You should read this for 4/28/2018:
Art and Film
Watch This In-Depth Take on Everything Wrong With The Hobbit Movies “critic Lindsay Ellis has embarked on an epic journey of her own, to dissect the failures and follies of The Hobbit. In a series of three critical videos, Ellis runs the gamut through all three films and the morass of hubris and bad decisions that brought them together.”
‘Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World’ Review: A Cross-Cultural Journey Begins
Books, Writing, and Language
Collection of Jewish jokes shouldn’t shy from the sorrow behind the humor
History and Archaeology
Swedish archaeologists uncover brutal 5th century massacre
Remains of 140 children found in Peru, pointing to world’s largest ancient child sacrifice
It’s estimated that the children — and 200 young llamas — were sacrificed about 550 years ago, when the area was home to the pre-Columbian Chimú civilization. The Chimú was the second-largest empire in Peru before Spanish colonization, next to the Incas, who were also known to sacrifice children during rituals.
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
‘Being LGBTQ is not an illness’: Record number of states banning conversion therapy
13 semis line Detroit freeway to help man considering suicide
U Street assault victim gets new teeth, replaced for free by DC dentist
I reached out and offered full care because we are all members of a powerful loving LGBTQ community before anything else. It is through these acts of love in the face of hate that we will persist, thrive, and succeed in showing the world we want to be ‘one’.”
Science and Nature
At the Bottom of the Ocean, Octopus Moms Cling to Their Bad Decisions “ Scientists found them clustered on the sea floor, trying to grow their young in a warm bath that will certainly kill babies and moms alike.”
Society
How Trump’s Trans Military Ban Backfired. Spectacularly.
Ever since July 2017, when Trump acceded to the religious right and tweeted a ban on transgender military service without consulting military leaders first, the administration has been dealt blow after blow, suffering two major defeats in the past week alone.
Women’s Work
Via the Getty Publications Virtual LibraryMary Beard ‘cut’ from US version of Civilisations, fearing ‘slightly creaky old lady isn’t ideal for US TV’
Julia Margaret Cameron: Complete Photographs
According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s great-nieces, “we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.” This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815–1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than twelve hundred images during a fourteen-year career. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her own art though exhibition and sale, and pursuing the eminent personalities of her age—Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, and others—as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné.
