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

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

• The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow, due mid October—”In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in a Hugo award-winning author’s powerful novel of magic amid the suffragette movement.”
• Crowdfunding effort: “Devilry: six diabolical stories. A book of fiendish tales told in traditional block print and ink drawings.”—”Fully illustrated with traditional block printing and ink drawings, the stories explore the many forms the devil takes in fiction and folklore, how we use devils to explore fear, cruelty and passion, and how devils are even woven into the landscape.”
• “Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. The philosopher and gender theorist discusses tensions in the feminist movement over trans rights.” Partly about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and recently released The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Also Tweet—”It is rare to see a magazine publish an interview in which their interviewer is so thoroughly and effectively skewered, time after time, by the person they are interviewing.”
• “How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole. Instead of optimizing work, technology has created a nonstop barrage of notifications and interactions. Six months into a pandemic, it’s worse than ever.” Adapted from Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen.
• “Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie on Cancel Culture and The Hitch.” Salman Rushdie interview with Martin Amis about Amis’ latest book Inside Story, due in October.
• “Simulating Democracy.” About If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore.
• Tweet thread—”The producers of The Social Dilemma brought some serious and valid concerns about the impact of social media platforms to a broad Netflix audience. BUT…”
• “Fincher Moments: Mark Zuckerberg Walks Into a Bar. The first few minutes of David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’ is a thesis statement on its protagonist—and a harbinger for a decade defined by assholes.”
• ‘Systemic shift’ needed to save biodiversity
• “Astronomers discover the first ‘ultrahot Neptune’: one of nature’s improbable planets.” But now this bugged moon in the video game Elite Dangerous isn’t quite so unlikely? Mitterand Hollow Super-Fast orbit—”Mitterand Hollow is the moon of the earth-like planet New Africa. The moon takes only 1 minute and 25 seconds to orbit around the planet one time.”
• Biomarker Indicating Neurodegeneration Identified in the Eye
• “Marine sponges inspire the next generation of skyscrapers and bridges. Bioinspired architecture could pave the way for stronger, lighter structures.” Watch.
• Drone canals. So, when do I get to live in a flying drone narrowboat? “Drones and Planes to Share the Same Sky as Altitude Angel Establish ‘Drone Zone’ Open to All. ‘Arrow Drone Zone’ will enable automated drones and general aviation to harmoniously co-exist in a real-world environment.”
• “Older people have become younger: physical and cognitive function have improved meaningfully in 30 years. The functional ability of older people is nowadays better when it is compared to that of people at the same age three decades ago. This was observed in a study conducted at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The study compared the physical and cognitive performance of people nowadays between the ages of 75 and 80 with that of the same-aged people in the 1990s.”
• Is Aging a Disease You Can Reverse? A Look at the Science Behind the Longevity Movement
• “In Guatemala, the Maya world untouched for centuries. Archaeologists have suspected there was more to Tikal, El Zotz and Holmul. But it wasn’t until recently that proof came – in the form of Lidar, a type of remote sensing technology.”
• “Designed in Minecraft, built IRL. In Gaza, citizens are imagining what public spaces could be, and then actually building them.”
• “UCLA-led team of scientists discovers why we need sleep.”—”But why is sleep so vital to our health? A UCLA-led team of scientists has made a major advance in answering this question and has shown for the first time that a dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs at the age of about 2-and-a-half. Before that age, the brain grows very rapidly. During REM sleep, when vivid dreams occur, the young brain is busy building and strengthening synapses — the structures that connect neurons to one another and allow them to communicate.” “After 2-and-a-half years, however, sleep’s primary purpose switches from brain building to brain maintenance and repair, a role it maintains for the rest of our lives …” “All animals naturally experience a certain amount of neurological damage during waking hours, and the resulting debris, including damaged genes and proteins within neurons, can build up and cause brain disease. Sleep helps repair this damage and clear the debris — essentially decluttering the brain and taking out the trash that can lead to serious illness.”
• Get lost often? Eat more yogurt! “Animals’ Magnetic ‘Sixth’ Sense May Come from Bacteria, New Paper Suggests. The question is one that has been unresolved despite 50 years of research.”
• Rapid Blood Test Could Detect Brain Injury in Minutes
• Because, of course. Spider venom trees. Everything in Australia is out to kill you, confirmed. “Australian stinging tree injects animals with spider-venom-like toxin.”
