An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for July 23, 2020

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• “This Is Why People Are Talking About Hexing The Moon And Baby TikTok Witches.” Also: “Have TikTok Witches Actually ‘Hexed the Moon’?” Also: “Did WitchTok ‘Baby Witches’ Hex the Moon?”
• Cursing the Moon?—”My basic point is this – you should experiment, even though it means doing something “wrong” or “dumb” or whatever, especially when you’re just starting out.”
• Tweet—”Dudes. You sound so arrogant when you go on about ‘Baby Witches’. Put down your dark fluff & plastic skulls – do some practice, experiment, learn, study, go for a walk, hug a tree or get a hobby. Most fabulous magicians were teen witches once.”
• Tweet—”Look at what the TikTok witches did now. Just great.”
• Tich-Toch Teens Hexcrawl the Moon
• “The Ultimate White Fragility. White people in not-insignificant numbers maintain a persistent belief that they’re the ones suffering historic levels of racial discrimination.” Counterpoint: ‘White Fragility’ is a corporate cult
• On Afropessimism
• “Ooh the rubble.” About Victory in the Kitchen: The Life of Churchill’s Cook by Annie Gray.
• “Should We Cancel Aristotle? He defended slavery and opposed the notion of human equality. But he is not our enemy.”
• K-pop backs BLM—”Their activism caught the media’s attention after fans crashed the Dallas Police’s “snitch” app on 31 May.”
• First image of a multi-planet system around a sun-like star
• Astrophysicists fill in 11 billion years of the universe’s expansion history
• “Nostalgia reimagined. Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too.”
• “How the geometry of ancient habitats may have influenced human brain evolution. Landscapes that are not too dense and not too sparse comprise a ‘Goldilocks zone.'” Watch
• 1.4-Million-Year-Old homo erectus handaxe unearthed in Ethiopia
• Earliest humans stayed at the Americas ‘oldest hotel’ in Mexican cave—”Chiquihuite Cave is the first site that dates the arrival of people to the continent to around 30,000 years ago – 15,000 years earlier than previously thought”
• How being realistic can be key to your wellbeing
• White evangelicals didn’t hold their noses to vote for Trump. His toxic masculinity is what they’ve been defending for decades.
• “Twitter cracks down on QAnon conspiracy group, including a ban on 7,000 accounts. The platform is explicitly blocking QAnon in trending topics, search and shares.” Also: Twitter Finally Cracks Down on ‘QAnon’ Nutters
• “Why Conspiracy Theorists Think FEMA Is Building Camps to Imprison Americans. The thinking goes that any number of abandoned industrial spaces could be used to round up civilians at a moment’s notice.”
• How I Offloaded My Anxiety to Trello
• Autumn Knight Responds to the “Gaslighting of the Current Moment” in New Performance Series
• How John Steinbeck’s Final Novel Grappled With Immigration and Morality
• To Attack and Dethrone Gods
• Introducing the Hay House Unlimited Audio App
• How can we see animals in terms of the Eight Circuits Model of Consciousness?
• Turkish Official Says Some of Hagia Sophia’s Christian Mosaics Will Be Concealed During Prayers
• “Echo” And the Problem of Chess Problems—”Art—whether chess problem or poem—is a game.”
• “A Swiss Dada Pioneer Finally Gets Her Spotlight. Sophie Taeuber-Arp did it all: Installations, textiles, costumes, abstract art. Nearly 80 years after her death, an online gallery show commemorates her talent (and a major museum exhibition is coming).”
• O! (My!) Canada! “COVID-19 and Sex.”—”Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact.”
• Spirit cooking! *Emily Litella voice* Oh. Never mind. “Our Ghost-Kitchen Future.”
• “‘Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky’ – do cities have to be so sexist? Toxic masculinity is built into the fabric of our urban spaces, writes Leslie Kern, author of new book Feminist City. And the results aren’t just divisive – they can be lethal” Also: Author Attacks “Phallic” Buildings “Ejaculating” Light Into The Sky
• The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, now released as an audiobook with James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, Arthur Darvill, Riz Ahmed, Kat Dennings, Taron Egerton, Samantha Morton, Bebe Neuwirth, Andy Serkis, and more.
• Official Amadeus w/ Lucian Msamati and Adam Gillen | Free National Theatre at Home Full Performance

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