An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for October 22, 2020

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

• “The other side of America’s iconic folk anthology is entrancing — but also plenty disturbing. ‘The Harry Smith B-Sides,’ a companion piece to the curator’s 1952 collection, shows a darker side than the original.” About The Harry Smith B-sides curated by Harry Smith —”The Harry Smith B-Sides box set contains the flip side of every 78-rpm record that Harry Smith included on the Anthology of American Folk Music. In 1952, Folkways Records published the legendary six-LP series entitled the Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by eccentric record collector, filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist Harry Smith. Many historians cite Smith’s reissue, with its recordings of country, blues, and gospel music from the 1920s and ’30s, and its booklet containing idiosyncratic liner notes, esoteric artwork, and handmade design as a major impetus for the folk music revival of the 1950s and ’60s. 68 years later, The Harry Smith B-Sides offers both a resonant listening experience and the closing of a collector’s circle. Sequenced in the identical order that Smith created, this new box set offers the flip-side of each record selected by Smith for the original Anthology of American Folk Music. Newly-remastered audio under license from Gennett Records, Paramount Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group. This box set represents a mirror image of the Anthology of American Folk Music’s tracklist.”
• Crowdfunding: “13th Moon Halloween Anthology. An exciting new 52 page Halloween Anthology comic book comprised of seven stories, rendered by a diverse team that spans the Earth!”
• Watch “Did hallucinogens play role in origin of religion? A new book tackles what’s been called ‘the best kept secret in history’: Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God?” About The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Brian C Muraresku, foreword by Graham Hancock—”A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations.”
• “8 Modern Cosmic Horror Books for a Post-Lovecraft World.”
• “NYPL’s Essential Reads on Feminism. As the 19th Amendment turns 100, The New York Public Library reflects on the history of suffrage and feminism with the publication of NYPL’s Essential Reads on Feminism for adults, teens, and kids. Discover the list and explore the Library’s resources on feminism through its Digital Collections, research guides, online databases, and huge catalog of books, e-books, and more.”
• “Where Do Reading Lists Come From? (And Why Do We Love Them?)” Excerpt from Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by William Germano and Kit Nicholls, part of the Skills for Scholars series—”How redesigning your syllabus can transform your teaching, your classroom, and the way your students learn”
• “Cheap Writing Surfaces and Medieval Bureaucracy Helped Popularize the Alphabet.” Excerpt from A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Judith Flanders—”From a New York Times-bestselling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world.”
• “Does Facebook Have Politics?.” Ahout Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (2nd Edition) [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]—”First published to great acclaim in 1988, Langdon Winner’s groundbreaking exploration of the political, social, and philosophical implications of technology is timelier than ever. He demonstrates that choices about the kinds of technical systems we build and use are actually choices about who we want to be and what kind of world we want to create—technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice. A seminal text in the history and philosophy of science, this new edition includes a new chapter, preface, and postscript by the author.”
• Book of the Hidden Name: Magick of the Shem HaMephorash Angels [Amazon] by by Maximus Tyrannus Avery—”The Book of the Hidden Name is the angel grimoire that will transform your understanding of the world around you forever. The most comprehensive information on the seventy-two hidden Shem HaMephorash angels, and how to access them, are contained in this tome. Unleash the ability of angelic might by acquiring the powerful secrets of magick that bring miracles into your life.”
• “The Atlantic and the Limits of Reasonableness. Is the magazine’s tradition of argument equal to the crises of the Trump era?” About The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. How We Recover. [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by the writers of The Atlantic—”Some of America’s best reporters and thinkers offer an urgent look at a country in chaos in this collection of timely, often prophetic articles from The Atlantic.”
• “Complex, Simple: On Robert Conquest’s ‘Collected Poems’.” About Collected Poems [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Robert Conquest—”This volume brings together eight decades of work by a writer described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘a man of letters, attaining equal distinction as poet, historian, and political commentator.'”
• “Poet of Loneliness.” About Fifty-Two Stories [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—”From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace: a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.”
• “Is Deep Thinking Incompatible With an Academic Career? Intellectual life is impractical, at least when set against the narrow confines of academic life.”
• “The Obligation of Self-Discovery. Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration.” About Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Judith G Coffin—”When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir’s international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s—from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters also provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed.”
• “Martin Amis Offers the ‘Inside Story’ of His Relationships With Three Famous Writers.” About Inside Story: A Novel [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Martin Amis, due in a couple days—”From one of the most highly acclaimed writers at work today: his most intimate and epic work yet–an autobiographical novel of sex and love, family and friendship.”
• More etymological fun about Harlequin and the Wild Hunt: “Harlots all over the place.”
