Link Roundup!

by Nicole Cliffe · April 14, 2015

“Black Men Being Killed Is the New Girls Gone Wild”:

It might seem that the difference between these snuff films and Girls Gone Wild is that people paid cash to watch the women perform for them. But that is merely a sign of the times. The Internet eventually won when the audience decided to pay with clicks instead of cash: The places that brought Girls Gone Wild to an end still have age disclaimers for mature content, and can be blocked by enabling parental controls. But, when the most explicit imagery of the violence enacted against black bodies can be at the top of The New York Times and the Daily Mail, it says that these are the images that sell in a world where clicks equal cash, and there’s no warning necessary. This is content everyone should see! Don’t miss this amazing new footage of a black man dying. Warning, graphic content, but the screen capture really sells the tale. The distribution channel isn’t the same as those videos of gyrating youngsters, but it is distributed and monetized just the same.

Elif Batuman on reading racist literature:

Part of the difficulty about such grievances is that they’re so isolating: they single out some people, and glide over the heads of others. Reading De Quincey, I had registered, with a shade of annoyance, the description of “Turkish opium eaters”—“absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves”—but hadn’t been particularly bothered by his claims of being the best Greek scholar in Oxford. For some of my students, those Greek and Latin lines were like an electric fence, keeping them out of the text. How could I not have anything better to tell them than “Try not to think about it”?

The great Molly Brooks on the history of the Stanley Cup.

Where did John Barrymore’s totem pole come from?

Tuxecan occupied a cove on the island’s northwest coast, backed by an ancient grove of cedar, hemlock, and spruce. Photographs from the turn of the twentieth century show a beach lined with rectangular plank houses and canoe runs, and boardwalks traversing gravel shallows. For generations, hundreds of Tlingit wintered there, but around 1900 they relocated south, to Klawock, where a Presbyterian school and Alaska’s first cannery had opened. Tuxecan remained standing, and clansmen visited occasionally, but without inhabitants the village deteriorated, as did its loose forest of totem poles. Some of the poles were taken to Klawock; others remained at Tuxecan, and as they aged they tilted, in a slow-motion game of pick-up sticks, until they fell. Then they were consumed by moss.
One particularly regal pole loomed over the southeastern corner of a large house on the beach. Nearly thirty feet tall, it had three crests. The topmost figure was a bird with folded wings. Below it was a human, which held a large finned sea creature at the base of its tail. The bottom crest was a fierce, furry animal—a bear or a wolf—sitting high on its haunches. One day, in the nineteen-thirties, the totem pole went missing. All that remained was a sawed stump.

A project to turn corpes into compost (I AM HERE FOR THIS, COMPOST ME!)

Scientists agree that human beings can be composted. Already countless farms across the country, including at least a third of Washington State’s dairy farms, compost the bodies of dead livestock. In some states,transportation departments compost roadkill.

“I’m absolutely sure that it can work,” said Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a soil scientist at Washington State University who serves on the advisory board of the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that Ms. Spade founded.

The process is surprisingly simple: Place nitrogen-rich material, like dead animals, inside a mound of carbon-rich material, like wood chips and sawdust, adding moisture or extra nitrogen and making other adjustments as needed. Microbial activity will start the pile cooking.

Never stop giving bad legal advice, the “lawyers” of Reddit.

How the police profile and shame sex workers (a video from Fusion.)

Nicole is an Editor of The Toast.


103 Comments

  2. smeesmeesmee +27

    Just the other day someone asked me what I’d want done with my body after death and I said “idk mulch, compost?”, so YES.

    1. octopoda +2

      Yeah this sounds good to me. I was debating cremation or just donating my body to science but composting works well too.

      1. smeesmeesmee +4

        Oh wait donating to medical science! Or body farms. I don’t know. Whatever is useful. Organ donation followed by body farm followed by composting???

        1. octopoda +1

          I told the donating thing to my wife and she said no, so composting it is I guess ha!

    2. pretty_monster +2

      i think being donated to science would be awesome. i’d like to be an organ/tissue donor, too, so hopefully science doesn’t mind getting leftovers.

      cremated, composted, shot into space. all cool back-up ideas. can you be fed to animals?! like, lions or crocodiles or something?

      i really want my carcass to be of some use if at all possible is what i guess i’m saying.

      1. Beakses +2

        I’m down for organ/tissue donation- even the really experimental face/ whole leg/ whatever type transplants. I won’t be using it, take it all!

