“Men’s Rights Activists have called for a boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, describing it as “feminist propaganda” and bemoaning liberal Hollywood’s attempt to undermine traditional masculinity.”
Aaron Clarey, a blogger [who] focuses on men’s issues, wrote that he was initially excited at
the “explosions, fire tornadoes [and] symphonic score of Fury Road,”
because it “looked like a straight-up guy flick.” But Clarey (who hasn’t actually seen the film yet) describes being
mortified when discovering from critics, who hailed Theron’s performance
and the well-rounded nature of her role in the film, that Fury Road was
not your average action movie.
WHO HASN’T SEEN THE FILM YET.
He hasn’t even seen the film, and he’s losing his shit.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh, you stupid, stupid, stupid, sad little manchild. Grow up, darling.
Is it too soon to share more photos of catssleeping in unlikely places? We didn’t think so. Last month we shared photos of cats snoozing the day away in flowerpots. Today let’s take a look at kitties in Japan who prefer cooking pots and bowls when it comes to cozy round places to catch some Zs.
Sleeping pot preferences among these Japanese cats seems to range from soup serving bowls to teapots to rice cookers to what might be a salt pig. Even better still, sometimes one bowl can hold more than one cat. Kawaii! They all look so comfy, we’re suddenly ready for a nap ourselves.
Still awake? Head over to RocketNews24 for even more photos.
Amazon, headquartered in the city’s historically industrial South Lake Union neighborhood, has a workforce spread around more than a dozen buildings and plans for more. And when you need to hire thousands of high-salaried workers in Seattle who probably have their minds set on Mountain View or Cupertino, you make a promotional video.
Amazon did just that in 2013, putting together a collection of testimonials assuring the next wave of Amazonians that Seattle is right for them:
The selling points fit what’d you’d expect a young tech worker with a lot of money to appreciate: Ambitious fitness routines (“everyone does Crossfit”). Weirdness in a safe, controlled environment (“there’s actually two places in Seattle where you can take circus classes”). And owning property in a market they’re unwittingly making too expensive (“we bought a house recently here”).
The video started making the rounds among Seattleites after being posted on The Strangerlast month. Since then, not one but two razor-sharp parodies have popped up, shared yesterday by the Seattle Times’ Tricia Romano.
One comes from the local rapper Spekulation, filled with voiceovers that get right to Seattle’s growing tech-dread:
And another by one of Seattle’s most famous record labels, Sub Pop:
Of course, these are funny manifestations of a very real issue. As Anthony Flint noted last month, “it won’t be long” before Seattle’s real estate market catches up with Vancouver’s, where the median home price is $1.2 million.
The dynamic is especially noticeable in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Separated from South Lake Union by I-5, the gay and punk cultures that have thrived there since the 1990s now feel at risk. Rents are rising dramatically and resentment is growing alongside it.
Capitol Hill Housing, an organization that provides income-restricted housing in the neighborhood, has 25 buildings with 747 units, according to the Seattle Times. The paper reported just one vacancy as of last March. A poster recently spotted in the neighborhood reads: “Tech Money Kills Queer Culture Dead.” A writer for The Guardian noticed multiple “We Welcome Our New Condo Overlords” bumper stickers while reporting on Amazon’s growth last year.
It may not be as bad as San Francisco yet, but the more Seattle changes in ways that isolate those who aren’t rich or absorbed in tech culture, the icier the satire will surely become.
In 2014, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant contacted conceptual design studio Lernert & Sander to create a piece for a special documentary photography issue about food. Lernert & Sander responded with this somewhat miraculous photo of 98 unprocessed foods cut into extremely precise 2.5cm cubes aligned on a staggered grid. Looking at the shot it seems practically impossible, but the studio confirms it is indeed the real thing. The photo is available as a limited edition print of 50 copies printed on 40 x 50cm baryta paper signed by the artists for about €500. You can learn more on their website. (via iGNANT)
Hi there! I’d like to hear your thoughts about the name “John”. It’s one of the most common names in the English-speaking world. It’s also your name. Do you like being named John? If you had to change your name, what would you change it to?
“John” is indeed a very common male name in the English world, as are its various cognates in other languages (Ian, Sean, Juan, Ivan, etc), but in English at least, its stock has come down in quite a bit in recent years — once a perennial Top Ten name, last year “John” was merely the 55th most popular name in the US (according to this baby name site), wedged between “Julian” and “Colton.” At this point, if you hear someone’s named John, you might reasonably surmise he’s likely over 25, which of course in my case is perfectly correct.
