billtron

Inspirational images and photos of Small Space Living : Remodelista:

This is an amazing gallery of tiny home photos etc. 

The Specials - A Message To You Rudy (by Leningradspb)

Rob Portman has decided that he’s only comfortable denying fundamental rights to strangers:

Sen. Rob Portman has renounced his opposition to gay marriage, telling reporters from Ohio newspapers Thursday that he changed his position after his son Will told the Ohio Republican and his wife Jane that he is gay.

This is a classic example of what Mark Schmitt calls “Miss America” compassion:

Second, I’m tired of giving quasi-conservatives credit for what I call Miss America compassion (I’ll explain in a minute). Smith’s son’s suicide led him to support more funding for suicide prevention and for mental health care generally. Great — my life has been affected by suicide also, so I’m all for that. Similarly, Senator Pete Domenici’s daughter’s mental illness made him an advocate for mandating equitable treatment of mental and physical well-being in health insurance, a cause in which he was joined by Paul Wellstone. Again, I’m all for it, and I have no doubt that Domenici was at least as personally sincere and driven about it as Wellstone, and watching the two of them pair up on this cause and learn to work together was a good example for the potential of democratic institutions to create understanding.

But what has always bothered me about such examples is that their compassion seems so narrowly and literally focused on the specific misfortune that their family encountered. Having a child who suffers from mental illness would indeed make one particularly passionate about funding for mental health, sure. But shouldn’t it also lead to a deeper understanding that there are a lot of families, in all kinds of situations beyond their control, who need help from government? Shouldn’t having a son whose illness leads to suicide open your eyes to something more than a belief that we need more money for suicide help-lines? Shouldn’t it call into question the entire winners-win/losers-lose ideology of the current Republican Party? Shouldn’t it also lead to an understanding that if we want to live in a society that provides a robust system of public support for those who need help — whether for mental illness or any of the other misfortunes that life hands out at random — we will need a government with adequate institutions and revenues to provide those things?

And that’s what I mean by “Miss America Compassion.” These Senators are like Miss America contestants, each with a “platform”: Mr. Ohio: “Adoption Assistance.” Mr. Oregon: “Suicide Prevention.” Mr. Minnesota: “Community Development.” Mr. New Mexico: “Mental Health Parity.” Mr. Pennsylvania: “Missing children” The platform is meant to show them as thoughtful, deep and independent-minded, but after the “platform segment” they return to play their obedient part in a degrading exercise that makes this country crueler and government less supportive.

And, of course, as with Miss America contestants’ “platforms,” there are a few approved topics and many more that simply couldn’t be considered. It’s not too likely that you’ll see Miss Alabama adopt “Income inequality” as her platform or Miss Colorado, “Corporate tax evasion.” Nor is a Senator likely to have a family experience with lack of health insurance, or personal bankruptcy, or Food Stamps.

…more from Chait.

ReclaimUC:

• In-state undergraduates at UC pay in tuition “nearly twice what it cost the University to provide their education”
• Monsanto University
• Oberlin cancellation of classes was demanded by students of color / Oberlin microagressions
• The university as a site of struggle: On occupying in a Midwest college town
• Virginia’s evangelical mega-university
• Education in the streets
• Anatomy of a failed campus: NYU in Asia
• How Washington could make college tuition free without spending a penny more on education
• Abolish the SAT
• The professor, the bikini model, and the suitcase full of trouble
• Student protesters Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty!!!
• How cops became soldiers
• The racist history of the entrapment defense
• The austerity question: Work, welfare, and post-family life

nathan jurgenson

• “The commodity markets of capitalism have made being truly different as difficult as space travel, and being merely different as easy as online shopping“
• “The more labor we pour into our ‘product’—that is, ourselves—the more we value we assign to it“
• “I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, & I find myself laughing in the dark“
• “the technocratic character of political debate is causing the irrationality of science to overflow its bounds“
• “After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation“
• “Using microchips, proud grandparents threaten to store thousands of images on portable show-and-tell miniscreens”
• “The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else“
• “with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway“
• “Is a tweet labor? Is a Facebook post labor?”
• “Drone makers have been courting the paparazzi“
• “widespread bigotry and rape culture are just as big if not bigger barriers to a free and open Internet as over-zealous copyright laws and bandwidth caps“
• “there is no good pre-internet metaphor for what it’s trying to do“
• “sources confirmed that the president said “Go get ’em!” and quietly watched the drone fly off into the night sky“
• “Drones permit and accelerate new topographies of warfare“
• “The Auto-Tune or not Auto-Tune debate always seems to turn into a moralistic one, like somehow you have more integrity if you don’t use it“
• “we might someday wonder why our childhood memories are held under DRM“

