Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls – What Remains, 2019.

“… a collaborative performance that responds to questions of presence by poetically addressing the erasure and exposure that drives the historical disturbance of black citizens.”

More here, here, and here.

by Emily Ogden

The author learns to like it loud.

A friend of mine has an expression he uses when he isn’t wild about a book, or a show, or an artist. For people who like this sort of thing, he’ll say, this is the sort of thing they like. He’s giving his irony-tinged blessing: carry on, fellow pilgrims, with your rich and strange enthusiasms.

My friend is saying something, too, about being imprisoned by our tastes—or by our conscious ideas about our tastes, anyway. There I am, liking the sort of thing I like. How tiresome. Isn’t there some way out of this airless room? Trapped with our own preferences, we find we don’t quite like those things after all—we don’t like only them, we don’t like them unfailingly. Taste not a duty we can obey, nor will it obey us. It wells up from somewhere. It comes in through the side door. It is, at its best, a surprise.

I don’t like loud music. That at any rate has been the official word for some years. There was reason for doubt. In high school I listened to Nine Inch Nails in my pink-and-cream-colored bedroom, tracking the killer bees of The Downward Spiral as they veered from the right to the left headphone. Later, Venetian Snares drove me out of myself when that was what I needed. (If you don’t know the music of Venetian Snares, it is tinny, relentless, almost intolerable, highly recommended.) Nothing has ever been better than hearing Amon Tobin’s waves of musical and found noise at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, more or less alone. My tolerant friend came along but gently left me to myself after a while, perhaps because being in that basement club felt something like participating in a sonic weapon test. Could the sheer percussive force of a sound wave alter the rhythm of your heart? It seemed as though it might. I was ready to pay the price, and so were a lot of other people I saw standing rapt, alone, looking up. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joshua Wilbur 

tl; dr:

Skim-reading is a bad habit, all things considered.

It’s detrimental to our sense of time and place. Screen technologies are fundamentally changing not only how we read but also how we think and what we remember.

But readers shouldn’t take all the blame. Writers, editors, and creatives of all stripes must adapt in order to counteract our tendency to skim-read everything in sight.   

For the uninitiated, “tl; dr” stands for “too long, didn’t read.” It’s a handy piece of internet slang, used on discussion forums to briefly summarize a dense “wall of text.” A good tl;dr distills the key points of a lengthy post, saving the hurried reader minutes of time.   

It’s not unlike the BLUF (bottom line up front) technique commonly used in business and military writing, in which “conclusions and recommendations are placed at the beginning of the text, rather than the end, in order to facilitate rapid decision making.”

You could also imagine tl;dr as the internet’s snarkier version of the Inverted Pyramid method used by journalists. The method dictates that the most significant information should appear at the top of any news article —front and center— with supporting details falling below. To “bury the lead” is to fumble the pyramid’s orientation and waste the reader’s time as a result.

Arguably, tl; dr is only the latest expression of an old petition from readers: get to the point; give me the gist; just the facts, ma’am. We’ve always been pressed for time and concerned with the most salient points, especially when it comes to the news. For many of us, “reading the newspaper” has long amounted to skimming the headlines.

So what’s the big deal? Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

The spring ephemeral wildflowers of the Midwest are generally not large or showy. In a relatively short time during one of the less promising parts of the year, these perennial plants must put out leaves and flowers and reproduce, all before disappearing until the next spring. Still, they light up the woods for me every year despite their relatively modest circumstances.

One of the earliest spring ephemerals, harbinger of spring, may be the most inconspicuous. The plant is usually no more than a few inches tall when it blooms, and if you don’t keep an eye out for it, you could walk right by and not know it’s there. Unless you kneel down and look closely, the leaves are little more than a small green patch dotted by tiny white flowers. Closer inspection reveals that the flowers have five white petals and deep red anthers, which darken with time and give the flowers a charming salt-and-pepper look. Harbinger of spring can appear as early as February, when the weather has been cold for months and the trees are bare. It’s a minute but electrifying herald of warmer and greener days to come. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Have you ever been asked to donate to the worthy cause of sending the Lady Loins to the state semi-finals? I have, and I think I gave a couple bucks because of the doubtlessly unintentional prurience of the street fund-raising efforts of these aspiring young athletes and their lacking sign-makers.

