Elsewhere for November 17, 2018

You should read this for 11/17/2018:

Art and Film

The world’s oldest figurative drawing depicts a wounded animal “The 40,000-year-old cave painting in a cave in Borneo depicts a speared animal.”

New radiometric dating identifies the oldest known figurative drawing—not a stenciled outline of a hand or an abstract design, but an actual attempt to depict a real object in an image. As far as we know, a cave wall in Indonesian Borneo was the site for the first time a person drew something, rather than just making abstract marks. The drawing is at least 40,000 years old, based on uranium-series dating of a thin layer of rock deposited on top of the drawing since its creation.

 

Books, Writing, and Language

From Madonna’s Sex to Lady Chatterley: inside the Bodleian’s explicit book club “Created at the height of Victorian prudishness, the Bodleian Library’s Phi collection was designed to protect young minds from “immoral” books. More than a century later, they’re going on display for the first time”
The One Direction Fan-Fiction Novel That Became a Literary Sensation
Isabel Allende’s Unconventional Advice for Finding Writing Inspiration
‘Ignore this’: Jonathan Franzen’s top 10 writing tips get gleefully trolled on Twitter

American novelist Jonathan Franzen has drawn the ire of fellow writers, who are mercilessly trolling him following an article in which he lists his 10 writing rules for aspiring novelists.

Education

UW-Stevens Point Eliminating 6 Majors In Humanities To Address Budget Shortfall

The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is eliminating six degree programs in the humanities to address budget deficits and increasing drops in enrollment. The changes are aimed at creating a new regional university model that is more career focused, according to the university.
The university originally proposed cutting 13 degree programs, which led to student protestson campus and a sit in at the UW System Board of Regents office in Madison. The six majors that will be cut include: French, German, geography, geology, history, and two- and three-dimensional art, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

What the article doesn’t specify is that the years of budget cuts took place because of the actions of Scott Walker.
The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews historian Jill Lepore: ‘The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril’ “Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined”
Lepore’s history of America Jill Lepore’s These Truths is a NYT bestseller. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Food and Drink

Vitamin D And Fish Oil Supplements Disappoint In Long-Awaited Study Results
But:

While the overall results were disappointing, there appeared to be a beneficial effect when it came to one aspect of heart disease and fish oil: heart attacks.
Taking fish oil lowered the risk of heart attack by about 28 percent, which is a “statistically significant” finding, says Dr. JoAnn Manson, who is chief of the division of preventive medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She led the research.

And see also: Cardiovascular Risk Reduction with Icosapent Ethyl for Hypertriglyceridemia

Patients with elevated triglyceride levels are at increased risk for ischemic events. Icosapent ethyl, a highly purified eicosapentaenoic acid ethyl ester, lowers triglyceride levels, but data are needed to determine its effects on ischemic events.

Ars Technica on Homebrewing cider
American Winemakers Are Getting In On The Fun Of Beaujolais Nouveau

The third Thursday of every November is Beaujolais Nouveau Day. Made from gamay, the primary grape in Beaujolais, a winemaking region in eastern France, traditional Nouveau is bottled not long after the harvest and is only about two months old when you traditionally uncork it. . . . Beaujolais Nouveau isn’t just hype. It’s a way for winemakers to celebrate the end of the harvest, a two-month period of intense work—picking and sorting grapes by hand and then pressing and bottling them into wine.

Via Clare Smyth in The Guardian: Gordon Ramsey’s Broccoli Soup

History and Archaeology

Eerie recording reveals moment the guns fell silent at the end of WWI

On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent. It brought an end to four years of war which crippled Europe, leaving 17 million dead including 888,246 British or Colonial servicemen. As we approach the centenary of the Armistice on November 11, the Imperial War Museum has released a recording of the moment the war ended, patched together using recordings from their collections.

‘Moai are family’: Easter Island people to head to London to request statue back “Delegation from island, backed by Chilean government, will ask for return of statue British Museum acquired in 1869”

Towering at the entrance of the British Museum’s Wellcome gallery is a 2.5-metre basalt statue from Easter Island. For indigenous Rapa Nui islanders, such statues — known as moai – carry the spirit of prominent ancestors and are considered the living incarnation of their relatives.
Next week, a delegation from the island – which has been part of Chile since 1888 and is officially known as Rapa Nui – will travel to London to request the moai’s return, emboldened by the backing of the Chilean government and the museum’s willingness to engage in talks for the first time since it acquired the statue in 1869.

Science and Nature

The 26-foot-long “unicorn of the sea” is a lesson in the wonders of collaboration

Pyrosomes, also known as unicorns of the sea, are exceptional evidence of the advantages of cooperation. These colonies of creatures, made up of hundreds or thousands of individual organisms known as zooids, travel together in a single gelatinous tunic.

