#Queertheballet Explained
“Without visible exemplars, many queer women and non-binary people question their own place within the art form. “Growing up, I felt like I was the only one,” says Kiara DeNae Felder, a queer, non-binary dancer with Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. “I felt like, ‘Maybe there’s a reason I don’t see other people like me.’” – The Guardian
GOOD: Study identifies ‘Achilles heel’ of bacteria linked to Crohn’s disease.
Why Sherlock Holmes Has Become One Of Our Most Enduring Literary Characters
There are the endless literary takes. There are Anthony Horowitz’s sequels, or Andrew Lane’s tales of a teenage Holmes. Star basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbarhas written novels about Holmes’s older brother Mycroft; Nancy Springer wrote the Enola Holmes books, giving Holmes and Mycroft a younger sibling. James Lovegrove has combined the worlds of Holmes and HP Lovecraft in the Cthulhu Casebooks. Nicholas Meyer’s forthcoming The Return of the Pharaoh is drawn “from the Reminiscences of John H Watson, MD”, while Bonnie MacBird’s The Three Locks, a new Holmes adventure, is out in March. –The Guardian
“An obituary should be more about how someone lived versus the fact that they died,” says Victoria Chang, a Los Angeles-based poet and writer who wrote 70 obituary poems in the two weeks after her mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015. Ever since, Chang has been a student of obituaries, seeking them out in newspapers and alumni magazines. “The diction is very flat and matter-of-fact,” she says. An obituary tends to have three distinct parts: the beginning (name, age, date of death, cause of death [if possible to include], work, education); the middle (anecdotes that celebrate the person’s life); and the end (so-and-so is survived by, which Chang calls “a very efficient way of saying who’s grieving.”)
If the deceased is a public figure, the job of writing an obituary falls to a journalist, probably a stranger. But most who pass will be eulogized by someone in the family. If you’re tasked with writing one, remember that your aim is to center the person’s life and not your grief, profound though it may be. In fact, your sorrow might act as a kind of writer’s block. Chang suggests jotting down the functional bookends first (who died, who survived), and then let yourself free-associate themes and memories that might end up in that middle part. If you’re feeling stuck or you had a difficult relationship with the person, ask friends and relatives for their recollections. “Everyone is special and quirky, and I think the best obituaries capture the essence of those qualities about each of us,” Chang says. What things did she collect? What did she love to eat? What brought her joy?
An obituary is for the living, but you should consider the sensibilities of the deceased. How would the person want to be remembered? “Imagine what they would write about themselves,” Chang says. It’s OK to be funny. “There’s a lot of humor and oddity, strange tensions and funny stuff about people and the things they do together,” Chang says. Obituaries, even simple ones, remind us of our briefness. After watching her mother die, Chang understood in a visceral way for the first time that she, too, would die. She thinks that if people spent more time acknowledging their mortality they’d live differently — kinder, more present. Writing an obituary can be a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang says. “You’re alive.”
Who Was Mike Nichols When He Wasn’t Playing Mike Nichols? It’s Not An Easy Question
“Making stories was how Nichols coped with the world. The biographical question is: why was there a need to cope? The answer is not mysterious. Nichols was unusually self-aware, and he liked to talk about his life. To some extent, the Mike Nichols story is a story by Mike Nichols.” – The New Yorker
hy Men Should Spend Less Time Watching Porn And More Time Reading Erotica
“Finding your thrills in erotic literature, rather than in video scenes, might take a little longer, but it means caring more about the characters involved, which brings more meaning to the sexual scenes,” says totally unbiased erotica author Max Sebastian. “I’m not sure than any other literary genre or visual media honestly appreciates male sexuality the way that erotica can,” says the (female) host of a podcast about the genre. – InsideHook
Want To Understand People Better? Scientists Look To Dogs
In a recent study of 217 Border collies that ranged in age from 6 months to 15, the team, together with the Clever Dog Lab in Austria, found similarities with humans in the dogs’ personality traits as they age. – Nautilus
This is how we lost control of our faces
MIT Technology Review – “The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy. In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces. Now a new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent. Deborah Raji, a fellow at nonprofit Mozilla, and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of the US Congress on algorithmic accountability, examined over 130 facial-recognition data sets compiled over 43 years. They found that researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge. It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences, such as the false arrests of two Black men in the Detroit area last year. People were extremely cautious about collecting, documenting, and verifying face data in the early days, says Raji. “Now we don’t care anymore. All of that has been abandoned,” she says. “You just can’t keep track of a million faces. After a certain point, you can’t even pretend that you have control.”
Internet Archive’s Modern Book Collection Now Tops 2 Million Volumes
Internet Archive Blogs: “The Internet Archive has reached a new milestone: 2 million. That’s how many modern books are now in its lending collection—available free to the public to borrow at any time, even from home. “We are going strong,” said Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive and director of the Open Libraries program. “We are making books available that people need access to online, and our patrons are really invested. We are doing a library’s work in the digital era.” The lending collection is an encyclopedic mix of purchased books, ebooks, and donations from individuals, organizations, and institutions. It has been curated by Freeland and other librarians at the Internet Archive according to a prioritized wish list that has guided collection development. The collection has been purpose-built to reach a wide base of both public and academic library patrons, and to contain books that people want to read and access online—titles that are widely held by libraries, cited in Wikipedia and frequently assigned on syllabi and course reading lists. “The Internet Archive is trying to achieve a collection reflective of great research and public libraries like the Boston Public Library,” said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, who began building the diverse library more than 20 years ago…”