• “Hate reads. The Western canon has no shortage of fascists. But can the far-Right make ‘literature’ worthy of the name?”—”If Bronze Age Mindset and Harassment Architecture are any indication, the current trend of far-Right literature is pseudo-academic in its pretensions, but lacking in novel interventions: its Romantic environmentalism, neoclassical worship of the male physique, and its fixations on technological determinism and irony recall literature of the early 20th century, though its prose style has yet to pass high-school English. The narrative function, too, has remained the same: to stoke feelings of bitterness and solitude into a politics of reaction that is intellectually justified only after the fact. That young fascists want to be taken seriously as writers is perhaps not as troubling as their desire to be cops – if nothing else, it could be taken as evidence that the novel is far from dead.”
• “We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?. How good utopian novels can change our thinking about the world.”
• “Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism. After the First World War, the members of the Vienna Circle tried to put European thought on a rigorously logical footing. Then the times caught up with them.” About David Edmonds’s The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]—”From the author of Wittgenstein’s Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe’s history.”
• “Why British Police Shows Are Better. When you take away guns and shootings, you have more time to explore grief, guilt, and the psychological complexity of crime.”
• “How a Road Trip Through America’s Battlegrounds Revealed a Nation Plagued by Misinformation.”
• “A new fellowship to explore White House’s history of slavery. White House Historical Association partners with American University for researcher role.”
• “This is the future of abortion in a post-Roe America. The fall of Roe v. Wade won’t end abortion. Here’s what it will do.”
• “How ‘The Master’ Took Command. There’s still plenty to unpack about Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film. In an excerpt from a new book about the director’s work, dig deep into a … masterpiece.”
• I Have Been On A Journey To Come Out As The Person I Truly Am. ‘My path hasn’t necessarily been pretty, but it’s been incredibly rewarding.'”
• Tweet—”Anderson Cooper is trying very hard to keep a straight face while “Macho Man” is blasting in the background.”
• “The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists. In the 1950s, the residents of Mosinee, Wisconsin, staged a coup to warn of the dangers of the red menace. The lessons of that historical footnote have never been more relevant.”
• “Rudy Giuliani faces questions after compromising scene in new Borat film. Trump’s personal attorney has indiscreet encounter with actor playing Borat’s daughter in hotel room during pandemic.”—”Even before he reaches into his trousers, Giuliani does not appear to acquit himself especially impressively during the encounter. Flattered and flirtatious, he drinks scotch, coughs, fails to socially distance and claims Trump’s speedy actions in the spring saved a million Americans from dying of Covid. He also agrees – in theory at least – to eat a bat with his interviewer.” Also “Rudy Giuliani Caught On Camera Appearing To Touch Genitals During ‘Borat’ Prank. Giuliani, 76, was filmed putting his hands in his pants when he thought he was with a female journalist.”
• Tweet—”Today we’re reporting that People of Praise has recently hired a big law firm to investigate claims of sexual abuse within the group. It happens to be the same firm that helped Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation.” Also “Revealed: ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse. People of Praise hire lawyers to investigate historical sexual abuse allegations as former members speak of ‘emotional torment’”
• Tweet—”When politicians use faith as an excuse to pass and uphold laws that seize control of people’s bodies but not guarantee them healthcare, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, or welcome the stranger, you have to wonder if it’s really about faith at all.”
• “What’s So Great About a Written Constitution? Having one document that sets up a government does not result in better democratic outcomes than having a mix of statutes, norms, and precedents.” From the series “The Battle for The Constitution. A special project on the constitutional debates in American life, in partnership with the National Constitution Center.”
• “Teenage ‘computer genius’ could become the first millennial saint.—”Acutis, described by the Vatican as a “computer genius with a love for the Eucharist” is believed to be the youngest contemporary person who has been beatified.”
• “Parents Of 545 Children Separated At U.S.-Mexico Border Still Can’t Be Found.” Also “Hundreds Of Parents Separated From Their Kids Under Trump Still Can’t Be Found. ACLU Lawyers say they can’t locate the parents of at least 545 migrant children after they were separated under the president’s “zero-tolerance” border policy.” Also “Lawyers say they can’t find the parents of 545 migrant children separated by Trump administration. About two-thirds of the 1,000-plus parents separated from their kids under a 2017 pilot program were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be found.”
• Watch Frank Figliuzzi On QAnon: ‘This Doesn’t Go Away Merely If Trump Goes Away’—”There are no more guardrails.”
• “US militias forge alliances with conspiracy theorists ahead of election. Anti-government and anti-science advocates joined by founder of militia group at Red Pill Expo in Georgia.”