  3. longlostlullaby +18

    II’m sure everyone is happy together in that house now, but it’s going to get reeeaallly awkward in there as soon as she refuses to go. Having to move again so soon is a sucky situation, but still. If you have to go, do it while everyone still feels bad and wants to give you half off rent and help you move, not three months from now when they hate you because it took you so long to give in and leave.

      1. longlostlullaby +24

        I actually wrote “he’, but then I thought, “I shouldn’t assume male is the default” and changed it. Though he/she sounds like they’re about to make a stupid decision in refusing to leave, and is therefore more likely male.

    2. irishbreakfasttime +35

      I saw the phrase “there is no lease” and was like, welp, there’s your answer.

    3. GoatseFanfic +14

      It’s just tragic that an absolutely smoking deal like they’re being offered is so wasted on someone who doesn’t know how rare anything more than “okay I’m done with you, get the hell out by the first” is in month-to-month rentals.

      1. jlper +12

        RIGHT? You are getting 60 days notice, half off your rent for two months and your full deposit back, PLUS you don’t have to find a new place, PLUS you don’t have to move any of your own stuff or pay someone else to move it? That’s a goddamn DREAM, especially considering he’s only been there for one month.

        I also refuse to believe it is difficult to find a place in San Francisco where you can smoke weed inside.

        1. GoatseFanfic +5

          I refuse to believe it’s difficult to find a place anywhere where more landlords honestly give a shit if you smoke up in the house than not but growing your own little pot farm on the property is a horse of a different color entirely

          also the OP there kind of sounds like a piece of shit so I bet they get busted on a lot of things a normal person who doesn’t try to forcibly colonize someone’s goddamn house against their will would not

  4. LyetteM +14

    I want to be composted! I read about cultures that would leave bodies in the desert to be picked clean by scavengers & then come back for the bones, and the writer was like, “We might consider that creepy!” Meanwhile I was like, “That is awesome. Can I do that when I kick the bucket?”

    1. sednarea51 +5

      Right, seconded! I don’t know if I’m personally up for being bone-picked, but I would like nothing more than to accelerate the process of turning my mortal remains into a tree. Get my leftover bits into a maple or birch or fir ASAP.

      1. whittingly +5

        There are several companies that make biodegradable cremation urns filled with seeds, so ashes go in, the urn is buried, and a tree grows from the urn. Insta-tree!

    2. GoatseFanfic +10

      that probably works better in a time and place when there’s nothing but endless miles of desert in the desert but OTOH when I’m not using my body anymore having coyotes strew bits of it all over one of those Phoenix golf courses is kinda appealing too. I think Edward Abbey would approve anyway

    4. Perdita McLeod +4

      I am with you! I’ve long thought that the idea of a permanent grave is sort of selfish? Humanity is going to keep coming and dying and there is a finite amount of land. Declaring this one little plot to be yours forever, for no other purpose than storing and commemorating your bones? That’s not sustainable.

      1. GoatseFanfic +13

        forever since when? It’s my turn to have a mcmansion built over my grave and when the first family shows up I’m gonna haunt the shit out of them

      2. sorrycassandra +2

        In principle I agree with this, but I’ve been watching a whole lot of Time Team lately and I always love it when they dig up burials and find, like, elderly Saxon women buried with shields and spears. Then again, we’re not really bringing our A-game where grave goods are concerned, so future archaeologists are going to be pretty disappointed anyway.

        1. GoatseFanfic +7

          Yeah but back in the day for every Egyptian prince or tomb warrior there were like a million serfs who just got tipped into a hole in the ground and were paid no mind ever after unless they chanced into becoming a really neat bog mummy or something. We’ve got the capacity now to create mausoleum scenes to put Qin Shi Huang Di to shame, but it’s not gonna just happen for you, you gotta want it. You gotta go out there and get those golden torcs, those sacrifical slaves, don’t leave it to self-absorbed millionaire eccentrics to write this century’s legacy

          1. sorrycassandra +3

            Also true. Come on, people, grave robbers are an essential part of the economy! And they’re all out of work right now! Get it together, rich and famous dead people!

          2. GoatseFanfic +8

            I’m planning to set a little something aside to create a tomb scene that gives an utterly misleading impression of 21st century life, because screw the 30th. Rubber chickens arranged in postures of worship around a shrine, on the pedestal? An Elvis of the best clear glass. A pit full of old iPhones, knapped into spearpoints. A set of clay tablets engraved with advertising in English, Mandarin, Amharic, and Urdu, contents of each unrelated but with marks to suggest they’re all translations of the same text. Upon my head a silver crown, in my right hand a shotgun, and in my left, a TV remote.

