Knocking At The Gate

Jaeah Lee writes in The New York Times about how rap lyrics affect juries and judges, and how persistent are the racial biases in American criminal justice: We have found that over the past three decades, rap — in the form of lyrics, music videos and album images — has been introduced as evidence by prosecutors in hundreds of cases, from homicide to drug possession to gang charges. Rap songs are sometimes used to argue that defendants are guilty even when there’s little other evidence linking them to the crime. What these cases reveal is a serious if lesser-known problem in the courts: how the rules of evidence contribute to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Full article here.

Based on the book Arriving Today: From The Factory To The Front Door – Why Everything Has Changed About What And How We Buy , this Wall Street Journal documentary looks at the many confounding issues affecting each stage of the planetary supply chain, now severely disrupted by the pandemic and the war in Europe.

Julien Crockett interviews Justin E. H. Smith in The Los Angeles Review Of Book s, regarding his new book The Internet Is Not What You Think : So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.  Full interview here.

Dona and I watched Spielberg's remake of West Side Story yesterday. I am kicking myself hard that I didn't see this in a cinema. It's completely flawless, a sparkling gem of a movie, and it's a big movie with big themes deserving of a big canvas.   This story has been worked and reworked over the course of four centuries by some tremendously expressive people: William Shakespeare, for starters, and also Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Wise, and now Tony Kushner, Janusz Kamiński, Justin Peck, and Steven Spielberg. There are many layers on this palimpsest, many versions all reaching across time. Spielberg uses all of these contributions, remixes them, adds to them, awakens them.   The most obvious of these is Rita Moreno's marvelous turn from starring in the 1961 as Anita and returning in this film as both on-set executive producer and in a reworked role of Valentina. She brings dignity and resonance in every scene she'

Film School Rejects has compiled a convincing list of some of the better movies that somehow failed to be nominated for the coveted Best Picture Oscar. They actually came up with a hundred of them, and it's a great list. Full article here. Warning: Some of these will make you mad.

Nick Paumgarten writes in The New Yorker about a Florida retirement community built around the Jimmy Buffett mythos: More than twenty million people a year pass through the doors of a Margaritaville-branded establishment. The company, with annual system-wide sales of $1.7 billion, licenses the name to restaurants, hotels, casinos, and resorts, and sells a wide array of branded merchandise: umbrellas, towels, beach furniture, bicycles, blenders, frozen shrimp, and Key-lime-pie mix. It recently announced plans to launch a cruise line. (Before that, Buffett himself had never been on a cruise ship.) Given the age of Buffett’s fan base, and the life style he’s hawking—as well as baby-boomer demographics—the move into active living was a natural one. “Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?” Buffett told me. “I thought for a while it was a myth.” Full article here.

Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times : My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing. The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. It’s neither a difficult film for the art-house crowd nor a comic-book blockbuster but a film for the largest possible audience of serious adults — the kind of movie that was commonplace in the not-so-distant days when Oscar races regularly threw up conflicts in which every moviegoer had a stake: “Titanic” against “L.A. Confidential,” “Saving Private Ryan” against “Shakespeare in Love,” “Braveheart” against “Sense and Sensibility” against “Apollo 13.” That analysis explains why this year’s Academy Awards — reworked yet again, with various technical awards taped in advance and a trio of hosts added — have a

Jenny Holzer. (1983). " Survival." Cast aluminum.  Much more insight and wisdom from the amazing Jenny Holzer here.

  From Lauren Berry's 2010 collection The Lifting Dress : The entire red carnation in my mouth. Like any panicked schoolgirl, I’m inarticulate       and constantly introduced to beautiful things.   Full poem here.

Beton (Бетон). (2022). "Kyiv Calling." [Authorized cover version of "London Calling" by The Clash.)

Sometimes we get away without suffering the consequences of our questionable decisions and sometimes we don't. One of the more questionable decisions I ever got away with was when I made a reminiscence slide show for my own senior high school class, to be shown on the occasion of our final class assembly. The show consisted of photographs of the senior class from their entire school experience from kindergarten through high school, carefully timed and faded between two synchronized projectors, with audio-triggered advances cued to specific lines in four or five popular songs of the day that I thought had special meaning for us. Yearbook advisor Jeananne Grace and school district media guru Tim Osborne had taught me how to make these slide shows. In those ancient times I thought they were a powerful storytelling technology. My eighteen-year-old self wanted to add stage lighting and pyrotechnics to this performance, though. Drama teacher Jean Ball helped me with the stage lighting. I

 Edward Burne-Jones and Morris & Co. (1848). Luna (Stained Glass).

Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker: A century ago, parents who objected to evolution were rejecting the entire Progressive package. Today’s parents’-rights groups, like Moms for Liberty, are objecting to a twenty-first-century Progressive package. They’re balking at compulsory vaccination and masking, and some of them do seem to want to destroy public education. They’re also annoyed at the vein of high-handedness, moral crusading, and snobbery that stretches from old-fashioned Progressivism to the modern kind, laced with the same contempt for the rural poor and the devoutly religious. Full article here.

In 1967, Pink Floyd was introduced to American television audiences when they performed "Apples And Oranges" on Dick Clark's American Bandstand . Lead singer Syd Barrett is still fronting the band, and guitarist David Gilmour had not yet joined. Given the limited effort the band seems to be putting into lip syncing, this clip may be from a rehearsal. The recording has been spruced up and colorized by Swedish artist and graphic designed Alex Stubbe Teglbjærg.