T. F. Charlton:

• Spectra Speaks: Losing Access to Sisterhood: Tomboys, Masculinity, and the Unmaking of a Girl
• Eddie Izzard on Atheism, Being Transgender, and “The Invisible Bloke Upstairs”
• (by me) On the connections between Evangelical sexual abuse scandals and patriarchal theology
• “Student activists force a historic campus to shut down and nobody notices”
• Mary Robinette Kowal on revising one of her stories after realizing it was racist and colonialist
• Supporting more trans stories: reflections on our healthcare system and the media
• Hugo Chavez’s legacy lies greatly with his efforts on behalf of Afro-Venuzuelans
• Pro MMA Fighter Fallon Fox on being forced to come out as transsexual (+ video)
• New York cops will arrest you for carrying condoms
• Christine Burns on meeting computer science pioneer Lynn Conway
• Forty Years in the Hustle: Margo St. James on the connections between housewives and sex workers’ activism
• Tara Conley reorients whitewashed histories of digital feminism
• Why Linda Hirshman is wrong to declare “Victory” on queer rights

Kerim Friedman:

• The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever Isn’t Scary Enough
• Rand Paul’s constitutional philosophy: “The Constitution grants certain inalienable rights to Americans but not to foreigners.”
• “Bye-bye Radium Brand Creamery Butter. Bye-bye radioactive jockstrap.”
• The conflict over Taiwan’s Longmen facility highlights “the fears surrounding nuclear power in Asia since Japan’s March 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima”
• Did you miss the Day of the Dude? It’s not to late to watch “The Dude.”
• Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension.
• Chávez: “it quickly became apparent that the social missions were doing nothing for the arrival city in terms of its most important needs”
• The problem “was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough.”
• Star Wars Episode VII as directed by the guy who made Amour.
• “Americans… used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day”
• “Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily forgiven, because he had eaten his cousin.”
• “we live in a culture where dull biological platitudes make headlines and irritating scientific cliches win arguments”
• “Yes, mistakes were made in the name of scientific anthropology.”
• “Spanish, Portugese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Turkish, Arabic and Italian”
• “I’m not worried about an imminent invasion of ‘rat multiborgs’.”
• “the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat”

Jacob Remes:

• The European rewards and American dangers of free transit.
• Greg Grandin on Hugo Chavez.
• “If we pretend elite college students aren’t sexually assaulting their peers, the rape fairy will make it all disappear.”
• A Quick Blow, Then Lingering Death for Devastated Towns
• The truth about Vikings.

L. E. Long:

• On White Privilege and Museums
• Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering
• The Love of Black Mothers and the Care of Black Children
• The Bitch Manifesto
• Rules for Goddess-Femmes Who Cut (Colonizing) Bitches
• Dependency Culture: Welfare, Women and Work
• This Is Not A Love Story: Armed Struggle Against The Institutions Of Patriarchy
• “May 5, at night, we told a child the story of the maquis and the anarchist struggle against Franco and against democracy.”
• Oakland Might Sue Banks Over Rate-Rigging Conspiracy
• Against nostalgia
• Anarcha Feminist – Bolivia (video) ”Feminism and also anarchism, it’s the tendency we sympathize with.”

Frank Pasquale:

• China model: 83 billionaires in Congress; hand-cranked ventilators for the people; extreme real estate bubble.
• Russian thinking on what to do after an asset grab.
• Thoughts on the surveillance society; Google’s privacy record; Quotations from Chairman Schmidt.
• Google Guinea pigs; part II; Google as future of law enforcement and drug safety determinations.
• Mistaking free information for freedom.
• MOOCS to “enrich a select class of content aggregators;” beware infographics.
• “Many scholars [fail] to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation.”

Kitabet:

• “we are standing until the asphalt speaks”
• Letter from a Congo Literary Festival
• Manual of Decolonization: an architectural toolkit for a post-occupation West Bank
• An interview with Amit Chaudhuri
• The Prophet of Aleppo
• “In Hackney, the riots are spoken about in strangely fond terms….”
• When Electricity Was New, People Used it to Mimic the Moon
• More Thoughts on the Dangerous Fragility of Men
• The University as a Site of Struggle: on Occupying in a Midwest College Town
• The Good, Racist People
• Amnesia in Mesopotamia (the remnants of the Iraqi National Library)

Bint Battuta:

• The Development of Arabic-Script Typography in Georgian Britain
• Religion and the Rise of Printing in the Ottoman Empire [podcast]
• Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative
• Faces, Veils, Beliefs…and a Decision
• The Evil Architects Do: Crimes of Urbicide and the Built Environment [pdf]
• Pahlavi Iran & Zionism: An Intellectual Elite’s Short-Lived Love Affair with the State of Israel
• Edward Said in Bombay
• Beautiful places to read in London
• Mogadishu: Images from the Past
• Who Spoke Siculo Arabic?
• On astrolabes, astronomers and observatories
• Is there a political theory in the Hebrew Bible?
• Before Orientalism: From Paris to Patna in the 17th Century [video]
• South Asians in British and American music
• The Khazarian Hypothesis and the Nature of Yiddish
• Les chrétiens de l’Inde, la tradition de saint Thomas [podcast]
• Looking at photos
• How Istanbul-born Greeks have kept their culinary traditions alive in Athens

