[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, tweets … you name it]
[Videos]
Plastics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver – Plastic is in everything, from the clothes we wear to the water we drink. John Oliver explains how plastics are harming the planet, why recycling isn’t the solution you think it is, and why fixing the problem will be up to not just consumers, but corporations and policymakers.”
That Zoom Call with the Lawyer-Cat, Explained – “The surprising reason why the “cat” filter, made famous by the lawyer Ron Ponton’s cameo during a court hearing, was installed as the default on thousands of Dell computers.”
Into the crater! – “I really thought I would never see my drone again” would have been a great ending, because we still hate drones.
Create Escape – Narrated by Bob Ross.
[Music]
Lil Nas X – MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) (Official Video) “Put headphones on for a simulated 360 Reality Audio experience.”
Jan Delay – Eule feat. MARTERIA (offizielles Musikvideo)
Pussy Riot – PANIC ATTACK (Official Music Video) – “Pussy Riot Nadya’s hologram, captured with 106 cameras, goes through a dystopian story featuring her slaughtered clones, toxic wasteland and a final fight on the ruins of a church.”
[Podcasts]
Know Your Enemy: Panic! In America, with the You’re Wrong About Podcast [dissent magazine] – “A discussion on how moral panics fueled America’s right turn, with Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.”
[Articles English]
Before and After Photographs of 5Pointz Mural Site Show a Bleak Transformation [hyperallergic] – See how a historic monument to graffiti art was unrecognizably transformed into a luxury high rise with the personality of a sad hotel lobby.
Shanna Swan: ‘Most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045’ [theguardian] – “The professor of environmental medicine explains how chemicals in plastics are causing our fertility to decline – and what we can do about it”
Long covid-19 sufferers were given a new name for the condition. Why it matters. [wapo] – “The renaming of long covid to PASC bears all the earmarks of these historical legacies. Once again, renaming is an act of appropriation — one central to medicine’s knowledge-making processes from the 19th century onward.”
Violet Gibson – The Irish woman who shot Benito Mussolini [bbc] – “On 7 April 1926 an Irish woman stepped out from a crowd in Rome and fired a shot at one of the 20th century’s most infamous dictators.”
Pirating the Oscars: Pandemic Edition [waxy.org] – “For nearly two decades, I’ve tracked the illicit distribution of Oscar-nominated films online to learn how the film industry’s new and innovative ways of thwarting pirates inevitably fail.”
Jordan Peterson Is Your Grandfather’s Conservative [jacobin] – “Jordan Peterson claims to slay sacred cows and challenge prevailing orthodoxies. But what he’s really offering is a minor twist on tried-and-true conservatism — defending existing hierarchies and opposing the democratization of political and economic life.”
New Map Unearths New York’s Oldest and Rarest Trees [hyperallergic] – “Part botanical history, part social history, Allison C. Meier’s map provides a welcome alternative route through New York’s urban jungle. ”
The Political Invention of the Feminist Strike [viewpoint magazine] – “In February, nineteen-year-old Úrsula Bahillo was murdered, stabbed to death, by her ex-boyfriend Matías Ezequiel Martínez, a police officer. Argentina’s feminist movement, a movement that has grown in opposition to all the forms of violence against women and feminized subjects, was quick to respond with protests around the country and making the lessons of Úrsula’s femicide central to the call for the March 8 Feminist Strike.”
Tories pass Grenfell costs onto tenants [pluralistic] – “In 2017, at 72 people were burned alive when London’s Grenfell Tower went up in flames. It had been skinned in highly flammable “decorative cladding” to make it less of an eyesore for rich people in nearby blocks of luxury flats.”
Anarchy is coming [unherd] – “By dismantling physical and informational barriers across the globe, the basic capacity of states to provide security for their citizens has become weakened, perhaps fatally. By eroding the lines between home and abroad, postmodernity has globalised conflicts, and eroded even the very distinction between war and peace. Instead of perpetual peace, it has ushered in an age of perpetual anarchy that states are finding themselves powerless to contain.” He says that as if it was a bad thing #anarchywrong
Lights off: France parkour collectives fight pollution one store sign at a time [the guardian] – “Movement wants to raise awareness about light pollution and energy consumption”
How some indigenous communities have built their own internet [mashable] – “As ubiquitous as “The Internet” is, more than 40 million Americans can’t access it from home. And rural Indigenous communities (at least 628,000 households) are some of the most disconnected. They’ve been forced to come up with their own solutions, and in many ways, they’re succeeding.”
Joe Sacco Has Given Voice to the Oppressed in Palestine and Beyond [jacobin] – “Joe Sacco’s iconic graphic novel Palestine turns twenty-five this year. Its depiction of life under occupation is in keeping with his life’s work — telling the stories of the oppressed that the powerful would prefer to forget.”
Big Pharma takes it all [public eye] – “How pharmaceutical corporations profiteer from their privileges – even in a global health crisis like Covid-19”
The Most Googled Artist in Every Country in the World [ken bromley art supplies] – “People are having to turn to the internet as the only way of viewing the work of so many world famous artists. With this in mind, we wanted to find out which artists were searched for the most in 2020 and who has been most popular in each country throughout the pandemic.”
Right-wing media helped usher in the age of “cancel culture,” but now pretend it’s an invention of the left [media matters] – “Cancel culture, like “identity politics” and “political correctness,” is an ill-defined concept that has been weaponized to shut down criticism of conservatives.”
Moya Bailey Weighs in on Misogynoir’s Impact on Meghan Markle [bitch media] – “I emphatically disagree. Whether Meghan calls herself a Black woman is irrelevant, as the animus she experiences has everything to do with her being read as a Black woman.”