• “Hog wild: U.S. has ‘out of control’ population of ‘super-pigs,’ expert says” I mean, yeah, both literally and figuratively; Animal Farm! Also, watch These Are No Ordinary Pigs | Invasion
• Butlerian Jihad! “Google brings back humans to take over moderating YouTube content from A.I.” Hold on! Not so fast: “A new lawsuit may force YouTube to own up to the mental health consequences of content moderation. Facebook agreed to pay out $52 million to moderators suffering from PTSD and other conditions — and now YouTube is being asked to do the same.”
• Hiding a 10,000 Year Clock inside a Mountain
• “Chitin could be used to build tools and habitats on Mars, study finds. The manufacturing process would require minimal energy and no specialized equipment.”
• “Esta comunidad de Guatemala nos enseña cómo conservar un bosque. No todas las acciones humanas dañan el planeta y esta comunidad nos enseña el valioso efecto de conservar el bosque y su biodiversidad.” [“This community in Guatemala teaches us how to conserve a forest. Not all human actions harm the planet and this community teaches us the valuable effect of conserving the forest and its biodiversity.”]
• “Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration. Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?”
• “Land of Free (and Fettered) Speech, In a time of rapid social and technological change, Americans are struggling to figure out the new rules of political discussion, online and in person.”
• “Ed-Tech Mania Is Back. Utopia-minded tech gurus promise they’ll solve all of academe’s problems. They won’t.”
• “What Is the Sound of Thought? Reading linguistic thought directly from the brain has brought us closer to answering an age-old question — and has opened the door to many more.”
• “The Solution to Information Overload Can’t Be More Information. Why shutting down Twitter accounts or limiting Facebook groups won’t solve our problem.”—”But eliminating accounts or restricting groups doesn’t get to the real problem, which is not about content but about the information sphere writ large that we’ve constructed — and what that means for our understanding of the world. Simply put, we have an information sequencing problem, in that any rational sequence of information has been destroyed. And this means everything turns to shit.”
• The battle over dyslexia—”It was once a widely accepted way of explaining why some children struggled to read and write. But in recent years, some experts have begun to question the existence of dyslexia itself.”
• Networked Publics: Learning and Creating as Global, Interconnected, Interactive Community Enterprise—”One of the most powerful amplifications of networked learning is the “PLN” — the personal learning network. Through social media, it is possible to identify knowledgeable people, to follow their publications, to communicate with them, to discover and follow those who they consider knowledgeable, to help them learn and to learn from them. PLNs are for teachers as well as students, and the art of cultivating, feeding, and harvesting knowledge from PLNs is an essential 21st century skill.” “Hand in hand with networked publics is collaboration. The era of individual learning in which collaboration was largely treated as cheating has given way to the reality of a networked world where collaboration skills are as important as individual literacies.”
• ‘We Blew It.’ Douglas Rushkoff’s Take on the Future of the Web—”Douglas Rushkoff is a futurist, author, early cypherpunk and professor of media studies at Queens College. His early writings on the internet paved the way for thinking about the web in revolutionary terms, as a tool to enfranchise and connect the world.” “When you decide to energize capitalism with digital devices, you amplify its power. It’s no longer the mechanical age of capitalists versus labor, but a digital, infinitely-scaled version that uses human attention as its surface area.”
• Tweet—”You don’t need to hate your opponent. You don’t need to wish harm on your opponent. What you do need to do is acknowledge that they are in fact your opponent, oppose them, and defeat them. It’s less exhausting.”
• It’s coming from inside the house! Still. Again. “A Notorious COVID Troll Actually Works for Dr. Fauci’s Agency. Bill Crews is a PR official at the National Institutes of Health. But he also has another job: an anonymous RedState editor who rails against the agency for which he works.” Also “Blogger who trashed Fauci online “retires” after being ID’d as NIH staffer. Directly contradicting your agency and calling your boss names is a bad look.”
• “FinCEN Files Show Criminals Moved Billions As Banks Watched. Thousands of secret “suspicious activity reports” offer a never-before-seen picture of corruption and complicity — and how the government lets it flourish.” Also tweet—”This FinCen leak is worthy of our ridicule because it reveals the hypocrisy of those who argue that crypto-currency is for money launderers. Banking *is* money laundering on a massive scale. But the solution is not to tighten controls on money. That won’t work.”
• How the oil industry made us doubt climate change
• “Donald Trump’s rise to power and the vulnerability of American democracy. Journalist and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior takes no joy in being right. She predicted the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016 and the style President Trump would adopt long before anyone else. She writes about the inevitability of a Trump type presidency and the fragility of American democracy in her new book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America.” About Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America.
• “Jeff Zucker Helped Create Donald Trump. That Show May Be Ending. The coziness between the TV executive and Mr. Trump is a Frankenstein story for the cable news era. But then the monster got away.”