I’ve been posting most of my online writing to the New Inquiry these days–with a handful of exceptions–but since people still hitch me to the post of ye old wordpress web-log, I’m re-posting my ZZ’s best of 2012 list here, a year which felt like it happened in the passive voice:

Some films were reviewed:

• Zero Dark 30
• At Jacobin, Lincoln Against the Radicals (preceded by The Young Mr. Lincoln)
• Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman
• The Albatross Around Johnny Depp’s Brain

Some books were written about:

• Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memory
• Damning With Faint Prize: Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial”
• What It Takes to Build Your Credit: Billy Kahora’s “Urban Zoning”
• Everything Fantastic is Credible: Babatunde Rotimi’s “Bombay’s Republic”
• David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words

Some television was watched:

• The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
• The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction
• The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness

And of course, a lot of writing on higher education was done:

• With Mike Konczal, From Master Plan to No Plan was written on the slow decline of California public higher ed, and with Gina Patnaik, a piece On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses
• On the late, great UC logo debacle: first, Let Us Eat Cake and then A Different Baton.
• Some stuff on other campuses; Quebec: Il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants: Québec’s Law 78; UVa: What Terry Sullivan’s Reinstatement at UVa tells us; and UC Davis: Reading Katehi: The Pepper Spray Chancellor
• Most recently, an Inside Higher Education piece Questioning Clay Shirky (on MOOC’s and the techno-utopianism thereof).
• And some thoughts on academic social media: My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish

In an election year, some America stuff happened:

• American Democracy’s Bad Infinity and America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama

As Occupy was ended, the violence of the state was considered:

• Eikonoklastes: Violence and Speech
• Dumb Computers, Smart Cops
• Political Language on Police States and Political Language
• Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
• We Cannot Afford to Protect the Anuses of the Condemned

And the intersections of speech and forbidden speech:

• Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of “Free Speech”
• Obscenity: I Know It When I See It
• The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke
• “What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

Finally, A Breather was taken.

This looks beautiful: A Map of the World is a collection of maps by illustrators and storytellers. I've featured at least a few of the maps in the book here on kottke.org. Here's a sample:

You can see more of the maps in the book on the publisher's web site. (via raul, who says "This book is insanely beautiful. Buy it if you love maps. It will make you happy.")

Tags: A Map of the World   books   maps

[Images: The cover of Landscape Futures; book design by Brooklyn's Everything-Type-Company].

I'm enormously pleased to say that a book project long in the making will finally see the light of day later this month, a collaboration between ACTAR and the Nevada Museum of Art called Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions.

On a related note, I'm also happy to say simply, despite the painfully slow pace of posts here on the blog, going back at least the last six months or so, that many projects ticking away in the background are, at long last, coming to fruition, including Venue, and, now, the publication of Landscape Futures.

[Images: The opening spreads of Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Landscape Futures both documents and continues an exhibition of the same name that ran for a bit more than six months at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from August 2011 to February 2012. The exhibition was my first solo commission as a curator and by far the largest project I had worked on to that point. It was an incredible opportunity, and I remain hugely excited by the physical quality and conceptual breadth of the work produced by the show's participating artists and architects.

Best of all, I was able to commission brand new work from many of the contributors, including giving historian David Gissen a new opportunity to explore his ideas—on preservation, technology, and the environmental regulation of everyday urban space—in a series of wall-sized prints; finding a new genre—a fictional travelogue from a future lithium boom—for architects David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of The Living in which to experiment; and setting aside nearly an entire room, the centerpiece of the 2,500-square-foot exhibition, for an immensely complicated piece of functioning machinery (plus documentary photographs, posters, study-models, an entire bound book of research, and much else besides) by London-based architects Smout Allen, a design duo I refer to often here on BLDGBLOG.

Those works joined pre-existing projects by Mason White & Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab, whose project "Next North/The Active Layer" explored the emerging architectural conditions presented by climate-changed terrains in the far north; Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, whose widely exhibited "Animal Superpowers" added a colorful note to the exhibition's second room; and architect-adventurer Liam Young, who brought his "Specimens of Unnatural History" successfully through international customs to model the warped future ecosystem of a genetically-enhanced Galapagos.

[Images: More spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

But the book also voluminously expands on that central core of both new and pre-existing work to include original essays by Sam Jacob, Cassim Shepard, and Rob Holmes, but also texts by Alex Trevi (edited from their original appearance on Pruned), a travelogue through the lost lakes of the American West by Smudge Studio, a walking tour through the electromagnetic landscapes of Los Angeles from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and a new short story by Pushcart Prize-winning author Scott Geiger.

