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A Northwestern grad student's refusal to sing a song with words by Walt Whitman, who was a racist -- and why the student is wrong.

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That isn't to say that everyone must appreciate Whitman, or any larger than life figure from the past. It is to say that 25-year-olds like McNair, along with 33-year-olds like myself, would be wise to stay open to the possibility that inhabiting the art of someone whose aesthetics or personal moral beliefs we find abhorrent might nevertheless end in our gleaning something valuable from the experience. The opportunity to learn in that way won't survive, for most students, in a world where rejecting bigotry is thought to require rejecting everything produced by every dead bigot. Let's reject that standard, and the attendant fantasy that it's possible to shun the part of our cultural inheritance contributed by people who held ugly ideas. To really confront the horrific scale of bigotry, and American racism in particular, is to know that is impossible. Too much would have to be shunned. The timber of humanity is too crooked. We'd have nothing left.​
- read the full article History Is Beautiful Things Made by People With Ugly Ideas (from The Atlantic)​
 
sorry for the screen-stretcher, but it's such a nice image for a wonderful article

I raise my beers toward him and head back to the music, nodding at the man with the machine gun as I enter.

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Famo is the reigning musical genre in the southern African nation of Lesotho—that glorious mountain kingdom, all boulder and canyon, where the scorched-red earth of the foothills soon gives way to wind-blasted basalt and dizzying donkey trails along gorge edge—that tiny peaceful nation tucked unobtrusively within the poison bosom of South Africa.
...
Famo sounds like some African step-cousin of zydeco. The music is filled with plaintive, reedy accordion runs built over a foundation of stuttering bassline (guh-duggah-duhduh-guhduh) and thumping basso kickdrum, then filigreed with bright guitar flourishes and fluttering synthesizer trills. These last two instruments—the guitar and synthesizer—are unnecessarily rococo additions, however. Accordion, bass, and drums are all you need. Layered over this three-piece shuffle-stomp, the vocals take the form of: A) breathless Sesotho raps, the words all fused into one Germanically-constructed superstring, or B) melodic moans that follow along with the accordion line.
​
- read the full article Basotho Dance Party (from Roads and Kingdoms)​
 
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If you’re stuck inside on the Internet on a beautiful spring day, like us, please accept our condolences and this gallery of pictures of crystals induced to grow into beautiful, microscopic flowers. By manipulating the conditions where the crystals were forming, researchers were able to get the crystals to self-assemble as stems, leaves and buds, all on the tinest of scales.​
- read the full article Chemists Grew Microscopic Crystal Flowers on a Razor Blade (from Vice Motherboard)​
 
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has always had something of the rock star about him. Now his hotly anticipated musical debut has finally emerged blinking into the glare of international attention: the self-proclaimed heavy metal single Dumbass.

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The 55-year-old said his first foray into music was "a kind of self-therapy" helping him to deal with the impact of his 81-day detention in 2011. He was one of dozens seized in a crackdown on campaigners, lawyers and dissidents.​
- read the full article Dumbass: Ai Weiwei releases heavy metal music video (from The Guardian)​
 
This is the first thread I've subscribed to. I just spent the morning reading through articles and did not even need to get up for my first cup of coffee yet. ;)

Thank you, Laurel!
 
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At some point in the 90s, queercore band Pansy Division were interviewed by Kerrang! magazine. In that interview, they compared major pop punk bands like NOFX and Pennywise to 80s party metal scumbags Mötley Crüe – asserting that they appealed to roughly the same type of person (scumbag party bros), behaved in a similar way (were scumbags at parties), etc. They were lamenting punk's descent into apolitical bro-ishness via the Warped Tour and MTV, and while they were right that the focus had shifted a little from fighting the power to fighting back the puke, they could never have predicted Ronnie Radke. No one could, or would ever want to.​
 
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“I forget a lot of things, or so my wife tells me. But I don’t forget those things,” said Stultz, 91, from his home in New Carrollton, Md. “It was rough, in a way. I got through it. We did our job.”

