You should read this for 4/8/2018:
Art and Film
H/T Bronwen: In bloom: the art of drawing and painting Australian plants – in pictures
Big tobacco: top US arts institutions under fire for accepting donations “Smithsonian and other leading museums continue taking tobacco donations even as others reject funds from big pharma”
Books, Writing, and Language
An Alternate Ending for F+W Media F + W Media, the owner of Writer’s Digest and a number of other “niche” magazines and Web sites has declared bankruptcy.
Education
This Is How You Kill a Profession “How did we decide that professors don’t deserve job security or a decent salary?”
College faculty were not defeated after great struggle, after a battle with a winner and a loser. College has simply been redefined, over and over, in ways that make faculty irrelevant. College teaching, as a profession, is being eliminated one small, undetected, definitional drop at a time.
Food and Drink
H/T Yasmine: How L.A.’s Early Italian Pioneers Transformed the City’s Food Scene
History and Archaeology
H/T Bronwen: The seasons and flavours of Indigenous baking
As award-winning writer Bruce Pascoe explains in his book Dark Emu and across other writing, the discovery of those grinding stones in western New South Wales dating back around 30,000 years and the 25-year-old grinding stone from in the Notrhern Territory, suggest that Indigenous Australians were likely the world’s first bakers.
Science and Nature
Texas is having its biggest bluebonnet bloom in a decade
Society
Myke Cole on The Poisonous Cult of the Military Hero
Been thinking a lot about Trump’s attacks on McCain, and on the universal outcry about slandering a “hero.”
It made me reflect on how poisonous and destructive that term is.
So, I wrote about it
H/T Metafilter: All About Pete
Pete Buttigieg is not the shining star he might appear:
By leveling fees and fines, the city leaned on homeowners to make repairs or have their houses demolished. In many cases, Buttigieg said, the homeowners proved impossible to find amid a string of active and inactive investment companies. In other cases, he said, they were unwilling or unable to make repairs.
Technology
A lot of barely chargeable AirPods and wireless mice and Bluetooth speakers are ending up in the trash as consumers go through products—even expensive ones—faster than ever.
Women’s Work
She Was Betrayed by a Gentleman’s Handshake
The history of invention is littered with men who took credit for women’s ideas. Take Monopoly, for example: As the story goes, an unemployed man named Charles Darrow invented the beloved American board game in the 1930s, sold it, and became a millionaire. All of that happened, except the part where he invented the game.
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Via NPR: What You Need To Know About The Russia Investigations: The Dossier
Generally speaking, the wide aperture afforded by a counterintelligence investigation might be key to understanding some of the biggest lingering mysteries of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2016—mysteries that, if solved, could explain the president’s continued deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and skepticism about his conduct on the part of the U.S. intelligence community.
For example, was the fact that Trump pursued a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow during the election—and failed to disclose the deal to the public—enough for the Russians to compromise him? Why did the administration attempt to lift the sanctions on Russia early on in Trump’s tenure, even after it had been revealed that Russia had attacked the 2016 election? And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016—an episode that, according to one of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”?
The Critical Part of Mueller’s Report That Barr Didn’t Mention “The special counsel’s most interesting findings about Trump and Russia might be in his report’s narrative description of key relationships.”
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
HT Yasmine: L.A. River’s Invasive Weeds Find An Artistic Purpose