    5. sfbeee +4

      I am Zoroastrian and theoretically bodies are supposed to be placed on top of towers of silence and then picked clean by vultures, which tbh has always TERRIFIED me, mostly because I first processed this reality as a kid imagining it being my granny… It’s conceptually so beautiful, but I am not into the reality of it, damn.

      An interesting and also horrifying issue is that all the vulture are THEMSELVES dying, meaning that the system is kind of broken and it’s all just yikes yikes yikes.

      1. GoatseFanfic +2

        in the sense that everything is, ultimately, dying or are they running out of body vultures or what

        I have trouble conceptualizing vultures as anything but as endurable as the tardigrade especially when provided with extra free food

        1. sfbeee +1

          they are getting weird diseases, i believe because of all the crazy pharmaceuticals in dead bodies. it’s by far the strangest problem i have ever encountered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisi…

          i am very grateful that i am not the type of religious person who thinks i won’t be saved if i do not get this type of burial.

          2. Perdita McLeod +1

            Wow, I had no idea that vultures were the end of the line for pathogens; it never occurred to me how incredibly important they are.

  5. MMT +5

    well, shit. i thought dispersing these images of black men being killed was to keep it in the open so it wasn’t hidden, ignored, or mischaracterized as accidents, asking for it, etc. i guess if people are just watching them over and over or if they watch one then start to search for others in the way the GGW would lead someone to keep looking for more/dirtier stuff, maybe that is the soft-core porn analog? i guess the media are making money due to getting eyeballs and clicks from these sensational videos…but i still suspect there is more good in the light being shed, awareness, and acceptance that THIS IS HAPPENING and THIS IS WRONG. At some point…soon (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?) there will be some justice and changes, and i think we will point back to these videos as a catalyst.

    1. GoatseFanfic +5

      I think any open comments section under one of these news articles might indicate that not everyone is getting the same things from these kinds of stories, and they don’t just keep happening out of a mere lack of popular awareness.

      That doesn’t negate the value of sunlight as a disinfectant but yeah there are absolutely tons of people metaphorically and sometimes literally getting off to police/vigilante shooting videos.

      1. Ethylbenzene +7

        Right, and I think that “metaphorically” is important. I don’t think the article is indicating that people are enjoying these videos sexually, as such (though some undoubtedly are), but that these videos are tickling the same place in people’s brains as the GGW videos. That people are watching them not to confront the gruesome realities of race in America in the 2010s, but because they are getting a titillating thrill from them, which is…..gross.

    4. irishbreakfasttime +8

      Actual tears!

      I wonder where Vernon ended up in this world. The story’s not missing anything without him, but there’s some good schadenfreude to be had in knowing how exactly karma caught up with him.

  7. ppyajunebug +40

    I love when that person was like “but they’re doing something illegal and could I just tell them I’ll tell the authorities about it so I don’t have to move” and everyone is like “…you mean blackmail?”.

    I’m sorry the options these people found you won’t let you grow your pot, but GROW THE FUCK UP.

    1. winterbymorning +13

      I want to become a tree! Bonus points if it’s like that crazy tree in Life of Pi where the fruit have human teeth at the core. But I will settle for continuing to inconvenience people for centuries after my death by making it necessary for them to rake up my leaves.

  9. theyoungcynic +33

    1. okay it is my FAVOURITE THING when enormous badass hockey players with shaggy mountain man playoff beards pick up their ADORABLE TINY NEWBORN INFANTS (WITH THE TINY BABY NOISE CANCELLING HEADPHONES ON BECAUSE THEY’RE USUALLY SLEEPING) AND PLACE THEM INSIDE THE STANLEY CUP OMG
    2. like ALL Canadian sporting championships are called after the name of the cup (Stanley Cup, Grey Cup, Vanier Cup, etc.) and they were basically all donated by former Governors General so…
    3. Lord Stanley originally wanted to give the cup to the best Canadian amateur hockey team so it’s been against his wishes since it STARTED going to the pro leagues (especially since four of the original six teams of the NHL and 23 of the current 30 teams are American), so I don’t knwo how well that argument is supposed to hold up.

    1. blushingflower +10

      okay, I am not a hockey fan, but are there PICTURES of tiny babies in the Stanley Cup? Because that it definitely Relevant to My Interests.

