GUYS, if you have a New Yorker subscription, please immediately read Seymour Hersh’s new piece on My Lai (he broke the story back in 1969, and is revisiting it), it is…incredible, I don’t really want to quote from it bc it’s pretty gut-wrenching, but it’s a reminder of how journalism can actually change the national mood.
*
Oh, okay, here’s a non-paywalled story about an artist who lost her hippocampus to encephalitis which is everything you’ve ever hoped for about the resilience of humans and friendship and creativity:
As abject as Johnson’s condition sounds, it is hard to pity her once you’ve met her. If her life is an endless ride on a stationary bike, she pedals away with unflagging brio. This bustling personality is a preserved trait. Before her illness, Johnson was not only an artist on constant deadline; she was also an adept violist who performed in chamber ensembles and an amateur pilot who kept a 1946 Piper Cub on an airstrip at Watercolor Farm. (Flying was connected to her visual hunger: she wanted to draw better from an aerial perspective.) With a partner, Johnson set up an organic-dairy business on the property; at least once, she landed a plane while skirting a cow on the runway. Johnson found wisdom in upbeat aphorisms, and designed covers for books like “You’re the Best!” and “Love Your Life: Making the Most of Each Day.” Her whistle-while-you-multitask disposition is intact, if not intensified; she is a very American amnesiac. This makes her an eager experimental subject. Many psychology studies, with their sterile repetitions, are capsized when their subjects become too bored to coöperate, but Johnson relishes invitations to listen for an hour to extremely similar sequences of musical tones. (Others with Johnson’s condition are much less amenable to study. Clive Wearing, an amnesiac conductor, became indignant during a tones experiment, declaring, “I am a world-famous musician!”)
*
Michelle Dean and a man of some kind on what Robert Durst could still be hiding:
There was nothing unusual about having a private mailbox or how Robert Durst’s packages looked from the outside, the UPS employees said. But he did have an odd habit: Durst’s iPad would travel separately from him on long journeys. He would arrive at the UPS store, put down his iPad on the counter and ask the staff to ship it to wherever in the country he was travelling.
“Always shipped overnight so it’d be there before he got there,” a staff member told the Guardian.
Bacha, the private investigator, said that shipping the iPad separately could have allowed Durst to avoid ever having to show airport security its contents. The quirk – taken together with the addresses and the aliases and the holding companies that would seem unlikely if not useless for a magnate of his stature – may instead suggest a desire to obfuscate a simple truth about Durst’s comings and goings since the reopening of the cold case into his wife’s murder.
*
*
Emily Nussbaum wrote this really thoughtful thing about Kimmy Schmidt and the depiction of rape survivors in some recent TV shows (I think the show wants to leave it deliberately ambiguous as to whether Kimmy IS a rape survivor, but I think it’s a very plausible read):
When it comes to jokes about trauma, however, the show takes more risks. Kimmy buries her P.T.S.D. attacks in a SoulCycle-like class, only to find that she has submitted to another cult. She dates a Second World War veteran, since he’s the perfect shrink: he’s too senile to remember what she tells him. In one of the show’s funniest episodes, Kimmy and Jacqueline bond over their desire to hide any sign of sadness—an “outside in” philosophy. When Kimmy is disturbed by seeing her first selfie, Jacqueline takes her to her plastic surgeon, played by a deranged Martin Short, his face perverted into gargoyle features. Dr. Grant (pronounced Franff) is fascinated by Kimmy’s appearance: “Absolutely no sun damage, but you’ve clearly experienced a tremendous amount of stress. Are you a coal miner? Submarine captain? Because you have very distinct scream lines. Where did those come from, I wonder.”
*
Unlocked god mode at work pic.twitter.com/fenVe6YDCg
— viney (@vineyille) March 23, 2015
*
I really like The Last Man on Earth.
*
oh guys I just typed out this whole long thing about why stairs are no longer appearing on my fitbit as an option and my elaborate troubleshooting process and then I realized it’s because I just “upgraded” to the Flex AND IT DOESN’T TRACK STAIRS MY BEST AND GREATEST ACTIVITY
*
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I WAS SO HOPING YOU’D HAVE NUSSBAUM’S ARTICLE I AM SO HERE FOR IT
Yeah I totally read that as “lost her hippopotamus to encephalitis.” Just came down here to say that, scrolling back up now.
glad I’m not the only one who read hippopotamus!
that cat is terrible
Cats shouldn’t be this moist.
http://worstcats.tumblr.com/
hahaha YES
I’m having a very rotten sulking-into-my-yogurt whiny-ass day, and I very much needed those terrible cats. Thank you for that.
that is also what i imagined!
why is that cat’s mouth so gummy
I totally thought the same, and thought it was going to be an endearing story about a woman searching for her pet hippopotamus
WAIT THE FLEX DOESN’T COUNT STAIRS WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?