I like being named “John” just fine, but I’ll also note that almost no one calls me by the name. In most social situations I am almost always and exclusively called “Scalzi” and have been since I was child, not by family (my family nickname was “John-John” to distinguish me from other Johns in the family, including my father) but by just about everyone else. Indeed, I am often referred to by “Scalzi” even when everyone else is referred to by first name (“I had dinner with Bob, Ted, Cyndi and Scalzi”).
One reason is practical: I’m usually the only Scalzi in most contexts, so referring to me by that name is useful for identification, particularly when there’s another John in the social mix, who is then often referred to by his first name. Another reason, I suspect, is that “Scalzi” is more fun to say than “John.” Go ahead, try it. A third reason is that I lucked into the name as branding — there are other Scalzis in the English-speaking world, but none so prominent as I; check Google on this for confirmation (or Bing, if you like, you deviant). There are other Scalzis, and there are even other John Scalzis, but in terms of to whom the name refers in our culture, I am the Scalzi. And that’s pretty cool. Might as well call me that name; it’s me.
Whereas I will never be the John, no matter how hard I try. There are several saints at the head of the line, and then a few kings and presidents, other world historical figures and then the long long line of celebrities who share the name. Even fictional Johns have more notability than I; I will never ever be more famous than John McClane, for example. I’m not necessarily even the first John people think of when it comes to science fiction: There are the Johns Varley, Wyndham, Christopher and Ringo which come to me right off the top of head, and many others I could name if I thought about it more, and of course there’s John W. Campbell, who as an editor largely defined what we think of as the “Golden Age” of science fiction.
Which is neither here nor there as to whether I like the name “John,” mind you. I do; it’s nice and comfortable and it’s me — I will answer to it, when it’s used (which is rarely) and it’s meant to refer to me in context (slightly more rarely). I just recognize that a very common name means that you share it with a wide number of people. “John” is me, but it’s not only me, and it will never be primarily me, when people think of the name, in the way “Scalzi” is.
As for what I would change my name to, well, as noted above, there’s already a name for me that, culturally speaking, I kind of own, and which is what most people actually use to refer to me, so changing my first name would not only be unnecessary, there’s also a real question of whether anyone would actually notice. But if I had to change it, and I would have to exclude “Jon” from the list of names I could change it to (technically “Jon” and “John” are different names), I’d probably go with “Michael,” which is my middle name and thus one comfortably already allied with my identity. And it’s about as common as “John,” which solves no problems, as far as names go. Fortunately, “Scalzi” is still available to me for identification purposes.
(There’s still time to ask questions for 2015’s Reader Request Week — get your requests in here.)
The state’s labor movement has been “very good at being the opposite of Wisconsin,” Paulson said. Unions have traditionally been strong in Wisconsin, but over the past few years a state government has dealt a series of crushing blows to the labor movement, including passing a law restricting collective bargaining for public employees and a law that bans union shops. Labor in California has remained strong enough to make such attacks unlikely, but Paulson said he and others in the movement have tired of focusing so much on simply avoiding disaster.
“Over the last few years, some of us have just said, fuck that,” Paulson told Al Jazeera. “Let’s do what we want to do to fight for workers. And so the state federation of labor in particular decided that we are going to put our resources into organizing. Into real organizing, that is going to result in a collective bargaining agreement at some time or another, and people being in a labor union, and officially having a voice at work.”
The California Labor Federation selected three particular campaigns on which to combine resources: The SEIU-USWW drive to organize Silicon Valley security officers, as well as a UFCW-backed campaign to organize workers at Walmart and a similar Teamster-driven campaign at food processing plants in California’s Central Valley. Every union in the federation is expected to contribute something to those three campaigns, regardless of whether the campaigns have anything to do with their immediate interests, Paulson said.
“Even school employees, we’re going to send them to the Walmart campaign,” he said. “We’re going to send them to food processing and help the Teamsters out in Central Valley. All of us central labor councils, we’ll organize civil disobedience and actions outside of Google and Apple in order to reinforce organizing for security officers.”
After the security officers campaign began to pick up supporters and public attention, the labor movement started throwing itself behind other organizing drives in the Silicon Valley area, according to SEIU-USWW organizing director Sanjay Garla. The most prominent of those campaigns is the Teamsters’ effort to unionize shuttle drivers — but, Garla said, “there’s a lot of talk about how food-service workers are also part of this fight.”
“Everyone sat down and said, ‘How do we back up these security officers that are going up against these major giants?’” he said. “It was really about supporting the security officers, and it’s turning into something more.”