Stunning astronaut photos show Australia’s outback “like an open geology book”

Society

Children in care homes: ‘It makes residents feel more human’ “The more time young and old people spend together, the more both parties benefit”
Why are attitudes to meat so complex and personal? I draw the line at cephalopods

I eat all sorts of creatures, but I won’t touch octopus – which only exposes my hypocrisy and our complicated relationship with food

This encapsulates my own feeling about octopus. And I’m not apologetic about it.
How moving to the US made me appreciate the House of Lords

One major issue is voter suppression, which is (currently) barely a thing in the UK. Methods vary from state to state, but there’s a clear trend: disenfranchisement of predominately working-class, African American, Latino and other minority voters in places where Republicans control the state legislature. In Georgia, roughly 700,000 were purged from electoral rolls in 2017 without being informed and this year 53,000 people, 70% of whom were African American, were prevented from registering to vote for reasons as trivial as a misplaced hyphen. This process was overseen by then secretary of state Brian Kemp, who just happens to have also been Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial candidate for the GOP – and who seems to have beaten Democrat Stacey Abrams, the first black woman in history to be a major party’s nominee for governor, by a very narrow margin.

After NRA Mocks Doctors, Physicians Reply: “This Is Our Lane”

Technology

Rural Kids Face An Internet “Homework Gap”. The FCC Could Help
Seth Abramson’s Metamodernism Preceded His Resistance “He has played ‘metamodernist’ games throughout his career.”
Do we have a moral obligation to quit Facebook? and also: Facebook hired firm with ‘in-house fake news shop’ to combat PR crisis and Facebook probably didn’t want to be denying it paid people to create fake news this week, but here we are

💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰

Via John R. Schlinder in The Observer: Team Mueller is Holding ‘Dozens of Sealed Indictments,’ According to Intel Source
Veterans haven’t received GI Bill benefits for months due to ongoing IT issues at VA “This is — to be kind — a train wreck,” said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.

Without the GI Bill’s housing stipend, Roundtree was kicked out of his apartment and is now living on his sister’s couch, miles from school, where he feels like a burden on his family. The new living situation required him to move all his belongings into a storage container, which he can no longer afford. Now all of his possessions are in danger of being auctioned off by the storage facility.

This Is the Saturday Night Massacre

With the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, America is in uncharted territory. The last time a president made a personnel change to undermine an investigation of his associates, Congress forced him to resign. That was when President Richard Nixon pushed out his attorney general and deputy attorney general so he could fire the special prosecutor. The fallout from this Saturday Night Massacre, as it is known, has stood as a warning to subsequent presidents. Yet President Trump has launched a piecemeal Saturday Night Massacre of his own. He first fired FBI Director James Comey last year for his handling of the Russia probe, then he fired the attorney general for failing to protect him from the Russia probe. His intent to undermine an investigation of his campaign has been clear throughout—he barely tried to hide it—but the difference this time is that he has acted with impunity. What comes next could be anything.

Melania Trump racked up $174,000 in hotel bills for a day trip to Toronto

How Trump and her staff ran up nearly $200,000 in hotel bills for a 12-hour trip is unclear (the total was nearly double the $95,050 bill for a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, where she stopped for a day last month during a trip to Africa). All six charges for the first lady’s Toronto hotel bills were paid to “miscellaneous foreign awardees” rather than a specific hotel.

Women’s Work

‘The lesson is to be hopeful’: Ilhan Omar’s journey from Somali refugee to US Congress

Ilhan Omar, who lived in a Somali refugee camp when she was a girl and was elected to the US Congress last week, has said she hopes her victory would give hope to those whose childhoods resembled hers.

Someone tried roasting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ wardrobe, and got meme’d
Women and the first world war: a taste of freedom “For many women on the home front, the war years became a springboard to liberation. But with peace came the backlash.”
‘They see no shame’: ‘honour’ killing video shows plight of Syrian women

“These are people who see no shame in killing the girl, but actually believe it’s what washes away the shame she has brought on the whole family,” says exiled Syrian writer Loubna Mrie. “An innocent girl is dead because some guy posted her pictures on Facebook.”

Nina Totenberg via NPR: How A Lawyer In The CNN Case Saved Me From Being Shut Down On My Beat

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Wallace & Gromit‘s Creators Are Giving The Company to Their Employees “Aardman Animation will be giving majority shares to their workers.”
Two Cats Have Spent Two Years Trying To Get Into A Japanese Art Museum
Why I’m helping people fight their biases
How to be kind at work, no matter how you’re feeling

If you think your workplace could use a little more kindness, one of the first steps you can take is to recognize that kindness is an action.

Some great, simple non-demanding ways to make the day better for you, and someone else.