I have a One and just stick it on my bra every day and go about my merry way, stairs are my favorite :'( That and the pretty flower!
I love my One! Discreet and comfortable! It also survived a trip through the washing machine, although I do not recommend trying that for yourselves!
You guys, Elyse is a fitbit champion. She beats me by a zillion points every week. Her stair/cleavage powers are amazing.
I woke up, checked Twitter, saw that an Airbus crashed in France with all passengers presumed dead, and now I am going to be fretting and freaking out about this all day. Those poor people!
I’m 90% certain my coworker was on a plane from Madrid to Frankfurt, but he’s not in the office today and now I’m worrying, ugh.
ETA: He is fine and working from home/taking his dog to the orthopedic specialist. Thank goodness.
The past two years have been terrifying for air travel!!
I hope your coworker is okay…
Last Man on Earth! I thought it was going to be dumb and boring, but it’s not. Will Forte is so great as a kind of dirtbag-you-root-for.
Yeah I was really skeptical about it but I like the direction the writers took his and Kristen Schaal’s relationship.
I stopped watching it after they introduced “OH, look, the other survivor is a super pretty white lady instead of this kind of weirdo but still reasonably attractive white lady.” Also I cannot handle all the suspension of disbelief required. Where are all the dead bodies? Are ALL the mammals dead? Why is everyone white? Also, if two people survived then statistically there are more survivors – why is everyone so dumb? Why do they never ever ever talk about the fact that repopulating the earth means “oh let’s make our kids mate with each other.” Or why anyone would even consider getting pregnant/getting someone without at least some rudimentary knowledge? I am very interested in all the answers to this because I want to like the show. I do.
I definitely have all those questions too! If I were in that situation, the last thing I’d be worried about would be having babies, for about a thousand and one reasons. The January Jones character really interests me, though, because even though she is just another hot white lady, she’s deliciously creepy and manipulative and I haven’t really figured her out yet.
Uuugggh the question about the dead bodies!! That’s what I was practically yelling at the screen while watching! Maybe they’ll answer that later on…
They got around to that question on this week’s show.
The dumb part or the body part or the animals part? Or the white part? Or the pregnancy or or or or? SO MANY QuesTIONS!!!!
Ack, sorry! That was just terrible commenting on my part. They got around to the “repopulating the earth means your kids will have to mate with each other” question, though only because Phil was attempting to use it as justification to get Carol’s permission to have sex with Melissa. “You don’t want our babies to have sex with each other, do you!?!?”
I too wonder why the roads are all empty and there are no bodies anywhere. I suppose they’re just leaving that out because the show is meant to be a comedy and answering those questions would be a bummer, but perhaps they’ll eventually get around to it.
The main issue I have is that one week after humans disappear all the nuclear reactors in the world would meltdown, and over the next few months the nuclear steam will rain down on the world.
Here’s a map: http://todayilearned.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/201…. Worth noting is that there are at least 1-2 in Arizona, plus a few more in SoCal. Tucson isn’t as dumb a place to live as New York would be, but it’s pretty damn dumb.
You would need to go to Australia or Africa to be safe. And they don’t have any doctors, and all the water is standing water run through hoses, so there’d be all kinds of issues regarding infection that they’d need to vigilant about.
Also I shared this article about a guy that played Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town” on a bar jukebox until he got kicked out on Facebook yesterday and got semi-mansplained by a friend about what other Thin Lizzy songs I should listen to but whatever, if you need a laugh this morning this is like…John Mulaney’s Salt and Pepper Diner TO THE EXTREME.
This was great. I need to add “stories about people playing the same song over and over on a jukebox” to my list of very specific genres I love.
When my boyfriend was a teen, he and his wayward teen friends fed a mess of quarters into a jukebox and had it play “The Hokey Pokey” over and over. For hours, I guess. The owners couldn’t stop the machine, so they eventually had to yank the plug out or cut the power or something.