Global Climate Report – February 2021 [ncdc.noaa.gov] – “Averaged as a whole, the February 2021 global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.65°C (1.17°F) above the 20th century average—the smallest February temperature departure since 2014. However, compared to all Februaries in the 142-year record, this was the 16th warmest February on record. February 2021 also marked the 45th consecutive February and the 434th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.”
Incarceration in Real Numbers – “Each icon represents one incarcerated person”
Seeing CO2 – Game lets you drive a car [?] to experience CO2.
Can Long COVID Be Treated? [the atlantic] – “A growing number of clinicians are on an urgent quest to find treatments for a frighteningly pervasive problem. They’ve had surprising early success.”
Tricky and the making of Maxinquaye [mark saunders] – “Soon enough though, the door opened and there was Tricky. He was shirtless and looked tough, more like a scrappy street fighter than a new artist signed to a record label. To complete his look, his shaved head was covered in a thick white cream. He looked uptight. I introduced myself and he immediately broke into a big smile, shook my hand and told me, in his thick and unique Bristolian accent, that he was a big Cure fan – and then, pointing to his head, he said ‘oh don’t worry about this, oy got fucking eczema’.”
The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew. [nyt] – “Silvia Federici has been warning for decades of what happens when we undervalue domestic labor. […] Capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism,” Federici wrote. “For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations … by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization.”
Stockton’s Basic-Income Experiment Pays Off [the atlantic] – “A new study of the city’s program that sent cash to struggling individuals finds dramatic changes.”
Swiss Democracy and the Public Humiliation of Women [gender campus] – “This year, Switzerland remembers the introduction of voting rights for all its citizens. Fifty years ago, on February 7, 1971, women were enfranchised. This moment was preceded by 123 years of male-only suffrage, granted in 1848 to a selected group of men that initially excluded poor and Jewish men. Even today, voting rights are not granted for anyone without a Swiss passport.”
We Hate You Now. The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes | Quinn Norton – “Unlike any other pandemic in history, our level of scientific knowledge and ability to communicate globally gave us the power to stop this virus. This is humanity’s first self-inflicted pandemic. Or rather, a bunch of people inflicted it on the rest of us because of selfishness, ignorance, or both.”
David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep [jacobin] – “Most of the work we’re currently doing is dream-work. It exists only for its own sake, or to make rich people feel good about themselves, or to make poor people feel bad about themselves. And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us.”
[Articles German/French]
Zone à Défendre: Bäume, Beton, Barrikaden [das lamm] – “Heute beginnt die Räumung des Protestcamps auf dem Mormonthügel zwischen La Sarraz und Eclépens. Der Zementkonzern LafargeHolcim will seinen Steinbruch dort ausweiten. Zum Schutz des Hügels besetzen Aktivist:innen das Gebiet seit vergangenem Oktober.”
Die NZZ im Kulturkampf [nchm] – “Wer sich für Diversität einsetzt, ist rassistisch – so scheint das neue Mantra der NZZ zu lauten. Jetzt hat es die Neuen Deutschen Medienmacher*innen getroffen.”
Man könnte auch sagen: Die QAnon-Verschwörung ist einfach sehr schlechte Literatur [woz] – “Alle reden vom postfaktischen Diskurs, Nicola Gess erklärt, wie er funktioniert. Die Literaturwissenschaftlerin zeigt, was der Hochstapler aus den 1920er Jahren mit den Trickstern von heute gemeinsam hat. Und wie die Rechten die Meinungsfreiheit missbrauchen.”
Notiz zum Nebelspalter: Wenn Rechte Akteure versuchen, das Image der Eweggestrigen abzustreifen und rechte Positionen mit Witzen salonfähig machen [präzis und kopflos] – “Mit dem Nebelspalter gibt es jetzt in der Schweiz ein weiteres Anschauungsbeispiel, mit welchen kommunikativen Strategien rechte oder rechtsextreme Positionen in der gesellschaftlichen Mitte annehmbar gemacht werden – als Humor und mit dem Label „Meinungspluralismus“.”
War da was? [republik] – “Es ist eine realitätsleugnende Altmänner-Mär, man müsse nur hart genug arbeiten, tüchtiger sein als die anderen, dann schaffe man es auch von ganz unten bis ganz nach oben. Der Selfmademan ist eine Lüge. Macht wird in erster Linie verliehen. Von Menschen, die bereits mächtig sind, die gezielt fördern oder Strukturen aufziehen, die gewissen Menschen Macht ermöglichen und anderen erschweren oder ganz verweigern.”
«Im Alltag überfordert zu sein, bedeutet nicht, dass du dir keine politische Meinung bilden kannst» [republik] – “Manuel Conzett ist es sehr wichtig, dass seine Stimme zählt. Doch weil er anders ist als die Durchschnittsmenschen, ist ihm sein Stimmrecht nicht sicher. Ein Gespräch über die Arroganz der Gesellschaft und warum auch Spinner abstimmen dürfen sollen.”
Brief an CR:GL von 78 Tamedia-Frauen – Open letter signed by 78 women accusing the casual inherent sexism in many press rooms.
Die meinen ja mich [fabrikzeitung] – “Der Gang in die Migros ist zum Gang ins Risikogebiet geworden.”
[Older articles, still great]
The Irishwoman Who Shot Mussolini [rte] – “Four people tried to assassinate Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Only one person ever came close – her name was Violet Gibson and she was Irish. Violet spend the rest of her life in mental institutions, forgotten by society and by history.”
R.I.P.
“Rahel K”
Nawal El Saadawi
Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape
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Header Photo: The hashtag #NoLiestal trended in Switzerland in reaction to a big demonstration of right wing corona sceptics in Liestal