You should read this for 6/16/2018:
Art and Film
The Book of Kells — in pictures Captions by Bernard Meehan, former TCD Keeper of Manuscripts. Read more about the Book of Kells.
Books, Writing, and Language
Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing Pay particular attention to Rule #8.
A Passport to Washington Libraries: How many libraries can you visit?
Left to Their Own (Literary) Devices Just some of the reasons not to leave children unattended at the library. Also: Librarians are not child-care workers. They’re busy.
Food and Drink
Anthony Bourdain: Serving Up Inclusion
Another reason Anthony Bourdain mattered to so very many people. And here’s another reason why Bourdain meant so much to so many.
The Best of Anthony Bourdain “What to read, what to watch and what to listen to by and about the chef, TV host and author who died on Friday.”
How to Construct the Ultimate Burger
Sam Adams Summer Ale may be my perfect mass-produced Summer beer. It’s an American Pale Wheat Ale style beer with a touch of citrus, only available from April through August.
History and Archaeology
DNA study reveals fate of Irish women taken by Vikings as slaves to Iceland “Ancient Iceland settlers had even split of Norse and Gaelic ancestry”
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
This Woman Had The Perfect Response When ICE Boarded Her Greyhound Bus Speak truth to power. Represent.
Use your voice. Take a risk. Act an ASS. Because if you let them intimidate the poor Spanish speaking woman next to you, who do you think they’re coming for next?
Science and Nature
Ancient Teeth Unlock Plague Secrets “The findings suggest the pathogen’s ancestor is almost 1,000 years older than previously thought.”
Cleanse and Refresh “The New York Times’ coverage of buzzy wellness concepts like “detox” is a case study in pseudoscience creep.”
Society
Madness “In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide, and killed by guards.”
Technology
How eBooks lost their shine: ‘Kindles now look clunky and unhip’
figures published today by the Publishing Association show that sales of consumer ebooks have dropped by 17%, while sales of physical books are up 8%. Consumer spending on books was up £89m across the board last year, compared with 2015. So why is the physical book winning through?
But wait:
The figures from the Publishing Association should be treated with some caution. They exclude self-published books, a sizable market for ebooks. And, according to Dan Franklin, a digital publishing specialist, more than 50% of genre sales are on ebook. Digital book sales overall are up 6%.
Washington State Is Now the Only Place in America with Net Neutrality “The state law only went into effect once the federal rules were officially repealed on Monday.”
The Washington law prohibits telecom providers from blocking content or devices, throttling traffic, or participating in paid prioritization.
Women’s Work
Was on a train from Cambridge earlier. Two young girls with beautiful face paint walked into my carriage and sat down about half an hour into the journey. A couple of mins later this man walked in and sat next to them even though the carriage was empty with plenty of empty seats
In Conversation With Mary Beard The Cambridge classicist on misogyny, power, and the future of women in the public sphere.
You unpeel the cultural layers and investigate the history and you will find that the ancients were having some familiar debates. Like Perseus and Medusa: decapitating women, silencing women, cutting women’s tongues out. There are things that are so resonant with now. If you look at what Twitter trolls tend to say when they want to target a woman, they go back to those tropes about cutting tongues out, cutting your head off and raping it. And I’m pretty certain that many of them have not read Ovid.
Melania’s Recent Behavior Is Right Out of Hitchcock: The lady vanishes.
The point is not that we should invade the First Lady’s privacy (which could have been protected with any simple, coherent explanation of her malady, eliding intimate details). The point is that Melania Trump is such a convenient blank space around which this administration practices weaving its inconsistent lies. She’ll be gone for a week; no, a month. She’s at the window; no, she’s not.
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
This Incredible Photo Of Trump Surrounded By G7 Leaders Is Like A Renaissance Painting The photo was taken by Jesco Denzel, a German government photographer. Tesco has a Website here: http://www.jescodenzel.com/. https://twitter.com/BWJones/status/1005637999038611457
Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together Trump has a habit of ripping up all of his paper — his own “filing system” of sorts. Officials working in records management spend their days taping them back together to avoid violating Presidential Records Act
Report Condemns FBI Violations In 2016 Clinton Probe But Finds No Political Bias
Democrats, meanwhile, said the findings of the report made it clear that the FBI had effectively helped elect Trump — by damaging Clinton.
For example, the minority leaders of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees cited Comey’s choice to reveal the FBI’s investigation into Clinton but not its counterintelligence investigation into Trump aides’ ties to Russians.
“As we warned before the election, Director Comey had a double-standard: he spoke publicly about the Clinton investigation while keeping secret from the American people the investigation of Donald Trump and Russia,” said Judiciary Committee ranking member Jerry Nadler of New York and Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
The Democrats also said they are angry that Comey talked so much, so often, about a case that he ultimately had concluded should not result in any prosecution.
Here’s Comey’s response to the Horowitz report. And finally, the most astute comment by someone who’s read the Horowitz report: Rachel Maddow:
The inspector general finds that James Comey just didn’t care if he might be seen as acting in a way that might hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” she said. “But he really, really, really cared and he took great extraordinary action to avoid appearing like he might be helping Hillary Clinton in any way. that’s how he weighed those two consequences.
And as Maddow notes:
You wonder why the president and Republicans today are attacking the FBI and attacking the justice department all the time?” she asked. “This is why. I mean, if you can just hit them hard enough, if you can just use conservative media to attack them hard and consistently enough, then you can make the justice department and the FBI worry about the perception that they might be perceived as soft on Democrats. It might overcompensate, right? once they’re worried about that perception you’re halfway there to make them bend over backwards for you and in this case break policy for you to make sure they definitely don’t help the Democrats and they thereby help the Republicans instead.
