Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past. Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was.
He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Huge bouts of déjà vu. Coincidences. Memories of things that hadn’t happened yet. Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Does The Art World Still Have A Sense Of Humor?
Red tape and regulations have largely put paid to a congenial and very possibly no-less-profitable art world, as has the workload in oppressed, ever-leaner organisations dominated by accountants or hit by government cuts. - Apollo
The Thriving Book Community On TikTok
BookTok is a hashtag on TikTok, where readers post videos of book recommendations, talk about writing novels and make reading-related jokes. The hashtag #BookTok currently has more than 18 billion views on TikTok. - CBC
I HOPE THEY LIKE DICK PICS: Australian state begins use of app that dispatches police if you don’t prove your location with selfie within 15 minutes of random check.
The Quiet Value Behind The Enduring Success Of “Antiques Roadshow”
In a show whose segments are punctuated by dollar amounts, there’s actually a quiet, persistent suggestion to direct our aspirations somewhere else: history, family, sentiment, even love. - The Atlantic
Our Misperceptions Of How The Brain Works
“Scientists have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences." But these "are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.” - Quanta
High-speed German train inches its way through floods Boing Boing
Climate crisis likely creating extreme winter weather events, says report Guardian
Teleread, : “I just came acrossan excellent write-up called How to Fork a Book: The Radical Transformation of Publishing. “Forking” is a term borrowed from open source software, whose license allows anyone to make their own modified versions that diverge from the original, taking it in another direction, like a fork in a path. Well, nowadays there are open source books. Forking turns them from fixed, unchanging artifacts into living works that grow and develop over their lifespans or even give birth, their very authorships blurring. That, in turn, reminded me of conversations I had in the past year or so with Alex Schroeder about wikis: an electronic medium, defined by continuous rewriting and blurred authorship, that’s been in decline for a solid decade now. On my blog, I argued it’s because people don’t want authorship to become blurred, but clearly there are exceptions to the rule. Yet it doesn’t seem to happen very often. While Wikipedia has been around for two decades now, and so have the Creative Commons licenses, the practice of taking a free culture book and building upon it is uncommon. In fact, this is only the second or third case I’ve heard of so far. It’s a lot more common in the field of videogame art, as I wrote in a book of my own. And even that is relative: most people simply stick to reusing free culture works unchanged. Why it matters? Because, frankly, book publishing these days looks tired and adrift. Maybe people read more, assuming we can trust surveys, but I’m not sure they read books. Indies struggle to sell; big publishers report moving fewer units (yet making bigger profits, go figure); and don’t even get me started about what can be found in Romanian bookstores. Certainly most of my own reading time is spent online, jumping from blog to blog, going back, opening more tabs. If this makes the web sound like one giant Memex, that’s because it is. It’s how we always wanted to read, but could only take notes, earmark pages or collect newspaper clippings. Books don’t need to be reinvented. Reading, however, does — as an act inseparable from writing. Because we ache to create, yet our creativity is too often stifled…”
Our Misperceptions Of How The Brain Works
The Verge – “Being original on Facebook doesn’t pay, according to its own data. conventional wisdom around the “widely viewed content report” that Facebook released last week is that it obscured more than it revealed. The company’s effort to demonstrate that most users do not regularly see divisive news stories in their feeds received widespread criticism for offering only the highest-level view of the data possible. The most-shared domain on Facebook is YouTube.com? Great, thanks. But in recent days, I’ve spent more time looking at the data Facebook actually did share. And while it’s true that it tells us little about hot-button issues like the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or the rise of vaccine hesitancy, the report arguably reveals something just as damning: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. And some of the same audience-building tactics that allowed Russian interference to flourish on the platform in 2016 continue to be effective. Today, I want to look at two aspects of the data. First, we’ll look at the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter to see where they originally came from. Second, we’ll look at one of the most popular links on the platform, which may be running a grift on US military veterans…”
IN STAND ON ZANZIBAR, “NIPICAPS” LET WOMEN CONTROL THIS PHENOMENON: “The Effect of Nipple Erection on Intended and Expected Altruism.”
Lawson’s sexy roundness … mixed with her speed-demon technique makes cooking dinner with Nigella look like a prelude to an orgy’