These, in turn, join reprints of texts highly influential for the overall Landscape Futures project, including a short history of climate control technologies and weather warfare by historian James Fleming, David Gissen's excellent overview of the atmospheric preservation of artifacts in museums in New York City (specifically, the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and a classic article—from BLDGBLOG's perspective, at least—originally published in New Scientist back in 1998, where geologist Jan Zalasiewicz suggests a number of possibilities for the large-scale fossilization of entire urban landscapes in the Earth's far future.

Even that's not the end of the book, however, which is then further augmented by a long look, in the curator's essay, at the various technical and metaphoric implications of the instruments, devices, and architectural inventions of the book's subtitle, from robot-readable geotextiles and military surveillance technologies to the future of remote-sensing in archaeology, and moving between scales as divergent as plate-tectonic tomography, radio astronomical installations in the the polar north, and speculative laser-jamming objects designed by ScanLAB Projects.

To wrap it all up and connect the conceptual dots set loose across the book, detailed interviews with all of the exhibition's participating artists, writers, and architects fill out the book's long middle—and, in all cases, I can't wait to get these out there, as they are all conversations that deserve continuation in other formats. The responses from David Gissen alone could fuel an entire graduate seminar.

The spreads and images you see here all come directly from the book.

[Images: Spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Of course, the work itself also takes up a large section in the final third or so of the book; consisting mostly of photographs by Jamie Kingham and Dean Burton, these document the exhibition contents in their full, spatial context, including the double-height, naturally lit room in which the ceiling-mounted machinery of Smout Allen whirred away for six months. This is also where full-color spreads enter the book, offering a nice pop after all the pink that came before.

[Images: Installation shots from the Nevada Museum of Art, by Jamie Kingham and Dean Burton, including other views, from posters to renderings, from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Which brings us, finally, to the Landscape Futures Sourcebook, the final thirty or forty pages of the book, filled with the guest essays, travelogues, walking tours, photographs, a speculative future course brief by Rob Holmes of Mammoth, and the aforementioned short story by Scott Geiger.

[Images: A few spreads from the Landscape Futures Sourcebook featured in Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Needless to say, I am absolutely thrilled with the incredible design work done by Everything-Type-Company—a new and rapidly rising design firm based in Brooklyn, founded by Kyle Blue and Geoff Halber—and I am also over the moon to think that this material will finally be out there for discussion elsewhere. It's been a long, long time in the making.

In any case, shipping should begin later this month. Hopefully the above glimpses, and the huge list of people whose graphic, textual, or conceptual work is represented in the book, will entice you to support their effort with an order.

Enjoy!

(Thank you to all the people and organizations who made Landscape Futures possible, including the Nevada Museum of Art and ACTAR, supported generously by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts).

The first District line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5am ... if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say ta-dah!—except you probably wouldn't, because nobody is thinking ta-dah! at seven minutes to five in the morning; certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I'm one of them.

John Lanchester on the experience, at once aversive and hypnotic, of catching the London Underground. Lanchester's article is an extract from his forthcoming entry in the new Penguin Lines series of tube-reading-friendly books released to commemorate the Underground's 150th anniversary. Meanwhile, the Guardian have compiled a collaborative Spotify playlist of songs that mention Tube stations, for those so inclined.

I was reading a piece the other day in the paper and it was talking about 'literary fiction' as a genre in itself. It picked up on the remarks of the editor of the New York Review of Books reprint range of ebooks (a list i've enjoyed dipping into in its hardback form). Apparently she has talked about literary fiction's 'allegiance to language' as the thing that marks it out.

As if no other fiction has such an allegiance?

I've said my bit again and again over the years. There are good books and bad books. Genres don't exist. Not outside of marketing.

I certainly don't think - any more - that literary fiction is superior to any other kind.

I used to think it was the genre where *anything* could be done. But I now think that's true of any genre.

I've had conversations with a lot of people over the years about what might make literary fiction different.

Is it fiction that has a commitment to groundbreaking form or language? Is it the creative laboratory where new things are thought up and thoughts are thinged? Is it just fiction concocted especially to win literary prizes? The kinds of books that people buy but never actually read? Is it just about novels with deliberately wonky stories and snobby characters?

All these things have been suggested. I even had someone quite recently suggest outright what many have implied: that 'literary fiction' is what you call fiction about well-off and clever people talking about 'philosophical issues of the day.' (And, following that, fiction with ordinary, working class characters can never be literary, really, unless it's foreign or Scottish.)

'Literary' is just another genre, with its own codes and cliches. One that was created for marketing purposes some time in the 1980s, say, to describe a certain kind of vaguely earnest, perhaps experimental, self-consciously learned and often prize-winning book.

