All necessary lives are gathered
in the distance
then dispersed
to circle
and to be available wherever I look
the way the sounds forest animals make
do not come from a single point
but envelop from everywhere.
There will be no more flights across the fields
flitting from pine to pine.
No tree will hold me tight.
No one is to join me when I dance.
From the opening lines: “All necessary lives are gathered/in the distance/then dispersed,” the writer delineates the sorrowful ways quarantine has separated communities. And the final line: “No one is to join me when I dance,” how illness separates us from even that community. It’s a haunting piece of writing. --R.T. Castleberry
Katherine Rundell: ‘Larger than the world’s chaos are its miracles’ FT
Awesome Archives on Tumblr: “A celebration of archives, archival material, and the amazing history that they protect. Expect to see a lot of strange historical finds, unique materials, and archives in the news.
I throw up 5 posts a day….Sometimes I’m looking for something online – often “how to” articles – and I want to filter for – like – a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience.
FBI misled judge who signed warrant for Beverly Hills seizure of $86 million in cash
What Football Can Teach Us About Death: Fathers Are Fullbacks
After the Ivory Tower Falls: A Book Review – Among the main strengths of this important, highly readable book, says David H. Rothman, is its history of how we got into the mess in the first place. We blew our chance by not making higher education more of a tax-supported public good with academic values prevailing over commercial ones.
The GI Bill and other measures helped, but what if the aid had been even more extensive with far less reliance on the marketplace?
Smithsonian Magazine: “It’s an increasingly common sight on vacation, particularly in tourist destinations: An influencer sets up in front of a popular local landmark, sometimes even using props (coffee, beer, pets) or changing outfits, as a photographer or self-timed camera snaps away. Others are milling around, sometimes watching. But often, unbeknownst to everyone involved, another device is also recording the scene: a surveillance camera.
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter is exploring this dynamic in his controversial new online exhibit, The Followers, which he unveiled last week. The art project places static Instagram images side-by-side with video from surveillance cameras, which recorded footage of the photoshoot in question. To make The Followers, Depoorter started with EarthCam, a network of publicly accessible webcams around the world, to record a month’s worth of footage in tourist attractions like New York City’s Times Square and Dublin’s Temple Bar Pub.
Then he enlisted an artificial intelligence (A.I.) bot, which scraped public Instagram photos taken in those locations, and facial-recognition software, which paired the Instagram images with the real-time surveillance footage. Depoorter calls himself a “surveillance artist”…
Controversial Artist Matches Influencer Photos With Surveillance Footage Smithsonian Magazine
Dated and fractured: Optus and data protections Down Under
Things are not getting better for Optus, a subsidiary of the Singapore-owned Singtel and Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Responsible for one of Australia’s largest data breaches, the beleaguered company is facing burning accusations and questions on various fronts. It is also proving to be rather less than forthcoming about details as to what has
