An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for August 5, 2020

By the by, happy astronomical Lughnasadh, Lammas, coming up on August 7 at 01:07 UTC in 2020, which will be in the evening on Aug 6th for me, as ☉ in 15° ♌︎ (Sol is in 15° Leo).

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

• “How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind.” About Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage by Laura Huang.
• “Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski review – supremely sharp.” About Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski—”Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude – have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’, and ‘small masterpieces’.”
• Composer Max Richter On ‘Voices,’ A New Album That Envisions A Better World—”On his latest album, Voices, he takes inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” About Voices by Max Ricther.
• “Occult following: tarot cards through the ages – in pictures” is a gallery of some images from Tarot by Jessica Hundley & al., from TASCHEN. Also—”Trace the hidden history of Tarot in the first volume from TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica, a series documenting the creative ways we strive to connect to the divine. Artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the Major and Minor Arcana, this visual compendium gathers more than 500 cards and works of original art from around the world in the ultimate exploration of a centuries-old art form.”
• “Believing in Literature.” About The Trouble with Literature by Victoria Kahn, from Oxford University Press.
• “To Fascinate and Unnerve. The philosophical leftovers of Gilles Deleuze.” About Letters and Other Texts by Gilles Deleuze, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges.
• “How literature can mirror our complicated desires. There’s inequality in real-life relationships. Art shouldn’t hide that.” About 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love by Daphne Merkin.
• “‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin. Alex Halberstadt elicits some painful memories from his reluctant grandfather, once Stalin’s bodyguard.” About Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning by Alex Halberstadt
• The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir by Justus Rosenberg—”The Art of Resistance is unlike any World War II memoir before it. Its author, Justus Rosenberg, has spent the past seventy years teaching the classics of literature to American college students. Hidden within him, however, was a remarkable true story of wartime courage and romance worthy of a great novel. Here is Professor Rosenberg’s elegant and gripping chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil.”
• Treadwell’s Book of Plant Magic—”Treadwell’s first ever guidebook has been two years in the making; its author, Christina Oakley Harrington, focused exclusively on actual magical powers attributed to the plants, so this book is full of the old ways plants have been used to achieve love, win competitions, become invisible, see fairies, gain good luck, achieve success, receive protection, and many more. She consulted over 200 sources for the book, and every spell is footnoted discreetly at the back.”
• 10% off all Anthology Artist Zali Krishna’s Polyversity paperbacks until midnight Friday with code PUBLISH10.
• Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Series – Rough Trade Books—”In 2021, the museum will celebrate its 70th anniversary and Rough Trade Books are working with the museum’s director who also happens to be fashion’s leading set designer, Simon Costin, on a celebratory publication for the occasion. If you can’t wait until next year, fear not. As a warm-up to this special anniversary publication, our latest series of Rough Trade Editions—published in association with the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic—seek dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. Through hallucinatory fiction, illustration, a deeply personal essay and the fates, a range of artists have collaborated to create new works that take their shape from the fascinating, alternative history of the museum. And the good news is, you can pre-order these titles now.”
• “The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. A Q+A with the novelist Tim Maughan, whose disturbing future predictions have had an unfortunate habit of coming true.” Check out Tim Maughan’s books.
• “The space between our heads. Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts?”
• “Scientists Crack the Mathematical Mystery of Stingless Bees’ Spiral Honeycombs. The waxy architectural wonders seem to grow like crystals.”
• “Tinkering with Roundworm Proteins Offers Hope for Anti-aging Drugs​. The somatic nuclear protein kinase VRK-1 increases the worm’s lifespan through AMPK activation, and this mechanism can be applied to promoting human longevity, the study reveals.”
• Not as cool as Tesla Coil Towers, but … “Press release: NZ start-up launches world-first long range wireless power transmission”
• There Is Something Strange About Our Universe, Scientists Find After Mapping the Cosmos—”The findings could suggest that there is something deeply strange about our understanding of the universe, which could require a new kind of physics or fundamentally alter our understanding of dark matter.”
• “Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang. Detailed computer simulations have found that a cosmic contraction can generate features of the universe that we observe today.”
• I Escaped the Cult. But I Couldn’t Escape the Cult Mentality.
• “Interview with the Mapmaker. I spoke to the man who designed the QAnon and 5G infographics you’ve seen circulating online.”
• Paul Rudd, John Cena Warn Against COVID Conspiracies
• “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. The political economy of bullshit.”
• “How to Hug During a Pandemic. Of the many things we miss from our pre-pandemic lives, hugging may top the list. We asked scientists who study airborne viruses to teach us the safest way to hug.”
• Indian restaurant offers ‘COVID curry’ to scared customers—”An Indian restaurant is hoping to win back customers afraid of eating out during the pandemic with a special ‘COVID Curry’ and ‘Mask Naans’.”
• Food and Covid-19: 2 Poems
• Turning to Art for Spiritual Sustenance
• We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations—”Art may occupy the realm of the spirit, but artists do not. They have bodies as well as souls, and bodies make their gross demands. In plainer language, artists have to eat.” Also, moreover, my personal windmill to tilt: read this, then re-read it considering also “magic” as cognomen for “art” and “magicians” for “artists”, because, for one example, as Alan Moore says in the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore: “There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as ‘the art’. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic IS art, and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form, IS literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art, as it about supernatural events. A ‘grimoire’ for example, ‘the book of spells’, is simply a fancy way of saying ‘grammar’. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply ‘to spell’, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or a writer is the closest thing, in the contemporary world, you are likely to see to a shaman.”
  
• Weaving Fate: Hypersigils, Changing the Past, & Telling True Lies by Aidan Wachter, due in August. “Weaving Fate presents tools to help restore our connection to the Field, the Others, and our own intrinsic natures. These practices can help us to re-imagine the possibilities available to us and to shift our lives into more beneficial forms.”

• The Secret: Dare to Dream—”A feel-good movie starring Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas based on the best-selling book ‘The Secret,’ which focuses on the power of positive thinking.” About The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Or, you know, read The Kybalion.
• Brindlewood Bay from The Gauntlet—”Brindlewood Bay is a roleplaying game about a group of elderly women—members of the local Murder Mavens mystery book club—who frequently find themselves investigating (and solving!) real-life murder mysteries. They become increasingly aware that there are supernatural forces that connect the cases they are working on and, in particular, a cult dedicated to the dark, monstrous aspect of the goddess Persephone will come to vex them. The game is directly inspired by the television show Murder, She Wrote, but also takes inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, ‘cozy’ crime dramas, and American TV shows from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.”
• Metamorphosis—”Play as Gregor, turned into a tiny bug, and set out on an extraordinary journey to unravel the mystery of your transformation. Metamorphosis is a first person adventure set in a surrealist world where your newfound abilities are your last and only hope for redemption.”
• “How urban planning is a tool of white supremacy. This is the other lesson from Minneapolis.”
• “Throne of Blood. It’s time for the British royal family to make amends for centuries of profiting from slavery.”
• ASMR Hypnotised by the Element Air
• Ratched; official trailer for Netflix’s show, staring Sarah Paulson as the nurse from, and before the events of, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Played previously by Louise Fletcher in Milos Foreman’s film adaptation of the novel. Also.
• Honest Government Ad | A message from the White House—”Authorised by the Department of Sacrificing School Teachers to the Greater Bull God to Make Line Go Up”

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