Link Salad, the End(s) of the Earth Edition
-- The genius of The Great British Bake Off - Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, Oct. 6, 2015
"Orwell and Major were both asserting the strength of a national culture at times when Britishness - for both men basically Englishness - was felt to be under threat from outside dangers (war, integration into Europe). The Bake Off tent operates similarly. There it sits, in inviolable splendour, a blessed plot, an island amid a sea of green. Into this demi-paradise the dangerous clamour of less happy lands cannot intrude. The tent stands in for a utopian little Britain in which all - the firefighter, the student, the grandmother, the doctor, the nurse, the prison governor, the full-time mother, the musician - exist in harmony. This little world is rather middle-class (some people in the real world are too posh to bake, some too impoverished, and they are not in the tent). It is a world in which any number of distinctions have been erased, and many pressing and anxious-making things are left outside. In the real world, Tamal may tweet about the iniquities of the government’s contracts for junior doctors, but this side of him is never expressed in the tent, just as it is unthinkable that Paul-the-prison-governor might so much as mention the criminal justice system. It is, of course, a wish-fulfillment, this equalising Albion of common purpose, meritocratic effort and vanished difference. But how delightful and seductive it is, this little world, where all that matters is the rise of your sponge."
-- The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here - Eric Holthaus, Rolling Stone, Aug. 5, 2015
"Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide."
-- The Infinitely Boring No Man's Sky - Tim Martin, The Economist, Aug. 19, 2016
"The more I played “No Man’s Sky”, the more these weird and niche qualities became apparent. The first of them was a peculiar sublimity, as I wandered alien landscapes in a haze of psychedelic colours and swooshy, trance-like music. The second, after 20 or 30 planets, was a creeping feeling of boredom with the vistas and creatures: another goat-shaped being, another grey chain of islands. I became frustrated that there were so few ways I could engage with the glorious worlds. I reflected on the comment that Ricky Gervais attributed to his mother: “Why do you want to go to Paris? There are bits of Reading you’ve never seen.” You could say the same of Zelovorcin Arcorr."
-- How a Self-Published Writer of Gay Erotica Beat Sci-Fi's Sad Puppies at Their Own Game - M. Sophia Newman, Literary Hub, Aug. 26, 2016
"In 1806, when the Grimm Brothers were writing “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” the Western worldview often interpreted uncommon or uncontrollable occurrences as magical, supernatural, or heaven-sent. That same pre-modern era involved a rather primitive grasp of health and psychology in general and abnormal psychology in specific. In Germany as the Grimm Brothers knew it, the literary concept of an elf-a human-like but not-quite-human being whose perspectives and behaviors often seem otherworldly, unpredictable, or strange-might have effectively been a description of people we’d now call mentally, intellectually, or neurologically disabled."
-- Is China’s gaokao the world’s toughest school exam? - Alec Ash, The Guardian, Oct. 12, 2016
"For two days in early June every year, China comes to a standstill as high school students who are about to graduate take their college entrance exams. Literally the “higher examination”, the gaokao is a national event on a par with a public holiday, but much less fun. Construction work is halted near examination halls, so as not to disturb the students, and traffic is diverted. Ambulances are on call outside in case of nervous collapses, and police cars patrol to keep the streets quiet. Radio talkshow hosts discuss the format and questions in painstaking detail, and when the results come out, the top scorers are feted nationally. A high or low mark determines life opportunities and earning potential. That score is the most important number of any Chinese child’s life, the culmination of years of schooling, memorisation and constant stress."
"Orwell and Major were both asserting the strength of a national culture at times when Britishness - for both men basically Englishness - was felt to be under threat from outside dangers (war, integration into Europe). The Bake Off tent operates similarly. There it sits, in inviolable splendour, a blessed plot, an island amid a sea of green. Into this demi-paradise the dangerous clamour of less happy lands cannot intrude. The tent stands in for a utopian little Britain in which all - the firefighter, the student, the grandmother, the doctor, the nurse, the prison governor, the full-time mother, the musician - exist in harmony. This little world is rather middle-class (some people in the real world are too posh to bake, some too impoverished, and they are not in the tent). It is a world in which any number of distinctions have been erased, and many pressing and anxious-making things are left outside. In the real world, Tamal may tweet about the iniquities of the government’s contracts for junior doctors, but this side of him is never expressed in the tent, just as it is unthinkable that Paul-the-prison-governor might so much as mention the criminal justice system. It is, of course, a wish-fulfillment, this equalising Albion of common purpose, meritocratic effort and vanished difference. But how delightful and seductive it is, this little world, where all that matters is the rise of your sponge."
-- The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here - Eric Holthaus, Rolling Stone, Aug. 5, 2015
"Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide."
-- The Infinitely Boring No Man's Sky - Tim Martin, The Economist, Aug. 19, 2016
"The more I played “No Man’s Sky”, the more these weird and niche qualities became apparent. The first of them was a peculiar sublimity, as I wandered alien landscapes in a haze of psychedelic colours and swooshy, trance-like music. The second, after 20 or 30 planets, was a creeping feeling of boredom with the vistas and creatures: another goat-shaped being, another grey chain of islands. I became frustrated that there were so few ways I could engage with the glorious worlds. I reflected on the comment that Ricky Gervais attributed to his mother: “Why do you want to go to Paris? There are bits of Reading you’ve never seen.” You could say the same of Zelovorcin Arcorr."
-- How a Self-Published Writer of Gay Erotica Beat Sci-Fi's Sad Puppies at Their Own Game - M. Sophia Newman, Literary Hub, Aug. 26, 2016
"In 1806, when the Grimm Brothers were writing “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” the Western worldview often interpreted uncommon or uncontrollable occurrences as magical, supernatural, or heaven-sent. That same pre-modern era involved a rather primitive grasp of health and psychology in general and abnormal psychology in specific. In Germany as the Grimm Brothers knew it, the literary concept of an elf-a human-like but not-quite-human being whose perspectives and behaviors often seem otherworldly, unpredictable, or strange-might have effectively been a description of people we’d now call mentally, intellectually, or neurologically disabled."
-- Is China’s gaokao the world’s toughest school exam? - Alec Ash, The Guardian, Oct. 12, 2016
"For two days in early June every year, China comes to a standstill as high school students who are about to graduate take their college entrance exams. Literally the “higher examination”, the gaokao is a national event on a par with a public holiday, but much less fun. Construction work is halted near examination halls, so as not to disturb the students, and traffic is diverted. Ambulances are on call outside in case of nervous collapses, and police cars patrol to keep the streets quiet. Radio talkshow hosts discuss the format and questions in painstaking detail, and when the results come out, the top scorers are feted nationally. A high or low mark determines life opportunities and earning potential. That score is the most important number of any Chinese child’s life, the culmination of years of schooling, memorisation and constant stress."