Cajoling all the unions into contributing something for organizing is a good idea and being aggressive is a great one. There can be good reasons to play defense, but labor also must press its advantages where possible. And if it isn’t possible in California, it isn’t possible anywhere.
Scene from “The Night Cafe – A VR Tribute to Vincent van Gogh” (GIF by the author via YouTube)
Orbs of orange paint suggested the light of the lamps past midnight in Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 “Le Café de nuit” (The Night Café), and in a new virtual reality take on his painting of the Café de la Gare in Arles, France, they come to life with radiating colors. The VR experience evokes his textural style and includes cameos from his other paintings hidden in the animated bar scene. Familiar sunflowers rest on a piano, the chair from his bedroom sits at the end of a hallway, and when you step outside, the sky swirls like in “The Starry Night.”
Created by New York–based developer Mac Cauley, the VR environment of the “The Night Café” is part of this month’s Oculus Mobile VR Jam. As he writes on the submission page, while Cauley explored reference material from van Gogh and contemporaries, he also imagined “what might have been there, just off the edges of the canvas.” An in-progress version is available to test out, and for those without a VR system, a video preview captures some of the experience.
Van Gogh described the café to his brother as “blood red and dull yellow with a green billiard table in the center, four lemon yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens.” The Dutch artist himself appears in “The Night Café,” smoking a pipe and contemplating the harsh yellow floors and green ceiling with melancholy eyes.
Whether they take the form of an LED-illuminated bike path or a severed ear reproduced with genetic material from a descendent, van Gogh–inspired experiments always seems to be on the edge of technology, perhaps because of the rich possibilities in his vivid paintings and the psychological mysteries of the man. Cauley’s “Night Café” is an atmospheric meditation on what van Gogh saw over a century ago, and how virtual reality can take us inside a long dead artist’s vision.
In a lovely long interview at LitHub, Maggie Nelson discusses her new book The Argonauts and the recent emergence of hybrid forms in popular literature. As a matter of fact, Nelson makes a point not to think much about form, except in direct service of content. The exchange with poet Adam Fitzgerald goes on to cover queer politics and poetics, Roland Barthes, and the history of outsider identity and the avant garde.
And why has your client not appeared today? the court asked Edinburgh solicitor Roy Harley. Harley said he didn't know, but noted that "[t]o be frank, My Lord, when he arrived at my office [last week] he was wearing a fluorescent green Batman outfit. I think drink had been taken." The court accepted that explanation. "I will defer the matter to next Tuesday," he said, "but perhaps you could tell him not to dress as Batman, or Robin for that matter," on that occasion.
Max, who sent me that item, points out that not only is a Batman costume inappropriate for a law office, fluorescent green is inappropriate for a Batman costume. Although anything fluorescent would be bad, actually.
Q: When does a positive recommendation letter not help you get admitted to the bar? A: When you failed to disclose that the person who wrote it for you only did so because he agreed to write it to get you to drop a lawsuit against him. There are lots of other reasons why this gentleman will not be practicing law in Massachusetts, but that's the most interesting one.
Is there anything that can't be improved by getting law enforcement involved? How about middle school? Jefferson Parish School District in Louisiana has 40,000 students. Over 1,600 of them were referred to police and arrested in just one year—more than ten times the number in the parish next door—often for heinous crimes like not having a hall pass and throwing Skittles at someone on the school bus. "Are we really here about Skittles?" a judge reportedly said. Yes, Your Honor. The charges were battery (because the Skittle found its target) and "interference with an educational facility." Normally I think of the federal government for trumped-up charges like that one, but I forget that the states are our laboratories of democracy.
It isn't entirely clear how much this contributed to the arrest, but it is still worth reporting that three men who robbed the Build-A-Burger in Mt. Morris, New York, left "a steady trail of macaroni salad" behind them because they ate out of the bowl during their escape. (Thanks, Elisa.) Police reportedly followed the trail to a nearby hiking path which they also found littered with parts from the cash register they had stolen along with the bowl. This was less of a sure thing than finding the guys who stole GPS devices, but still a pretty good lead.
David Andreatta of the RochesterDemocrat & Chronicle writes that this doesn't surprise him, because Deby Hill's macaroni salad is "darn good." So good that "[i]f you accidentally drop a noodle, as I did Monday, you pick it up with all the tenderness you would a day-old chick and grieve for what might have been." That's good macaroni salad, and good writing.
Freddie de Boer’s new piece seems to be getting a lot of attention. What I see is a pretty familiar argument with some familiar problems.