The next time they went back, the owner spotted them and yelled “YOU!!” with a pointed finger, and then they hightailed it out of there.
Brian Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon”: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funn…
Oh this one is good too.
A friend and I did this once at a biker-ish dive bar in Texas, but with Dancing Queen. FULLY expecting to get kicked out. But it turns out they were super into it. The drunker they got, the more they danced. Accidentally a magical evening.
Holy shit, I wish I would’ve been there for that. Incredible.
Beautiful.
I find it so hard to imagine anyone resisting the power of Dancing Queen. Even if they sit through it all surly at the bar, their fingers will start tapping hours later.
That’s kind of what happened, it was a slow progression of involvement for most of the men. It started out strong with the ladies in the bar though, who were INTO IT from the start. But while you may be able to resist dancing during one play of the song, there’s no one who can fight it for like, six. Just not possible. We did not, however, admit it had been us at any point in case the tide turned suddenly!
We kind of discussed doing it again with Space Cowboy by Nsync, but we chickened out. I think that would have gone…poorly?
this is the best thing I read today you are great
I tried it once with “Golden Years” by Bowie and about the 7th or 8th time the intro kicked in the bartender kicked us out. Of a dive bar. On $1 High Life night! Humanity does not have a lot of patience for repetition.
i have the “John Mulaney’s Salt and Pepper Diner” bit on my computer and have watched it countless times. *ALWAYS*… *FUNNY*.
It’s the one thing I turn to when I am in the sourest of sour moods and need to smile IMMEDIATELY.
i love stand-up comedy in general for this and Mulaney’s is always gold. there’s also a guy named Bob Marley (not THAT bob marley) who does a “Halibut” bit that leaves me in tears every time.
I enjoyed that New Yorker article overall, which is a high compliment since my work is on amnesia, and one of the experiments I’ve done was in collaboration with a lab that studies a group of patients similar to Lonnie Sue Johnson (we ran the same task in animals and the human patients). It even got the vast majority of the science right, which feels pretty rare in science journalism these days. Maybe I can direct people to that article when I tell them I study memory and they assume I study Alzheimer’s.
The more Oliver Sacks I read, the more I find the brain entirely…weird, for lack of a better term. Deeply mysterious. Could you give a broad overview of what level you’re working on–cellular, behavioral, other?
I’m on the behavioral level- looking at different regions that are involved memories of space and navigation. So basically, we can take out these certain regions in a variety of ways (in animal models, at least) and then test them on tasks that require different kinds of memory.
“…when I tell them I study memory and they assume I study Alzheimer’s.”
so…how do you deal with the bewilderment/glares/disinterest when you say you’re not studying alzheimer’s (or really any kind of illness) and people look at you like “well then what are we even giving you our tax dollars FOR, then?!” alzheimer’s research is very important (and also very interesting in it’s own way) just…not the particular aspect of memory that i am invested in studying…
I usually talk something about how very little we know about memory like, in general. And that knowing more about memory will probably translate somewhere down the line to helping with Alzheimer’s and other dementia disorders. Basically, I try and link it back vaguely because the public is Not Great with things that don’t affect their/their loved ones health a lot of them time.
Have you ever been to see the brain collection at Cornell?
http://cornellsun.com/blog/2003/04/10/brain-colle…
No, but that sounds awesome! Sadly, I live on the West Coast and I’ve never had a reason to be at Cornell.
I used to pass by some of them on my way to class. They’re just hangin’ out there, relaxing in their glass jars.
(Apparently, a lot of the labels got mixed up in the ’70s, when they were in a basement someplace. So they don’t really know whose brain is whose anymore. But still– preserved brains!!)
As soon as I say I study brains people immediately ask about Alzheimer’s. When I tell them I don’t do anything memory adjacent, they still sometimes ask what I know about Alzheimer’s research. People are also generally surprised when I say that my lab works on psychiatric disease stuff but we are not really working directly on treatments (better understanding of disease will hopefully guide therapeutic design, but my particular lab is never going to be designing human treatments). I find that people are often somewhat confused about the concept of basic science (if you’re not directly designing drugs, where is all that funding going?).
My mother would say of Mr Durst that he doesn’t act like an innocent man. She always presumed GUILT when a man was involved and quote:
“The guilty flee where no man pursueth.”
