File under: something to look forward to. Sally Rooney has a new book coming.
In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release her new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” which follows four young characters in Ireland as they navigate the pressures of work and relationships against the backdrop of political turmoil and fears about their economic futures.
If you haven’t, go read Normal People and then watch the Hulu show. You can thank me afterwards.
Twitter bans Trump, at last. The final bullet in their (compelling, detailed) list of decision factors is an interesting one.
Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
Three things of note:
Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible.
Matt Miller, Between the Places:
Sol LeWitt did a series of maps where he cut out a section of it based on various criteria. … The area between the places he had lived in NYC were cut out, leaving an absence in the map. This tool lets you create your own cut up map, enter at least three locations and the map will be generated. A unique map reflecting your relationship to a city. Works best for larger metropolitan areas but it tries its best to scale the map.
I loved this post from Josh Rose in The Art of Photography: Does the iPhone 12 Dream of Rendered Moments? He uses the Voight-Kampff test from the movie Blade Runner as an analogy for computational photography.
You can tell a non-human from a human because the non-human is trying to be human, whereas a human is just being human. And imitation will always feel slightly cartoonish to anyone who has studied emotion deeply. But this works in reverse, too. Life and simulated life are indistinguishable to those who have not connected deeply with nature or humanity. …
I’ve listened to it all of twice, so here’s the hot take: evermore is a bold statement from a confident artist. I love folklore, but I think this will end up being the more interesting record.
The collaborators may be the same, and the instrumentation may sound the same, but let’s be clear: these aren’t folklore b-sides. These songs are the product of someone who loved the work they had produced and wanted to go further. …
Only 63 Apple I computers have been confirmed to still exist, and they have been known to fetch around $400,000 at auction. One of these has been cut up into pieces to make the Caviar Apple I iPhone 12 Pro.
Emphasis mine.
Michelle McGhee and The Pudding have collaborated on an incredible piece of cultural data analysis about representation in crossword puzzles.
We sampled tens of thousands of clues across decades and publications from Saul Pwanson’s crossword corpus. Then, we manually labeled each person’s race and gender after researching them. For the purpose of this analysis, we classified people using US Census’s categories. We believe that the lines between races and genders are social constructs, and their precise delineations are moving targets without unanimous agreement. …
Kicks Condor answers the Uses This questions. I wrote about Uses This recently (and answered Daniel’s questions a decade ago), but Kicks Condor brings their unique vibe.
What would be your dream setup?
Cody: Envision a room full of millions of people holding one giant, hugely sprawling conversation. Such a thing has never been possible. I think if I could one day find myself in that room, even as a simulation, and it felt real — and I knew that it was just my sister and I having a conversation through these myriad expressions of us — it would be a dream come true.
Go read the whole thing.
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