As a genre - like any other genre - it has produced monstrous offspring.

Many years of reading, teaching, workshopping, writing, studying and more reading have given me a kind of checklist of the cliched features that Bad Literary Fiction often boasts...

And I am absolutely sure that I have been as guilty as anyone - at one time or another - of some of the following points:

1.  The ability to say the simplest things in the most complicated way possible.
2. Twisted syntax and word choice posing hopefully as stream-of-consciousness for a character having a not-particularly pleasant time of it.
3.  Epiphanies galore, in which the tiniest moment becomes transcendent and obscurely meaningful all of a sudden, accompanied by strange sensual effects examined microscopically in luminously belaboured language. And possibly, a bubble of childhood flashback presented in italics.
4. The forward momentum of a story being subordinated throughout to the conveying of mood. And when something looks as if it's in danger of happening, the chapter abruptly stops.
5. The assumption that earnestness = seriousness.
6. Also, sneering = cleverness.
7. The skilful concealment of actually having nothing to say.
8. The skilful concealment of the fact that looking stuff up in books isn't knowledge.
9. The achingly obvious admiration of writers that serious readers admire but nobody loves. And then copying them.
10. Assuming that your words weigh more, mean more, and are doing more. Not as much as any poet's, of course. But more than anyone writing in any other genre.
11. A wearisome meta-critique of the form of the novel itself running throughout the thing. Sometimes in the form of a particularly self-aware narrator, or interleaved fairy tales or even features borrowed ironically from other, lesser, fictional genres.
12. Cold, almost emotionless analysis of stuff in the world, bleached of any sentiment or actual feeling. Often lists of things are presented, or facts, or allusions to scientific or historical stuff that the author has browsed through.
13. The need to tell the world that - hey, rich people have it tough, too.

This last point is the trickiest for me. It's the question i often hit upon - is literary fiction always just a playground for the privileged?

If there’s one thing Americans love, it’s food faddism. The history of full of weirdness, from John Harvey Kellogg’s yogurt enemas that placed yogurt cultures in our mouths and rectums at the exact same time to Sylvester Graham’s graham crackers, created so we wouldn’t eat meat and milk and get all hot and bothered and start masturbating.

We (or at least my students) laugh at all this. But are we any different today with our nutty diets? Not really.

Luckily, there are at least some people pushing back against this. Here’s a discussion of the new Marlene Zuk book exposing the absurdity of the paleo diet. The paleo diet falls under the overarching theme of recent American dieting, which can be summarized as “I want to eat as much meat as possible and will look for any justification to do so.” And do whatever you want, but it’d be nice to avoid the absurd discussions about what our distant ancestors did or did not eat.

Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.

For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”

But what is evidence in the face of food faddism?

And of course there’s the gluten-free insanity. While celiac disease is a real thing that affects about 1% of the population, the fact that 1/3 of the American public is trying to shun gluten is insane. There is zero evidence that most of these people need to do this. Anecdotally, it definitely feels that a good number of people I have met who are avoiding gluten are, how shall we say, lifestyle experimenters more broadly. More broadly, I think this relates to the paleo diet in the context of how dieting has gone over the past 15 years–again, avoiding grains and eating meat. What makes gluten-free different is the theoretical health benefits as opposed to the I want to eat a steak every night blunt honesty of the paleo dieters.

Obviously, the answer to proper eating is to be healthy and exercise. One can choose whether or not to eat meat for any number of reasons. I was a vegetarian for about 10 years but couldn’t call myself that now, although I have never cooked meat and don’t really plan to. We can have that debate. But it’s remarkable how resilient magic diets are for Americans (and possibly those of other countries, but I can’t much speak to that). They all pretty much defy common sense.

All I can do is eat more wheat and drink more beer. Both of which I intend to do.

PC: I recommend Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food on this topic.

[SL]: Related: “I personally feel that it’s unlikely that the richest 1% of humans on earth all suddenly and simultaneously developed allergies to every single common food…”

I don’t know, why don’t you just ask me? Because apparently

I fool [students] into acquiring a decent approximation of expertise by providing them with source material that they believe they can become expert in. They’ll happily read eight chapters from Understanding Comics and memorize the 70 odd bits of critical vocabulary contained therein, whereas if I asked them to do something similar with Ciceronian rhetoric their anxiety would preclude the possibility of them ever feeling like they could master the material.

Or so I say!

I take it most of you are already familiar with my work on the medium, but for those who aren’t, I’ll throw some links below the fold.