Nussbaum references but doesn’t link an article by Arthur Chu, which really summed up my feelings on the show and race: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/201…
Oh, that was great. Thanks for posting.
Look but. If you had incriminating evidence that you’d committed a murder on your iPad, wouldn’t it be easier to, like, throw the iPad out and get a new one? Why would you have it mailed to yourself to escape security?
Also, why would you put incriminating evidence on your iPad in the first place?
Incriminating photographs that bring him pleasure to view (and thus he can’t bring himself to get rid of them), would be my guess.
Maybe he has a digital collection of trophies from his victims?
Spreadsheet of aliases and alibis?
I mean, it’s pretty stupid to carry digital evidence of your ongoing and past crimes on your iPad, but definitely not as stupid as being in a documentary about a crime you know you committed, so I don’t see any reason to rule that out.
“It’s the perfect cover! Nobody would believe that I would be stupid enough to do this!”
Insane billionaire? This is my explanation for everything about this case.
OT: the ‘room wanted’ section of Craigslist works remarkably well, at least in Albuquerque. I just dropped an ad assuming everyone assumed all the posts there were scammers, but it’s actually been more helpful tha using the for rent section.
I want to like The Last Man on Earth but Paul is just the wooooooooorst 🙁
I will watch any postapocalyptic premise for the worldbuilding (how will they survive? what will culture be like?), but as soon as the writers descend into “zomg who’s gonna fuck who lol” I’m outta there. BORED NOW.
Oh man, I only made it to the point in the first episode where they introduce Kristen Schaal in a way that made me super uncomfortable (“oh NoOoOoO he’s gonna have to share the earth with HhHhEEeEeEeErRrRR???!?!?!?! but she’s not supermodel?!?!?!?!!”) before checking out! Kinda okay with not watching further now!
At this point I would believe any derangedly wacky detail about Robert Durst. Anything you could make up about him would never be as bizarre/terrible as the truth.
On a serious note: that Hersh article was amazing and sobering. The stories about the veterans who went back to Vietnam to try to help rebuild and obtain reparations are good to hear, and in contrast to the reactions of the men who were never on the ground at all, who either denied what was happening or knew and did nothing, they’re especially powerful.
On a not-serious note: From the Argentine Nazi piece: “The stories say crates of Nazi gold hit the beaches, then vanished into the foggy Andes Mountains.” This is 100% the plot of Dead Snow, except not in Sweden.
My favorite undergrad professor talked last Veterans Day about his time in Vietnam (he was a SPY!): http://www.idahopress.com/special_sections/salute…
“If you want to thank me, hold the government accountable,” he said. “Ask questions. Challenge their claims when they say this and this is happening in this place. Say, ‘show me.’”
I really like the article on Kimmy Schmidt as a rape survivor. It’s a wonderful new take.and, I imagine, refreshing to other survivors of assaults. Kimmy just seems so empowered, but it doesn’t deny how her trauma resurfaces frequently and not to her convenience.
It is!
it adds an additional layer of disturbing onto the trial scenes, though…
EVERYTHING WAS DISTURBING ABOUT THOSE TRIAL SCENES.
Nothing else in the show made me cringe so hard or want to literally avert my face. But I have a thing about incompetent lawyers/courts. I mean, Jon Hamm was basically playing a more charismatic/self-aware version of my dad, and I felt SO BETRAYED by that.
yes! The whole courtroom scene is both bone-chillingly awful and horrifically funny (and a really solid send off to the season).
Your Dad sounds like an … interesting person.
See, it’s interesting to know some found it a good way to end the season — I just have no distance with that material, so for me, it was the hardest part to deal with.
My dad is a mentally ill fundamentalist and the Texas family courts refused to allow me to emancipate until I turned 18, my childhood was the greatest!
I would like to place Felines of New York before the group.
You’re doing great work, here. I’m keeping that tab open for the rest of the day. …Or am I keeping that tabby open for the rest of the day, amirite?? Haaaaa….I’ll show myself out.
eeeeee!
Well, there goes my productivity for the day.
(describing survivor Michelle Knight) But, to judge from newspaper profiles, she has not merely survived the abuse—she’s resilient and downright giggly, a fan of karaoke and dancing, angels and affirmations. It’s a powerfully girlish model of human toughness.