• “Witches Are Trying to Figure Out Whose Spell Gave Trump COVID-19. Witches have been casting spells on the president since he was inaugurated. His COVID-19 diagnosis fell on a suspiciously auspicious date.”
• “The Tree That Could Help Stop the Pandemic. The rare Chilean soapbark tree produces compounds that can boost the body’s reaction to vaccines.”
• COVID Sutra! “Kiss Less, Face Away: Your Guide To Covid-Safe Sex. Sex is no longer banned for couples in ‘established relationships’ – so is casual sex is still off the cards?”
• “The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year.”
• But, wait. These are at the mall?! Does every purchase include contact tracing? “Need to Find a Pandemic Necessity? There’s Now a Store for That. Covid-19 Essentials may be the country’s first retail chain dedicated solely to products required because of an infectious disease.”
• “Why the Trump Administration Doesn’t Want to Help. The pandemic recession is wildly uneven. Wealthy people are doing just fine. Hourly workers are not.”
• “The Art of the Pandemic Meltdown. Under stress from every front, we’re having more meltdowns. Here’s how to lose it the right way.”
• “A Dose of Optimism, as the Pandemic Rages On. The months ahead will be difficult. But the medical cavalry is coming, and the rest of us know what we need to do.”
• How to Avoid a Winter COVID Catastrophe. What we can learn from other countries to avoid the worst-case scenario.”
• Tuberculosis breakthrough as scientists develop risk prediction tool. Data from tens of thousands of people around the world used to identify those at highest risk of active TB before they get sick.”
• “Rewild to mitigate the climate crisis, urge leading scientists. Restoring degraded natural lands highly effective for carbon storage and avoiding species extinctions.”—”If a third of the planet’s most degraded areas were restored, and protection was thrown around areas still in good condition, that would store carbon equating to half of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution. The changes would prevent about 70% of predicted species extinctions, according to the research, which is published in the journal Nature.” Also “Restoring Farmland Could Drastically Slow Extinctions, Fight Climate Change. Returning strategic parts of the world’s farmlands to nature could help mitigate both climate change and biodiversity loss, a new study found.”
• “Group thinks it has found proof of 10,000-year-old, Ice Age culture in Straits of Mackinac.” Also “Native Americans May Have Found Their Atlantis Under the Great Lakes.”
• More about this: “Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of ‘The Social Dilemma’”
• Tweet thread—”Many Scots, while owning Scotland’s role in slavery, still take the stance that “normal” or “working class” Scots got no advantages from the fortunes made with enslaved labour, or any benefits were long in the past. (1/n)”
• “Physicists successfully carry out controlled transport of stored light.”
• “The first room-temperature superconductor has finally been found. The compound conducts electricity without resistance up to 15° C, but only under high pressure.”
• “Rare magnetism found in the world’s strongest material. Strange things happen when you stack and twist graphene.”
• “Pluto’s snow-capped mountains look like they belong on Earth, but they’re entirely different.”—”Cthulhu is a region that stretches nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum. It’s a bit larger than Alaska and showcases snow-capped red mountains that are actually covered in bright methane frost.”
• “Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50. Gauging whether or not we dwell inside someone else’s computer may come down to advanced AI research—or measurements at the frontiers of cosmology.”
• “As Jupiter dazzles in the night sky, new research suggests its moons are warming each other.”
• “Death by black hole: Astronomers spot flare from “spaghettification” of star.
  ‘We were able to study in detail what happens when a star is eaten by such a monster.'” Also watch “Death by spaghettification: artistic animation of star being sucked in by a black hole.”—”This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. In a new study, done with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers found that when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards.”

• Watch NASA Engineers Celebrate as Spacecraft Makes Contact With Ancient Asteroid. Also NASA attempts first ever mission to retrieve sample from asteroid. Also NASA Spacecraft Lands On Asteroid To Collect Sample.
• “Feast your eyes on a gorgeous ‘time bomb’ star—”One particular star, named Apep, is not only incredibly rare for what is, but based on what we know about its type, it’s not going to be around for much longer.” Also “This rare ‘peacock’ star system in our galaxy is doomed to explode.”
• “Long-Lost Medieval Monastery Discovered Beneath Parking Garage in England. Carmelite friars established Whitefriars in 1270, but the religious site was destroyed during the Protestant Reformation.”
• “Who Gets to Solve Death? The two types of “death tech” companies.”
• Memories Can Be Injected and Survive Amputation and Metamorphosis
• We need to reckon with our love of sexy robots. Because the robots we want to love may have other ideas.”
• “James Randi, magician and stage artist devoted to debunking the paranormal, dies at 92.”