• “Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained. He has fought to undermine voting rights his entire career.” Mentions Jesse Rhodes’s Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act.
• “Who is Amy Coney Barrett, the judge at the top of Trump’s list to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg?“—”Amy Coney Barrett tops President Trump’s list to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. The 48-year-old is a devout Catholic who is fervently antiabortion in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. Her name was floated in 2018 to replace Anthony M. Kennedy.”
• Don’t Despair About the Supreme Court—”It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.” HT Haymarket Books
• Perhaps as controversial as jury nulification, but consider the option of ignoring judicial review: “Democrats have a better option than court packing.”
• Watch “‘We Could Have Done More,’ Says Mueller Prosecutor In New Book.” About Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation by Andrew Weissmann and Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President by Michael S. Schmidt
• “The Inside Story of the Mueller Probe’s Mistakes. In a new book, Andrew Weissmann, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputies, lays out the limits and letdowns of the years-long Russia investigation.” About Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation by Andrew Weissmann
• Journalists Need to Be Clear About a Clear Threat to Democracy
• “The Mask Barons of Etsy. How a couple of mom-and-pop shops made millions off masks.”
• “Twitter is looking into why its photo preview appears to favor white faces over Black faces. Users discovered the problem with the neural network that crops photo previews.”
• “Tofu sales skyrocket during the pandemic, as consumers search for affordable meat alternatives. Tofu makers attribute the spike to an interest in healthy, plant-based protein sources in the wake of meat-supply disruptions and an economic slowdown.”
• “How to adapt meditation for little kids? It looks a lot like play. Introducing my 3-year-old to mindfulness was a complete failure. A year later and drowning in pandemic stress, I decided to find out where I’d gone wrong.”
• Tweet—”A pro-Trump group in the small Chicago suburb where I grew up has now started its own church. This is a real Facebook post. The group calls itself a militia and is stockpiling guns.” Also tweet—”If you have not watched—or read—@JeffSharlet’s The Family, you may want to do so after reading these tweets. The Family holds a key to contemporary US electoral political landscape.” About The Family by Jeff Sharlet, also a documentary.
• “What Preparations Are Due? Daniel Defoe attempted to teach a nation how to live in a world where the next crisis is always closer than it appears.” About Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations
• A bunch from Literary Hub caught my eye the last few days: The Fault Lines of Midwestern Racism Run Deep; also Life, Love, and Beowulf in the Deep South’s Most Literary Small Town; also Capitalism is Killing Us (But It Doesn’t Have To); also Writing a History of a Pandemic During a Pandemic; also “America, We Talk About It”
• Let’s Preserve Acts of History, Not Racist Monuments
• “Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream. Two years ago, Latria Graham wrote an essay about the challenges of being Black in the outdoors. Countless readers reached out to her, asking for advice on how to stay safe in places where nonwhite people aren’t always welcome. She didn’t write back, because she had no idea what to say. In the aftermath of a revolutionary spring and summer, she responds.”
• Guilt Lit—”Books can change minds, yes. But, if the change is to be for the better, reading, an exercise in abstraction, must be complemented by full engagement with the real—real people, real problems, real life.”
• “One Man’s Trash. Two new books reveal the meaning latent in the junk we collect.” About Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America by Wendy A. Woloson and Heart of Junk by Luke Geddes.
• “The Elusive Peril of Space Junk. Millions of human artifacts circle the Earth. Can we clean them up before they cause a disaster?”
• “G. E. Moore: A great philosopher? The realist who championed simplicity and common sense, and who discovered ‘Moore’s Paradox’”
• “COVID ruined weddings, so now people are eloping on Instagram. It’s the Vegas wedding chapel for social media.”
• “The art of tantra: is there more to it than marathon sex and massages? The west reduced tantra to a quest for sexual liberation and wellness. But a new show charts its darker depths – from avenging goddesses to blood-drinking and self-decapitation.”
• We Can’t All Be Ginsburgs (And That’s OK)
• “It’s Our Time Now”: The Aesthetics of Horror in Jordan Peele’s Us
• A Playboy Bunny-Turned-Psychic Tells Us the Future of Whiskey
• Storytime: A Loaf of Bread for Death
• Medieval kitchen—”Our [History at the University of Northampton] lecturer in medieval history, Rachel Moss, shares a recipe for medieval happiness: Hildegard von Bingen’s spiced biscuit recipe.” Also tweet thread.
• Watch “The Fiery History of Banned Books.”
• Watch “Yazidi Religion Explained.”
• “Please Don’t Summon Demons in the Bathroom.” Note that in once of the reviews, ninjapiratezombi made this so that the words “summon demons” glows in the dark.

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