Link Salad, the Changing Tides Edition
-- ‘Fitbit for your period’: the rise of fertility tracking - Moira Weigel, The Guardian, Mar. 23, 2016
"Many societies have a deeply ingrained belief that female bodies are mysterious and exist primarily to produce children. Historically, medical science has downplayed the suffering of women, viewing it as either an unfortunate fact of life or less severe than women say. The taboo that still surrounds periods exacerbates the situation. Women often do not report problems they experience; when they do, doctors often dismiss them. As a result, countless women suffer with undiagnosed conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome for decades."
-- The Mysterious Vision of Jeff Nichols, Hollywood’s Next Blockbuster Auteur - Amy Wallace, Wired, Mar. 2016
"By the time you read this, Midnight Special will have had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, headed toward a March 18 release in New York and LA and then a six-week rollout in theaters nationwide. You will likely have seen the movie’s evocative poster, which features a boy with glowing eyes, his head poking out E.T.-style from under a blanket, hands aiming a flashlight at a treasured Superman comic (“He’s not like us,” the poster warns). “Listen, I made the film we all want to see,” Nichols said. “I made the film we all sit around saying, ‘God, I wish I could have a film experience like watching Close Encounters again.’” He laughed, knowing full well that he hadn’t made Close Encounters. The thing Midnight Special doesn’t have that Spielberg’s films do is naked sentiment. “I do awe, but I don’t do wonderment.” But the difference between awe and wonderment might also be the difference, he admitted, between a movie that grosses $20 million and one that grosses $1 billion."
-- Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War - Brendan I. Koerner, Wired, Apr. 2016
"Today the Islamic State is as much a media conglomerate as a fighting force. According to Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, an October 2015 report by the Quilliam Foundation, the organization releases, on average, 38 new items per day-20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in languages ranging from Russian to Bengali. The group’s closest peers are not just other terrorist organizations, then, but also the Western brands, marketing firms, and publishing outfits-from PepsiCo to BuzzFeed-who ply the Internet with memes and messages in the hopes of connecting with customers. And like those ventures, the Islamic State hews to a few tried-and-true techniques for boosting user engagement."
-- After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting: Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916 - Colm Tóibin, London Review of Books, Mar. 31, 2016
"Joyce attended a few of the Irish language classes given by Pearse at University College Dublin in the spring of 1899, though he soon gave them up because he found Pearse a bore and objected to his efforts to denigrate the English language. He decided to study Norwegian instead in order to read Ibsen in the original. Since the university was small, and they belonged to some of the same student organisations, and since they both used the reading room of the National Library, it’s likely that they would have seen a great deal of each other in the years around the turn of the century. The clash between the two over ideas of language and cultural identity would make its way into the encounter between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages’, she replies: ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish?’ To which Gabriel replies: ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a figure whose ideology is close to that of Pearse roundly denounces Stephen Daedalus when he delivers a paper on ‘Drama and Life’ to the college Literary and Historical Society: ‘Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitanism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country - you must have a nation before you could have art.’"
"Many societies have a deeply ingrained belief that female bodies are mysterious and exist primarily to produce children. Historically, medical science has downplayed the suffering of women, viewing it as either an unfortunate fact of life or less severe than women say. The taboo that still surrounds periods exacerbates the situation. Women often do not report problems they experience; when they do, doctors often dismiss them. As a result, countless women suffer with undiagnosed conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome for decades."
-- The Mysterious Vision of Jeff Nichols, Hollywood’s Next Blockbuster Auteur - Amy Wallace, Wired, Mar. 2016
"By the time you read this, Midnight Special will have had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, headed toward a March 18 release in New York and LA and then a six-week rollout in theaters nationwide. You will likely have seen the movie’s evocative poster, which features a boy with glowing eyes, his head poking out E.T.-style from under a blanket, hands aiming a flashlight at a treasured Superman comic (“He’s not like us,” the poster warns). “Listen, I made the film we all want to see,” Nichols said. “I made the film we all sit around saying, ‘God, I wish I could have a film experience like watching Close Encounters again.’” He laughed, knowing full well that he hadn’t made Close Encounters. The thing Midnight Special doesn’t have that Spielberg’s films do is naked sentiment. “I do awe, but I don’t do wonderment.” But the difference between awe and wonderment might also be the difference, he admitted, between a movie that grosses $20 million and one that grosses $1 billion."
-- Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War - Brendan I. Koerner, Wired, Apr. 2016
"Today the Islamic State is as much a media conglomerate as a fighting force. According to Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, an October 2015 report by the Quilliam Foundation, the organization releases, on average, 38 new items per day-20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in languages ranging from Russian to Bengali. The group’s closest peers are not just other terrorist organizations, then, but also the Western brands, marketing firms, and publishing outfits-from PepsiCo to BuzzFeed-who ply the Internet with memes and messages in the hopes of connecting with customers. And like those ventures, the Islamic State hews to a few tried-and-true techniques for boosting user engagement."
-- After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting: Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916 - Colm Tóibin, London Review of Books, Mar. 31, 2016
"Joyce attended a few of the Irish language classes given by Pearse at University College Dublin in the spring of 1899, though he soon gave them up because he found Pearse a bore and objected to his efforts to denigrate the English language. He decided to study Norwegian instead in order to read Ibsen in the original. Since the university was small, and they belonged to some of the same student organisations, and since they both used the reading room of the National Library, it’s likely that they would have seen a great deal of each other in the years around the turn of the century. The clash between the two over ideas of language and cultural identity would make its way into the encounter between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages’, she replies: ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish?’ To which Gabriel replies: ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a figure whose ideology is close to that of Pearse roundly denounces Stephen Daedalus when he delivers a paper on ‘Drama and Life’ to the college Literary and Historical Society: ‘Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitanism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country - you must have a nation before you could have art.’"