          1. theyoungcynic +17

            BONUS OVARYSPLOSION: The back of baby’s teeny tiny Kings jersey says “Daddy”:

      4. mmsees +9

        In addition to babies in the Stanley Cup, I’m a huge fan of dogs interacting with the Stanley Cup. Here’s Anze Kopitar and his dog each eating out of a stanley cup (the dog got his own mini cup!!!!)

    2. Ethylbenzene +14

      I have a huge soft spot in my heart for “wacky things the Stanley Cup gets up to.”

  10. ramina +19

    I’m so glad the totem pole is being repatriated. That was the one thing I wanted to know throughout the whole article. Incredible, though, what a white dude with money will see and then just take because he wants it.

  11. houblonchouffe +5

    OT–I am a little bit sobby at my desk right now, because last night on The Voice a guy from my hometown sang my most favorite song, and it was so. fucking. beautiful, and I think he should win, so I voted for a reality TV thing for the first time ever and if you want to, too, just let me know and I will be more blatant about it. 🙂

    1. ru_ri +3

      Hooray for Josh Davis! Yes, he is awesome. Everyone should vote for him as often as possible!

  12. ballisticjaguar +15

    Is the time I get to tell everyone I have seen the Stanley Cup IN PERSON? I did, it was glorious. The town I grew up in is the birthplace and is still the home of the parents of a hockey player who has won that and an Olympic gold medal. Haven’t seen the medal, also the player himself is kinda not the greatest guy, but whatever! I saw the Stanley Cup!

    (I know there are a lot of people who have seen it in person, but it still feels so special.)

    1. mmsees +1

      I’m the exact same way – I went to a victory parade for a team I actively dislike just so I could see the Stanley Cup go by (and because big parades are often fun even when you’re bitter about the reason said parade is happening).

    2. Sunshine +2

      It sounds like a Victorian grave-robber, or criminal clean-up type. “I had hoped to avoid this, but we may have to call on Ms. Spade.”

  15. Sean_Sullivan +29

    Did not know Barrymore kept a stolen totem pole, but I’m not surprised. If you stopped me on the street and asked me to guess at likely owners of dubiously acquired totem poles, I’d probably say John Barrymore, Richard Nixon, and Bono. Maybe Zach Braff, although he seems more like an Incan mummy guy.

  16. 1sic1 +33

    Aaand I just realized I’ve mixed up John Barrymore and John Barrowman. The fact that ‘totem pole’ wasn’t a euphemism was my first clue.

    1. houblonchouffe +5

      Was about to post this exact thing verbatim so it definitely isn’t just you

  18. themegnapkin +13

    I find the idea of being preserved with embalming fluid (or, whatever? It creeps me out too much to look into it too closely) way more creepy than the idea of having my body returned to nature after I die. Whatever is most environmentally friendly at the time of my demise, that’s what I want.

    1. GoatseFanfic +19

      Pumping your body full of preservatives and dumping it in the body landfill in a $3k single-use box is about as enthusiastically American as it gets, though. It’s like you’re rolling coal in the afterlife.

  19. msk +2

    I went to school with her though did not know her personally very well. But she was and remains a super badass and I love this project of hers. Cemeteries can be beautiful, especially some of the historic ones, but I just don’t think we can afford to leave all that open space for the dead. There are too many living people with very little open space they can enjoy.

  20. catmanscrothers +1

    Was it here that I read about the Body Farm ( fac.utk.edu/donation.html )? I think it was but I can’t remember. Anyway, I’d rather have a ton of strangers studying my gross body decomposing than have family members throwing “me” onto their dumb gardens

    1. whittingly +1

      I’m in training to become a mortician, but I’m planning to donate my body to the UTK Body Farm (my sister is studying with them right now). There are so many diverse and fascinating ways to personalize funerals and what’s done with remains, if you can imagine it, you can pretty much do it. It’s really exciting.

  21. leighbee +8

    it’s so sad how the playoffs aren’t happening and no one’s winning the stanley cup at all this year isn’t it

    isn’t it

  22. GoatseFanfic +21

    What’s the bad legal advice tho, I don’t know that I’d put down a retainer for wisdom like “you can’t force your month-to-month landlord to keep your grow op on their property, and whatever you get from trying won’t be worth it” but not because that’s wrong

    1. threatqualitypress +22

      Yeah a lot of this advice seems pretty solid.

      “I don’t want to move out because I like the people here, we have a good relationship!”

