Brilliant Barty ends 44-year drought with Open triumph
The winning entries in the Environmental Photographer of the Year for 2021 highlight the ways in which our planet’s climate is changing and how humans are (and are not) adapting to those changes. From top to bottom, photos by Kevin Ochieng Onyango, Simone Tramonte, and Michele Lapini. (via dense discovery)
2022 - What the hell are apartment pants?
University slaps a trigger warning on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four | Daily Mail Online.
… staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
The poor, sensitive dears.
And a James Bond 60th Anniversary twofer…
Chris Queen: 60 Years of James Bond Theme Songs: Part 002. “We’ll start with the worst of the worst. These range from cringeworthy to truly bizarre.”
Yours Truly: Ranking the Bond Movies: Part 002 (The Ones That Really Blofeld). “It’s true that the franchise has been uneven over the decades, but there have been only five genuine stinkers.”
Yours Truly: Ranking the Bond Movies: Part 003 (Neither Shaken Nor Stirred). “This lists aren’t meant to be definitive — how could they be? — but to be a fun look back at an iconic series… and maybe engage in some not-too-heated discussion over my worst picks.”
The London writer on the success of his first book, Open Water, the limitations of masculinity and why his writing shouldn’t be compared to Sally Rooney’s
The Year of the Tiger 2022: predictions, food & celebrations South China Morning Post
Overweight armadillos put on a post-Christmas dietBBC
U.S. science no longer leads the world. Here’s how top advisers say the nation should respond Science
Great Art Cities Explained is one of my recent favorite YouTube channels (see The Mona Lisa, Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Michelangelo’s David, and Starry Night, all fascinating) and host James Payne, along with Joanne Shurvell, are now doing a related series on Great Art Cities Explained. They tackled London first and have moved onto Paris, where they feature three of the city’s lesser known museums that were originally art studios: those of Eugène Delacroix, Suzanne Valadon, and Constantin Brancusi.
This morning, I randomly ran across this New Yorker review of a memoir by Tabitha Lasley called Sea State. I couldn’t stop reading it, this review, and went down a rabbit hole of other reviews of the book: the NY Times, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.
After losing four years of progress on a novel, Lasley’s work on Sea State began when she visited Aberdeen, Scotland to research what life is like for oil rig workers, saying she “wanted to see what men were like with no women around”. And then, more or less immediately, she started a relationship with one of her (married) subjects.
Lasley’s first interviewee is an offshore worker from Teesside, an area that was once a hub of steel and chemical manufacturing. Caden has clear blue eyes, a jockey’s body, and tattoos of the names of his wife and twin daughters. He likes the gym, ironing, the autobiographies of Mafia dons, and bio-pics about soccer hooligans. Lasley spots him at an airport, where his kit bag — a kind of waterproof duffel, designed in accordance with helicopter requirements — gives him away. She approaches him, explains her project, and asks for his contact details. Caden demurs, but gives her number to a friend, who invites her to a pub with a group of fellow-riggers. Afterward, Lasley invites Caden to her hotel. Within weeks, he’s skiving off family life to sleep with Lasley in airport hotel rooms, laying the blame on the state of the sea — too rough for the chopper to take off — for not being able to make it home.
Now involved and “around”, Lasley turned the book into a hybrid: personal memoir + a class-oriented look at the concentrated masculinity of life aboard oil rigs. And somehow, according to the reviews, this actually works. Fascinating!
How a High Sex Drive Works Differently in Men and Women.
Mapping fiction: the complicated relationship between authors and literary maps Guardian
Why Buster Keaton is today’s most influential actorBBC
The Internet Is Failing Moms-to-Be Wired