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World – Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) – Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) – Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) – Robert Kirkman
• War is Boring – David Axe
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) – Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) – Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) – Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) – Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) – Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) – Alan Moore

Game of Thrones - 1995 Style (by hunterlsanders)

After a sojourn with his alter-ego Tony Gallardo II, El Rey de Reyes returns as María y José  with "Ultra," a track that merges the harshness of the King of Kings (a drunken stagger of an intro) with the endearing naivety of tracks like "Granada" or Los Espiritus's "Pacífico-Atlántico." As a counterpoint to "Club Negro," "Ultra" suavely cruises by in slow motion. Its protagonist is wide-eyed and brimming with emotion, he duets with a distorted self. But we're still in the club, the strobe still strobes (albeit slowly). Featuring the infamous hook of Kendrick Lamar's (by way of The Chakachas) "Backseat Freestyle," this is somewhat of an unexpected rap ballad from someone who doesn't stop surprising us.

The distorted vocal sounds like some cute robot toy (a similar one appears on Tony's "Tormento") and on first listen distracts from the story of the lyrics. But the genius behind this subterfuge is that the less you pay attention to the track (as with most of the catalogue), the more the track reveals itself: it's that dulce moment when you let go of worry, you find acceptance, you get zen on the dance floor. The dredge reality might lurk at the edges, but this is a moment of clarity. You weren't even listening closely, but the intimate piano melody is now stuck in your head. "Ultra" is not smash hit single material, however. It's too straightforward, too ponderous for what we've come to expect from María y José. But it's still slick in its design—a polished chrome bumper, just one small part of the whole vehicle. Soon we'll know for sure if the sophomore release also has wheels. (And we're certain it has.)
 

By most measures, the New Housing Marketplace plan, an affordable housing development program put into place during the Bloomberg administration, has been a great success. Since (fiscal) 2004, the plan has created or preserved more than 140,000 affordable units throughout the city — about 85 percent of its goal of 165,000 units. The city considers the initiative "the largest municipal affordable housing effort in the nation's history" [PDF].

As a new report points out, however, the plan is far from perfect. After studying about 124,000 units developed through (fiscal) 2011, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development concluded that Bloomberg's plan falls short in several ways. Its chief failure, writes the ANHD, is that the affordable housing being developed isn't actually affordable to the people living near it [PDF]:

While the City has committed to and developed a significant number of affordable housing units under the Bloomberg administration, about two-thirds of New Housing Marketplace units are too expensive for the majority of local neighborhood residents.

ANHD charges that, under the Bloomberg plan, one affordable housing unit is as good as another. Take two units developed in Central Harlem in January 2011. Unit A is a studio that rents for $1,492 a month and serves a single resident making upwards of $100,000; Unit B is a three-bedroom apartment that rents for $531 a month that serves a family making about $37,000. Even though the second apartment addresses a "greater need" for affordability, both units count as a success.

Some numbers to the point: From (fiscal) 2009 to 2011, only about 8 percent of the units developed by the city were meant for households that earn 40 percent of the area median income, even though that income group represents a third of all New York households. Meantime, 56 percent of the city's affordable units were made for households making 51 to 80 percent of the area median, although that group represents only 17 percent of all households.

In general terms, the affordable housing plan did create low-income housing, but it was upper-low-income housing.

An image makes the point too. In 13 of the 41 neighborhoods where at least 100 units were created during these three years, 80 percent of the units (or more) were too expensive for the typical household. What's most unfortunate is that these neighborhoods include some of the poorest in the city, including Mott Haven (in the Bronx) and Brownsville (in Brooklyn):

Back to the numbers. Take the case of District 1 in the Bronx, which serves Mott Haven. The median income there is about $20,000 a year. Of the 2,428 affordable units created in the district between 2009 and 2011, only 45 were affordable to the average household — less than 2 percent. In general, writes ANHD, a "typical Bronx household would have to make 1.5 times its income in order to be able to afford the majority of the affordable housing built in the Bronx."

One city housing official told the New York Times the report "oversimplifies the issues." And ANHD is quick to give credit where it believes credit is due. For instance, when it comes to creating affordable units for the proper household size, the report commends the city on an excellent job meeting the needs of larger families — even though smaller units would be quicker and cheaper to develop, and count just as much toward the plan's ultimate goal.

The report concludes that the city "needs a new way of measuring success" that takes quality, as well as quantity, into account with affordable housing. The Bloomberg era set a high goal for affordable housing. As it comes to an end, it's time to set a higher one.

Erika Cross / Shutterstock.com

Pine Slabs 3" thick, Kiln Dried, 20" - 24" wide, 8' long $100, 12' long $150. Perfect for countertops, shelving, tabletops, etc.

Whether you knit or simply have a slew of fabulously talented knitter friends, this simple DIY idea is the perfect accessory for this yarn-based craft!… Continue reading on Curbly.com

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““It was like waiting for the birth of a baby, only better, ” said a Roman man. A child sitting atop his father’s shoulders waved a crucifix.”