As an editor, I think everyone needs an editor’s eye to pass over any written material, including my own. When we review our own writing, our brain fills in any lacunae in logic or syntax. This does not happen when we read other authors’ output, at least not as often. If you want to point the finger at why this occurs no matter how conscientious we are, go ahead and blame science.

You have likely seen the memes that dot social media about being able to read garbled words and sentences such as:

Tehse wrods may look lkie nosnesne, but yuo can raed tehm, cna’t yuo? [from mnn.com]

When relatively simple (one- to two-syllable words) words have their first and last letters in the correct place, our brains decipher them fairly quickly. Why does this happen? Because we rely on context to determine meaning. Whether we are counting the number of letters when we play Hangman, watching a show like “Wheel of Fortune,” or working on a crossword puzzle, our brains are analyzing the context to create solutions.

Your brain wants to fill in a pattern so that the jumble make sense. Measuring pattern recognition is one of the ways to test IQ, intelligence, and job fit (how you think being perhaps more important than what you think). According to this article from Frontiers of Neuroscience, “A major purpose of the present article is to forward the proposal that not only is pattern processing necessary for higher brain functions of humans, but [superior pattern processing] is sufficient to explain many such higher brain functions including creativity, imagination, language, and magical thinking.” Patterns and context matter tremendously.

So, what does this have to do with needing an editor forthwith? It comes down to this: You can’t be trusted. Read more »

Eiffel Tower, Paris, March of 2014.

by Jeroen Bouterse

When Socrates’ students enter his cell, in subdued spirits, their mentor has just been released from his shackles. After having his wife and baby sent away, Socrates spends some time sitting up on the bed, rubbing his leg, cheerfully remarking on how it feels much better now, after the pain.

The Phaedo, Plato’s vision of Socrates’ final conversation with his students before drinking the hemlock, is a literary piece overflowing with meaning and metaphor. Its main topic is the immortality of the soul. Socrates’ predicament provides not just the occasion but also a handy analogy: Socrates sees his death as the release of the soul from the bonds of the body (67d). His students are not so sure.

With Plato, every moral, existential and philosophical question is in the end related to a problem of knowledge. So when, in the last hours of his earthly life, halfway through Plato’s dialogue, Socrates suddenly starts off on a lecture about the epistemological paradoxes of the natural sciences, no-one is too surprised. After all, the question whether death is bad for you naturally flows into the question whether the soul can actually die, and therefore into the question what kind of thing the soul actually is, and what we can say about it and how. It is Socrates’ excursion into science that I want to zoom in on here. Read more »

by Daniel Ranard

You must have seen the iconic image of the blue-white earth, perfectly round against the black of space. How did NASA produce the famous “Blue Marble” image? Actually, Harrison Schmitt just snapped a photo on his 70mm Hasselblad. Or maybe it was his buddy Eugene Cernan, or Ron Evans – their accounts differ – but the magic behind the shot was only location, location, location: they were aboard the Apollo 17 in 1972.

Since then, NASA has produced images increasingly strange and absorbing. Take a look at the “Pillars of Creation” if you never have.  Click it, the inline image won’t do.  That’s from the Hubble telescope, not a Hasselblad handheld.

Meanwhile, this week an international collaboration gave us the world’s first photograph of a black hole. The image appears diminutive, nearly abstract. It’s no blue marble; it offers no sense of scale. Though we may obtain better images soon, the first image has its own allure. The photograph is appropriately intangible, desiring of context, not quite structureless.

Maybe “photograph” is a stretch. For one, the choice of orange is purely aesthetic. The actual light captured on earth was at radio wavelengths (radio waves are a type of light), much longer than the eye can see.  The orange-yellow variations depicted in the image do not correspond to color at all: scientists simply colored the brighter emissions yellow, the dimmer ones orange. Besides, even if we could see light at radio wavelengths, no one person could see the black hole as pictured. Multiple telescopes collected the light thousands of kilometers apart, and sophisticated algorithms reconstructed the final image by interpolating between sparse data points.

Should we marvel at this image as a photograph?  Or is it a more abstract visualization of scientific data? First let’s ask what it means to see a thing, at least usually. Read more »