• Watch Animaniacs Jurassic Park Clip from the reboot coming in November. Also “Hulu brings back that irreverent magic with trailer for Animaniacs reboot. They’re ‘animaney, totally insaney, never man-splainy Animaniacs.'”
• Watch Mörk Borg Trailer
• An it harm none … “Why some people are cruel to others. Inflicting harm or pain on someone incapable of doing the same to you might seem intolerably cruel, but it happens more than you might think.”
• “On Turn-of-the-Century Suffrage Cookbooks, Trojan Horse For Women’s Equality.” From All Stirred Up: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food, and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Laura Kumin—”In honor of the centenary of the 19th amendment, a delectable new book that reveals a new side to the history of the suffrage movement.”
• “How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall.”
• “How Academics, Egyptologists, and Even Melania Trump Benefit From Colonialist Cosplay.”
• “The Case Against Critical Feedback.”
• “The Moment My Poetry Students and I Could No Longer Ignore the Climate Crisis.” Excerpt from The Georgia Review, Fall 2020.
• “Against the Muse Myth: On Motherhood and the Writing Life.” From Hinge [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Molly Spencer, part of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry—”Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering.”
• “The US government sues Google for alleged anticompetitive abuses in search.” Also “What we know about the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google so far. Yes, it’s a major suit and a major step—but what does it actually mean for anyone?” Also “How does Google’s monopoly hurt you? Try these searches.” Also “Who is Google’s market power hurting? The case against a ‘gateway to the internet’.” Also “Google Locks In Search Monopoly With $1 Billion to Carriers—”Google doled out more than $1 billion last year to U.S. mobile carriers to distribute its search engine, according to the landmark antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department.”
• The Other Lamb: The eerie cult horror being compared to Midsommar. New horror film tells the story of an all-female religious cult.” Watch The Other Lamb, official trailer, dir. Malgorzata Szumowska, with Michiel Huisman, Raffey Cassidy, Denise Gough, Kelly Campbell, Eve Connolly & Isabelle Connolly—”For her entire life, the cult she was born into has been all that teenage Selah (Raffey Cassidy) has known. Along with a band of similarly cloistered young women she lives seemingly unstuck in time, cut off from modern society in a remote forest commune presided over by a man called Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), a controlling, messiah-like figure with a frightening dark side. But when her insular world is rocked by a series of nightmarish visions and disturbing revelations, Selah begins to question everything about her existence—including her allegiance to the increasingly dangerous Shepherd. Awash in images of primal, dreamlike dread, this provocative fable is a haunting vision of adolescent awakening and revolt.”
• “Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Cross swords and fall in love with this tabletop RPG by April Kit Walsh, celebrating queer love and power, Powered by the Apocalypse.”—”If you love angsty disaster lesbians with swords, you have come to the right place.”
• “Mainframe. In the psychedelic shared hallucination of cyberspace—Mainframe—AI programs roam freely. Self-replicating and self-editing, they’ve turned our shared online consciousness into a deep dream, observing us to simulate anything we might want to do in the digital playground we now inhabit. Mainframe is a cyberpunk hack of Tunnel Goons in which you play as mercenaries who specialize in hunting down and capturing or deleting corporate AI programs. You have no body, your consciousness permanently wired into Mainframe. Each session is a mission to find and deal with one of these programs. Explore the never-ending surreal servers of Mainframe as you fight to stop megacorporations from taking control of cyberspace entirely.”
• “Time Traveler. When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year.”
• “Looking at Rococo to Understand the Future of Glitch Art.”
• Watch Did the WITCH cause the Plague of Madness—”In the promo for episode of Genndy Tartagovsky’s Primal, Coven of the Damned, we saw a supernatural wendigo entity with glowing green eyes. Could the tentative be responsible for the plague of the madness?”
• Watch Jon Anderson’s Go Screw Yourself (Election Edit)
• Watch (and listen) to Sounds from Around the Milky Way by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center—”A new project using sonification turns astronomical images from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other telescopes into sound. This allows users to “listen” to the center of the Milky Way as observed in X-ray, optical, and infrared light. As the cursor moves across the image, sounds represent the position and brightness of the sources.”
• Watch EVERYWHERE—”What is she, the mysterious woman in leather pants? A robot? A witch? A robot-witch? Is she even real or is this all just a dream? Am I dreaming? These are all questions we have to answer for ourselves.”
• Watch Library Takeout by Duke University Libraries—”Although our stacks will be closed for the Fall 2020 semester for safety purposes, you can still get books and other materials by using our Library Takeout Service. Check out the video (and get down with your masked self) to find out more. UPDATE: Our ‘Library Takeout’ song is now available on Spotify and Apple Music, so you never have to get it out of your head! Make it your new ringtone, jam in your car, and keep on checking out books.”

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