- Cardinals Elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as New Pope - NYTimes.com

きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ - ふりそでーしょん,Kyary Pamyu Pamyu furisodeshon (by warnermusicjapan)

Justin Kemp must really love the beach. He built an indoor sandbox to work from, calling his amusing creation, Surfing with the sand between my toes (after Brian Wilson). Hope he has a Roomba. More

"Boil the Frog lets you create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style to another. It's like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. If you heat up the pot slowly enough, the frog will never notice that he's being made into a stew and jump out of the pot. With a Boil the Frog playlist you can do the same, but with music." Here's more about Paul Lamere's new project, where he suggests some fun & incongruent playlists to try. Lamere's music projects previously on MeFi: infinite jukebox - infinite gangnam style - road trip mixtape - the labyrinth of genre - slow build - six degrees of black sabbath

Metaform Architecture have designed a small apartment building in Luxembourg with 7 living units.

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Project description

A discreet and reduced architecture with hidden openings based on a compact and pure volume. One of the main intentions of the project consists in the insertion of a residential building with 7 living units in its direct surroundings, marked by detached and solitary buildings in an suburban context. The use of a single light coloured material (fibre-cement panels) for the façade gives the building a monolithic aspect and preserves the quiet appearance. The composition of the different volumes merged to the continuous grid of the façade blurs the clear differentiation of the stacked floors, indeed often characteristic for an multi-storey housing project.

Each window has been individually conceived in order to frame different viewports or to manage the supply of natural lighting for the interior spaces. These lightly hidden openings play a major role in the desired sculptural image of this realization. The goal was to avoid the simple duplication of identical dwelling units. Here, densification is thought through individuality and this customisation following the wishes of the clients appears as the finalization of this work.

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Architects: Metaform Architecture

Photography: Steve Troes fotodesign

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White boy drops another AWESOME new sick beat!!! (by C. Smith)

Orchéstre Baka Gbiné playing Kopolo - album version (by bakabeyond)

There is a universe of recorded DJ mixes to sort through, enough to keep you entertained and dancing for years. Souncloud user R_co fills a pocket of this cosmos with thousands of mixes and some live shows to stream and download, spanning styles and decades, from Bob Marley and the Wailers live in 1975, to a Shep Pettibone Mastermix Danceparty from 1983, Mark Farina live in Los Angeles, 1996, or Masters at Work live in Miami at WMC, 2003, and Carl Craig in Ibiza, 2012. If you're wondering who this prolific archiver of dance music is, "R_co" a.k.a. Rico Passerini said:

I'm not anyone special. I hope it's OK for you! The real "R_co" is just a regular guy with a passion for electronic music. I'm from the UK originally, however I moved to Berlin a year and a half ago for the music scene. I'm often mistaken for being some big shot in the music industry, but I'm not. ... No, I'm not connected at all really. The more popular my page has become, the more I've been in contact with a few DJs and record labels, but nothing major really. To be honest, there is no real one place I get music from. I get mixes from all over the place: podcasts, radio shows, forums like Resident Advisor, plus I have a big archive of mixes that I've picked up over the years too. Recently though I've been lucky enough to get sent mixes personally from certain club nights and record labels like OFF Recordings, Berlin and Soma Records, plus I get a few mixes personally sent from a few DJs too.

Here's a random sampling from the thousands of mixes he has posted to Soundcloud, one per year for the years that are represented in the collection: 1974: Tom Moulton - The Sandpiper, Fire Island, New York, USA 1975: Bob Marley & The Wailers Live @ Lyceum Ballroom, London - July 18 1976: Bob Marley & The Wailers Live @ The Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, USA - May 13 1980: Joy Division Live @ Effenaar, Eindhoven, Holland - January 18 1981: Frankie Knuckles Live @ The Warehouse, Chicago - August 28 (Side A / Side B) 1982: Larry Levan Live @ Paradise Garage, New York 1983: Frankie Knuckles Live @ Power Plant, Chicago 1984: Steve "Silk" Hurley - WBMX Radio, Chicago 1985: Jeff Mills Live @ Roxanne Wars 1986: Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk - WBMX 102.7 FM, Jack Party Hotmix, Chicago 1987 (or 1988): Ralphie 'Rockin' Rosario & Julian 'Jumpin' Perez - WBMX Radio, Chicago 1988: Graeme Park Live @ Kula Shaker, Haçienda, Manchester 1989: Sasha Live @ Hacienda, Manchester - December 13 1990: Laurent Garnier - Denamaxx, French Radio 1991: Andrew Weatherall Live @ Kaos, Leeds 1992: Luke Slater Live @ Passion - January 1993: Kerri Chandler & Danny Tenaglia Live @ Cube (Napoli) 1994: Kevin Saunderson Live @ Harmony - April 30 1995: Aphex Twin Live @ Orbit, Morley, Leeds 1996: Robert Hood Live @ Energy, Zurich - August 1997: Stacey Pullen Live @ Freedom, San Francisco 1998: Kraftwerk - World Tour Live In Buenos Aires, Argentina - October 12 1999: CJ Bolland Live @ Fuse, Brussel, Belgium - June 26 2000: Ricardo Villalobos Live @ Clubnight Spezial, Sound Of Frankfurt - July 1 2001: H-Foundation (Hipp-E & Halo) Live @ DEMF, Detroit 2002: Pepe Bradock Live @ Garito Cafe, Mallorca (ESP) - November 9 2003: 808 State Live @ Benicassim Festival, Spain - August 2004: FC Kahuna Live @ VOX - Apirl 11 2005: Akufen Live @ Fuse-in Detroit, Underground Stage - May 28 2006: Monolake - JJJ The Club FM - April 2 2007: Ron Trent Live @ Development, Manchester 2008: Onur Ozer Live @ Classic Club - November 15 2009: Luciano (Cadenza) Live @ The Warehouse Project, Manchester, UK - December 4 2010: Robag Wruhme Live @ Pratersauna - June 16 2011: Todd Terje Live @ Evening Standard, Toronto - July 16 2012: Âme Live @ CatClub, Wide Gallery, Brussels - May 5 Bonus mixes: sets from R_co's favorite DJs, as of 2010 * Nina Kraviz Live @ Rote Liebe, Cologne - February 27, 2010 * Sven Weisemann - Max FM - July 10, 2010 * Peter Van Hoesen Live @ Fuse (Brussel) - October 20, 2010 * Mike Huckaby Live @ Betalounge, Hamburg - November 8, 2010 * Tevo Howard - Rebirth (Proton Radio) - December 14, 2010