  Randall Munroe at xkcd.   

Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic (in a message she also submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committe): For all of these reasons, we need a completely new strategy toward Russia, China, and the rest of the autocratic world, one in which we don’t merely react to the latest outrage, but change the rules of engagement altogether. We cannot merely slap sanctions on foreign oligarchs following some violation of international law, or our own laws: We must alter our financial system so that we stop kleptocratic elites from abusing it in the first place. We cannot just respond with furious fact-checking and denials when autocrats produce blatant propaganda: We must help provide accurate and timely information where there is none, and deliver it in the languages people speak. We cannot rely on old ideas about the liberal world order, the inviolability of borders, or international institutions and treaties to protect our friends and allies: We need a military strategy, based in deterr

      Alireza Karimi Moghaddam. (2022). "Colors vs. War." Artist page on Javali Design Via Instagram

David Browne writes in Rolling Stone : Anyone perusing a new psychedelic-era artwork exhibit in New York is bound to pause along the way and think, “Wait, isn’t that a Grateful Dead album cover?” And they would be partly correct. About 30 years ago, artist, curator and art collector Jacaeber Kastor was checking out a gallery auction and came across the nearly century-old ink drawing that served as the basis of the Dead’s logo and album art. Full text here.

Allegra Hyde writes about opening lines in Literary Hub : By “clarity,” I mean the ability of a first sentence to give readers an initial hand-hold for place and/or time and/or character and/or plot. Clarity is essential for a first sentence because, at the start of a story or novel—barring whatever information a reader might have encountered on the jacket copy or in reviews—the reader’s mental theater is a void. An unlit stage. A nothingness. Every word in that first sentence is an opportunity to shine a light on what is to come—to give a reader enough information to stabilize them in some degree of who and where and what the story is about. Full text here.

  We were friends but now you're the enemy Don't need this when there's a remedy

  Justin E.H. Smith writes in Wired from his forthcoming book: The internet is not what you think it is. For one thing, it is not nearly as newfangled as we usually conceive of it. It does not represent a radical rupture with everything that came before, either in human history or in the vastly longer history of nature that precedes the first appearance of our species. It is, rather, only the most recent permutation of a complex of behaviors that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols. Full article here.

La vie n’est facile pour aucun de nous. Mais quoi, il faut avoir de la persévérance, et surtout de la confiance en soi. Il faut croire que l’on est doué pour quelque chose, et que, cette chose, il faut l'atteindre coûte que coûte. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.   — Marie Curie as quoted in Madame Curie : A Biography (1937) by Eve Curie Labouisse, Part 2, p. 116

  – J.F. "Jeff" McCullers

  Nicasio Andres Reed in Reckoning : He turns the corner onto S Bonsall St. The sidewalk is broken in all the same spots he didn’t know he knew until he sees them again, and then he knows every fissure and crack, every dog paw immortalized in wet cement. No parked cars. A lot more boarded-up doors and windows than there used to be, although there’d always been some. There were never any front yards in the neighborhood, all the basement windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk. Now every house on the row that still looks occupied has a rain barrel out front, and a couple have one of those larger, galvanized metal cisterns that look like fat little grain silos. There’s a line of grass growing right down the middle of the street. Sedge, probably—a bad sign on what used to be high ground. And then, inevitably, there’s #2017. He’s been gone almost twenty years and it looks . . . not the same, but like a faded photograph of itself. Gino doesn’t know if it’s looked like that for a whil

 In which two living legends contemplate the human conditions: We could use someone to pray for us about now.

  From Randall Munroe at XKCD.

Writing in The Atlantic , Derek Thompson interviews Paul Poast, a professor of foreign policy and war at the University of Chicago. They discuss the possible resolutions for the Ukraine crisis: What makes this a very scary scenario—what makes a war between the great powers more likely than it’s been in 80 years—is that Putin might feel at some point like his back is against the wall and he has no other options, so he lashes out in desperation. In our discipline, we call this “gambling for resurrection.” You’re worried you are going to be deposed, and the only way to save yourself is to take a high-risk gamble. Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century called it “committing suicide for fear of death.” Full interview here.

Ashes. Greasy heaps of ashes, miraculously but ungratefully awake, walking pridefully around in the sunlight, japing and hollering, preening and bragging, unconcerned that we are but cinders tossed up by the wind, too often ungrateful for the brief gift of being alive.

May I offer you an orange in this trying time? These oranges were painted by Piet Mondrian in Amsterdam in 1899. Oranges are a hybrid of the sturdy pomelo and the vivacious mandarin. 1899 was the same year that The Hague Convention was signed, which forbade the use of poisons, the killing of enemy combatants who have surrendered, looting of a town or place, and the attack or bombardment of undefended towns or habitations. You'll be annoying if you insist at parties that oranges are a kind of berry but you won't be wrong. 1899 was the same year that Scott Joplin wrote "The Maple Leaf Rag." Bergamot oranges are used to make Earl Grey tea so it seems likely that Captain Picard loves their zesty flavor. 1899 was the same year that the Zeppelin was launched, that the newsies went on strike, that modern geometry was developed, and the U.S. acquired Cuba from Spain. One of the things made the Palace of Versailles so exceptional was its dazzling orangerie, which is how you s