      “That will change after you take them to court and force them to let you stay.”

      Good point, reddit!

      1. catoclock +13

        Also, I’m deeply suspicious of how good this “good relationship” actually is, considering the person sounds like an entitled, whiny butthead and is also illegally growing pot in their apartment? I’m guessing self-awareness and correctly interpreting other people’s feelings are not among their talents.

  23. selizabethbuchanan +10

    OMG, does anyone else really want to be able to see that re-staged play in the Bautman article?

    “B. J. J., following his therapist’s advice, decides to restage “The Octoroon,” but white actors refuse to work with him: nobody wants to play slave owners. In the play within a play, B. J. J. puts on whiteface and acts both the hero George and the villain M’Closkey himself.”

    ….just me? Reminds me of a re-doing of Playboy of the Western World a few years back where the main characters were re-cast as African immigrants in Dublin. Or maybe I just have a fetish for the word “recontextualize”…

    1. selizabethbuchanan +2

      …and did I really have to write “re-” at least four times in that one comment? Ok, so I have a problem.

    2. sigaloenta +2

      I want to see it! One of the big theatre groups in my home city staged Uncle Tom’s Cabin a couple of years ago and race-switched all the parts. It was still kind of problematic and icky, though (didn’t help that the director and originator of the concept was a white dude). (I saw it, and found it ~interesting~ but in a “being an academic and also a white person means I have the privilege to react to this as “oh, that’s…interesting and raises some issues about race and costume drama and how we imagine the past.”

      That was all just to say that the play in the Batuman article sounds a gazillion times more interesting and better (and actually meaningful as satire) and I wish I could see it.

  24. seapartridge +8

    I emailed the Stanley Cup thing to my sister (who kicks ass at fantasy hockey, which is apparently a thing) and her response was “Lord Stanley just wanted a punch bowl.”

  25. lauralizabethm +3

    I like the idea behind composting one’s remains, but I would probably never be able to do it. I went to visit the cemetary yesterday with my mom and grandfather, and was horrified to discover that my second cousin once removed has been dead since 2012, but still only has a plastic placard marking her grave because the executor of her estate is her nephew and he’s too “busy” (counting his money) to put up a proper headstone.

    Between that and the shriek of “Grandpa, you can’t SPIT in the CEMETARY!” (“Why not? They’re dead! They don’t care!”) I think I’ve got too much of a traditionalist strek to go for anything but a cemetery burial.

  26. StillT +2

    That Stanley Cup piece was great! I have an abundance of hockey-crazed friends and family, and they have all very much enjoyed it, too. Thanks for sharing!

    Also, I’ve got three teams in the running this year that I wouldn’t mind winning, so let’s hope one of them does. Go Wings/Hawks/Sens!

  27. irishbreakfasttime +9

    I love that Toasties apparently have “decidedly non-default and fascinatingly gross plans for their future corpses” in common <3

  28. sigaloenta

    Yeah, good old Bradley's Arnold (and, speaking of racism as well, should we talk about the longer passages at the back that try to get you to translate passages about British military exploits in India into Caesarean prose?). I think the problem is partly that it is doubly exclusive of anyone who isn't a privileged male: first because of the source material, and then because of the imagined pedagogic context. Classical Latin can't imagine that women exist as agents, and BA can't imagine that women might learn Latin.

  29. sorrycassandra

    "should we talk about the longer passages at the back that try to get you to translate passages about British military exploits in India into Caesarean prose?"

    Yes. Yes, we should. At a certain point, colonialism does translate colonialism relatively well, but WHY DO WE STILL WANT TO, BRADLEY'S ARNOLD? Why are people still printing it as anything other than a curiosity?

    As far as the gender stuff goes, I'm irresistibly reminded of when an Oxbridge-type professor of mine told his Greek composition class in exasperation that Ladies' Greek was all they were fit for.

    Oh, classics. Stories like these remind me why I quit you.

  30. sigaloenta

    One of my professors had a similar story about taking Greek prose comp while studying in France: the only other woman in the class was Senegalese, and once she got an accent wrong while putting something on the board. And the professor said something like "Maybe that's how you write Greek in Africa, but _here_ we use accents.."

    I think everyone's just too lazy to write a new prose comp book.

  31. Sunshine +2

    I automatically read the comment “I AM HERE FOR THIS, COMPOST ME!” in the voice of Arnold Schwartzenegger near the end of Predator. (“I am here, kill me!”