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review
So many things must be done right for an opera to turn out well that it’s amazing any of them succeed at all. The composer has to be a good musician, of course, but he must also be in sympathy with the librettist and, if there is a separate source author, with that writer as well. Once their initial job is done, the creation then gets handed over to a whole other set of people who can mess it up: the director, the set, costume, and lighting designers, the conductor, the orchestra members, and of course the singers. In most operas, these onstage performers need to be able to act as well as sing; it also helps if they look right for their parts. The list of potential pitfalls goes on and on—the acoustics of the hall, the size and nature of the audience, the comfort or discomfort of the seats. It’s endless, and daunting.
Continue reading

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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
On L.E. Sissman
The bard of Madison Ave. L.E. Sissman – poet, critic, advertising executive – had an “amiable, attentive intelligence,” according to John Updike. Sissman’s muse: the office…more

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Fan-created LEGO model bird set
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Lego birds
screenshot
The set costs $44.99 [sorry, I could only find this on the US site]

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