To start with a point of agreement, it is very bad and very stupid to compare critics of Obama’s position on TPP to Emmett Till’s lynchers. The problem is assuming that this random guy is representative of anything. Drawing broad conclusions from the dumb tweets of someone who formerly held a leadership position in the Sacramento Democratic party makes about as much sense as generalizing about “the left” based on Salon letter-writers or the “St. Petersburg Democratic Club.” (Or, to pick another entirely random example, asserting that all liberals really support torture because Alan Dershowitz.) If you find yourself using rhetorical techniques beloved by Glenn Reynolds, it may be time for some re-evaluation.
The basic idea here, which we’ve seen before, is to conflate various objections to Freddie’s arguments so he only has to engage with the weakest one. The idea that Democrats shouldn’t be criticized is, indeed, very dumb. Not very common, but dumb, and if you see the assistant treasurer of the Des Moines Young Democrats saying it feel free to call it out if it floats your boat. The idea that there’s no real difference between Republicans and Democrats because Democrats are bad on issue x, however, is much more problematic. The idea that vote-splitting on the left is a sound tactic for pushing Democrats to the left is equally bad. Pretending that all of the disagreement is over point one conveniently relieves from having to defend the indefensible, i.e. points two and three. And, sorry, noting the fact that the most disadvantaged bear the brunt of the large differences between having Democrats and Republicans in charge of the federal government is fair game.
This is all familiar territory. Much odder is the attack on The Toast, a site as consistently smart and funny as anything on the intarwebs. Freddie alleges that it is “a website that has taken maximum advantage of this Teflon aspect of progressive argument.” I’m not entirely sure what this means, and again the evidence is threadbare. As issue is a quick list by Nicole Cliffe. Now, no writer bats 1.000 (including, God knows, this one), and just for myself I didn’t find it particularly funny. But using it as some kind of culture war totem is hilariously overwrought. In particular, one might want to look at the second tag, although it shouldn’t even be necessary. The list isn’t an attack on the books in question or on white men; it’s observational humor, a form of humor that depends on generalizations. Freddie might also want to consider the fact that many commenters praised in not because they feel pressure from the P.C. police but because they thought it was funny — what humor hits you where you live is going to, you know, vary. Obviously, not everything that Mallory Ortberg writes is pure gold — although there are very few writers with a higher success ratio — but one can disagree that “she’s in a ‘Radiohead recording themselves farting into a paper bag’ rut” without believing that she Should Not Be Criticized. Freddie, alas, is too busy preemptively asserting that nobody (who?) will allow him to criticize Ortberg to cite a single objectionable thing she’s written, let alone explaining why he finds it objectionable.
To return to another point of agreement, I agree that “[o]ne-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen.” After reading all of the preceding paragraphs, however, I’m not sure who does believe this. What I am sure is that editors of The Toast “challenging their readers” in some unspecified way will not fix the world or create justice or make anything happen either, so they should probably keep doing what they’re doing.
96 yr old: You know how your parents probably say things like, "you were BORN with the internet, you don't know what it's like to live without!"
Me: yeah
96 yr old: Well, my parents said that to me about electricity.
Stop. Whatever you are doing right now, stop it. Give me your undivided attention. Are you ready for this? (No, you are not.) Cate Blanchett, Our Elfin Goddess of Porcelain Skin, has had many relationships with women. Many relationships with women. I know this because Variety published an interview with her today about her upcoming lesbian-centric film, Carol, which is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt.
When the interviewer asked her if this is her first time being a
lesbian, Cate Blanchett said, “On film — or in real life?” In real life,
duh, Cate Blanchett! “Yes. Many times.”
You heard me: Cate Blanchett has had relationships with women in real life many. times.
Photographer Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata walked every block in Manhattan in search of every last bodega, hoping to snap each one before they’re replaced by 7-11s and luxury condos. According to Hyperallergic, Quagliata began the project while searching for the iconic and elusive Anthora coffee cup. She got acquainted with different bodegas in different neighborhoods and became fascinated with the quirks of each one. So between December 2012 and August 2013, she photographed all 1,900 or so. Even in that short time, she saw many close up. So Quagliata’s project became a tribute to a vital and vanishing part of Manhattan street life. “Losing this anchor, replacing it with something safely homogeneous and starkly corporate, steals an integral piece of the character that makes your neighborhood unique,” she writes on her website, where many more photos can be found. Keep scrolling for some of the most interesting bodegas.
Philadelphia native Gene Demby was 4 years old when city police dropped a bomb on a house of black activists in his hometown. Thirty years later, he's still trying to make sense of it all.
Super Opinionated.
The Texas state Senate has voted to allow clergy members to refuse performing marriages that violate their beliefs.
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