"You know why we did [that]? So a DJ could take a lunch break. When you have all three-minute records, you don't even have time to go to the bathroom. Or you just want to stop for a minute. So that's 19-and-a-half minutes of 'I don't have to worry about a thing.' But I didn't do it to create this thing. I just did it to help the DJs out."

• Scientists create projectile vomiting robot named Vomiting Larry | Geek-Cetera | Geek.com
  The robot is named Vomiting Larry, and isn’t being used for sight gags, but is helping scientists to better understand the spread of noroviruses, also know as the winter vomiting bug, which can cause projectile vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, and loss of taste. Noroviruses are transmitted directly between people via aerosolization — having physical substances emit particles that float around in the air — and indirectly by contaminated consumables like food and water. When humans throw up, aerosolization takes place, and thus, Vomiting Larry was born so scientists can study human vomiting without, you know, humans vomiting.
• Pamplona's locksmiths join revolt as banks throw families from their homes | World news | The Observer
  Tired of accompanying court officials to evict unemployed people as banks foreclosed mortgages, De Carlos consulted his fellow Pamplona locksmiths before Christmas. In no time at all, they came to an agreement. They would not do the dirty work of banks whose rash lending pumped up a housing bubble and then, after it popped, helped bring the country to its knees.

Yeah, I could live there is a not-so-semi-new, occasional D16 feature wherein I post pictures of homes I want to break into, kick out the inhabitants and move in. Today I’m specifically planning to move into a kitchen in Barcelona designed by Daniel Perez and Felipe Araujo of Egue y Seta studio.

Yes, I could live in a kitchen—as long as it’s this kitchen. I mean…

HOW CAN IT BE SO PERFECT?! The floor tiles!!! I’ve seen these Q*bert-esque cement tiles in use before, but never on this kind of scale and never with results quite at this level of breathtaking. It’s not just the floor tiles, though, it’s everything. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I’m ready to set up a little bedroll in the corner and make myself at home.

DETAILS:
✚ Interior design by Daniel Perez and Felipe Araujo of Egue y Seta studio
✚ See more photos of this amazing house at Micasa and at Egue y Seta

I got so inspired by these photos that I even put together my own little collage (please don’t make me call it a “mood board”). I’m seriously wondering if there’s some way I can find a place to use those tiles in MY kitchen! Doing the whole floor would be crazily expensive, but maybe a tiled doormat by the back door or something like that? That could happen.

1. American Olean 3×6″ subway tiles
2. Francis Francis X1 espresso machine
3. HEKTAR pendant lamp, IKEA
4. Design Workshop rolling cart, West Elm Market
5. Eames DAX armchair
6. Vintage cast iron pot, Hindsvik
7. Mt Whitney table, Blake Avenue
8. Cubes geometric cement tile, Villa Lagoon

Kitchen spotted via Desire to Inspire (thanks to Tina for the tip!)

Roger Ferris + Partners designed the Sound House in Fairfield, Connecticut.

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Description from the architects

The house is located on an unusually narrow waterfront site along the Long Island Sound with spectacular views. An angled entry wall captures the sunlight and orients views while the interplay of solid siding and open and screened glass balances privacy and transparency.

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Design: Roger Ferris + Partners

Photography: Woodruff/Brown

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