You should read this for 12/24/2022:
Art, Music, and Film
An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad
Donna Reed’s daughter plays guardian angel for ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language
We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking.
Via @b_hawk@hcommons.social (Brandon W. Hawk): An Ox, an Ass, and Three Kings: A History of Apocryphal Christmas Traditions
Humanists All What is lost in the precipitous decline of the arts and humanities
Teaching the arts and humanities well confers proficiencies such as good writing and clear speaking. Critical thinking emerges—take nothing on authority, absorb but question traditions, conserve in order to reform. Embracing past experience, the arts and humanities put current predicaments in perspective: achievements since ancestors set foot in Olduvai clay, alliances with evil, triumphs over disease, social contracts defeating brute force—all represented from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the caves of virtual reality.
Huntsville Public Library (Tx) Privatized After Pride Display
The Huntsville Public Library (HPL) has been under fire since this summer, when a book display riled up city officials. Now, following the removal of two book displays at the public library, the city decided to privatize the library.
Though officials claim the move to hire Library Services & Systems (LS&S) will reduce library operational costs over the next ten years, it comes on the heels of the city removing a Pride book display and a Banned Books Week display in September. City Manager Aron Kulhavy called for the displays to be taken down, temporarily closing the library. Following the removal of both displays, the library was told they could not create any additional displays, pending the city’s review of policies and procedures about them. The City Librarian was also placed on leave.
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Food and Drink
The Difference Between Puff Pastry and Phyllo Dough
History and Archaeology
Researchers discover 168 mysterious carvings in Peru’s ancient Nazca plain
Archaeologists Devise a Better Clock for Biblical Times
Politics and Society
In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism
How Johnson became an unlikely part of an emerging voter revolt against Trumpism is not so much the story of some political strategy, or even the policies of the national Democratic Party, which has long been accused of ignoring places such as northwest Georgia. Rather, it is the story of a thousand life experiences that add up to a certain kind of American character, one that can arise from the very landscape where the Trump movement took root.
Science and Nature
H/T Introversion: Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human
Crows are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. They are capable of making rule-guided decisions and of creating and using tools. They also appear to show an innate sense of what numbers are. Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—which was long thought to be a uniquely human ability.
Recursion is a core conpt of human languages, so this is really cool.
The mysterious song of the dinosaurs
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Technology
Elon’s stale playbook “At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he’s just a jerk.”
Elon Musk blamed a Twitter account for a stalker. Police see no link.
The Twitter owner threatened legal action, changed the platform’s rules and suspended journalists’ accounts after a confrontation involving his security team at a gas station. But the incident’s timing and location cast doubt on a link to the @ElonJet account.
Making ActivityPub Your Social Media Hub for Mastodon and Other Decentralized Services
SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.
Something Wonderful
As ‘Mr. Christmas’ fights cancer, his former students bring the holiday to him
H/T Glenn Fleishman @glennf@twit.social
Eleanor Morton : JRR Tolkien Writes a Christmas Book
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