In spite of what sounds like some racially problematic plotting, I’m really looking forward to watching Kimmy Schmidt when it come to DVD. TV can never have too many heroines who are, to repurpose a phrase, light as feather and stiff (heh) as a board.
There’s a really good article posted above re: the race issues in Kimmy Schmidt. Highly recommend.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who is ok about Kimmy Schmidt being ambiguous about rape. Too much of the criticism I have read jumps straight to hand-wringing horror without relying much on the source material. All she says is “weird sex stuff, ” which, to a perpetual 13-year-old, could mean a lot of things– only some of which are abuse.
Yeah I’ve been feeling weird because when I watched the show, I didn’t immediately jump to that conclusion. I actually assumed the “weird sex stuff” was between the captive women because they were growing up and unsure about sexuality. So yes, to me, it’s fine to be ambiguous about it because that contributes to how we see Kimmy’s character. The New Yorker article was great!
And I like how that pops up early on (1st or 2nd episode?) and doesn’t really come up again, like, okay, let’s get this out of the way and move on to some jokes. We know y’all are at the edge of your seats wondering if there was sex (and was it rape?!?!) but that’s not the point, we’ve got a show to get on with.
The idea that you would ship your iPad to yourself for security seems very weird to me.
1) I have never had to show the contents of any of my mobile devices to airport security, even when I have been pulled aside for extra screening (like the time I forgot to take my swiss army knife out of my yarn kit). I did once have to demo my graphing calculator to the TSA at a small airport in the 90s, and when I had jury duty I had to power all of my devices on for court house security (that was fun), but no one has ever asked to see the contents.
2) If you ship something, you are removing it from your direct personal control. it would be a lot easier for someone to intercept something that you shipped!
3) even if the TSA did ask you to show them the contents, do they really have the time to look through everything? Can’t you just show them that you multiple variants of Angry Birds and some selfies and call it a day?
“Please ignore that folder that says murderphotos.jpg. Look, I beat my high score in Mah-jongg!”
Re #3, some travelers accuse the TSA of apparently copying the entire hard drive on the device for later review.
As a former ACLU employee, this makes my palms itch something fierce…
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/hold…
“If her life is an endless ride on a stationary bike, she pedals away with unflagging brio”.
I am sure we all feel our life is an endless ride on a stationary bike some of the time; wishing everyone on here the brio to get through today.
Goddess make my brio unflagging today!
I’d rather have unflagging brie… Mmmmm…
Or brioche – any of those really
That Outlook away message is next level. One of these days I’m going to snap and use it.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomnamako/robert-durst-li…
I think that makes the third missing woman linked to him since the show aired.
I would like to submit for misandrist consideration these 1939 illustrations of salesmen. They are delightfully terrible and I can’t stop imagining them as subjects of an Art History post.
I love how delighted that second lady is to be mansplained at. “One of the things you want is…” YES, GO ON!!
Also, I’m going to use the 9th one down as a valentine someday. (“I thought of you when I saw this sander!”)
I like to imagine the 2nd and 3rd ones as “before” and “after” shots for a Resisting Mansplaining class. (The 4th one is Advanced Level.)
because you are also noisy and abrasive!
Thank you! (I still haven’t figured out how to embed images).
psst: http://hooniverse.com/image-embed/ has a how to for embedding images in intensedebate
This has changed my life forever
There is one (number six) where I thought that the lady was complaining about how she wanted “it” to open into hell. Thought about portals etc, saw that it said “into the hall”. V disappointed.
The article about Lonni Sue Johnson is amazing, as is she and her family. (Got a lot of parenting echoes out of it, too.)
The disaster at Green Ramp was 21 years ago today. 24 people died while waiting on the tarmac to do training jumps; a C-141 and an F-16 fighter collided and sent a huge fireball washing over a group of nearly 500 soldiers. Trigger warning (fire, accidents, deaths) in this article for descriptions of the chaos and the soldiers’ heroic response to it. Green Ramp
You guys, the X-Files is coming back for six episodes! Let’s hope it’s to bring us a much-needed episode about that freaky Scandinavian milk-stealing familiar from the other day.
It's the one thing I turn to when I am in the sourest of sour moods and need to smile IMMEDIATELY.
It’s bugging the heck out of me that the New Yorker style guide has TV show titles in quotes instead of italics.
It's bugging the heck out of me that the New Yorker style guide has TV show titles in quotes instead of italics.