Whether it's 20-something Afghanistan veterans scratching out the progression of 2011 firefights in the dirt or men more than four times their age recounting battles in the South Pacific from 1945, there are stark parallels in their tales — similar noises, scents and visions, kindred feelings and emotions. War has a way of getting tattooed onto the brains of troops, no matter the conflict or the era, scientists say.
​
 
Most of us love food—many of us love food a little too much. Hence the dangerous rates of morbid obesity in the United States and elsewhere, an epidemic known as globesity. Those extra pounds generally come from the overconsumption of soft drinks, snack foods, and fast foods. The massive popularity of these so-called junk foods (a phrase that was added to the language menu in 1973) is a testament to the food industry’s talent for creating feel-good food.

Our diets may be richer for it, but so too is the English language, which now boasts many tasty new words and phrases cooked up by food industry scientists and technologists.​
- read the full article The Jargon of Junk Food (from IEEE Spectrum)​
 
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Kaiser, a 2-year-old German Shepherd who has served valiantly as a member of the Plymouth (MA) Police Department's K-9 unit since he was five months old, had to be put down last week after a rapid decline in health due to a sudden onset of kidney disease.
...
Following the ceremony, Officer Lebretton had a few more words for his fallen friend:

RIP my boy. I could not have asked for a better partner or friend. May you rest easy and wait for me at that sacred bridge. I will be there my friend. I will be there. I will never forget you or our accomplishments. You made me a better person, a better handler, and a better cop. Till we meet again kai. I love you and will miss you daily.
...
​
 
blackleggings said:
This is the first thread I've subscribed to. I just spent the morning reading through articles and did not even need to get up for my first cup of coffee yet. ;)

Thank you, Laurel!
Click to expand...

To be fair, there is no Blackleggings thread yet. And then you wouldnt need to subscribe to it.
 
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When Islamist rebels set fire to two libraries in Timbuktu earlier this year, many feared the city's treasure trove of ancient manuscripts had been destroyed. But many of the texts had already been removed from the buildings and were at that very moment being smuggled out of the city, under the rebels' noses.​
- read the full article How Timbuktu's manuscripts were smuggled to safety (from the BBC)​
 
The 17 tribes of Nagaland are united, historically, by an enthusiasm for heads. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India—my reading matter on the two-hour drive from Dimapur to Kohima, in the state of Nagaland —contains dozens of references to head-taking but only one mention of the item that has brought me here: the Naga King Chili (a.k.a. Bhut Jolokia), often ranked the world’s hottest. “In the Chang village of Hakchang,” the anthropologist J. H. Hutton is quoted as saying in 1922, “...women whose blood relations on the male side have taken a head may cook the head, with chilies, to get the flesh off.” Hutton’s use of “cook” would seem to be a reference to Chang culinary practice. Only on rereading did I realize the Chang weren’t eating the chilies—or the flesh, for that matter—but using them to clean the skull.

Such is the perplexing contradiction of the genus Capsicum: condiment and industrial solvent, pleasure and pain. I’ve come to Nagaland to confront the conundrum on its home turf at the annual all-tribe get-together, the Hornbill Festival, which includes a Naga King Chili-Eating Competition.​
- read the full article The Gut-Wrenching Science Behind the World’s Hottest Peppers (from Runner's World)​
 
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On the western edge of Northern California, due north of where Route 1 ends in Humboldt County, the earth rises some 4,000 feet in less than three miles. Here, along 35 miles of steep roadways beneath the towering King Range Mountains, are coastal redwoods, rocky shorelines, and black sand beaches, as well as a menagerie of fauna: black bears, mink, deer, and river otter traverse the land while peregrine falcons and bald eagles patrol above. This essentially untouched strip of land has been dubbed "The Lost Coast" for good reason: It's the only significant stretch of California without a shoreline highway, and so has thus far escaped tourism's aggressive paws.​
- read the full article California's Lost Coast (from Men's Journal)​
 
Some people have neurological quirks that give them extraordinary perceptual powers. What can we learn from them?

Ordinary people with superior perceptual skills walk among us, absorbing information from the everyday world which is debarred to the rest of us. We can’t spot them, but they can pick up the faintest traces of smell or taste. They might see coloured auras that correspond to the expressed emotions of others. Some of them can even experience the pain or pleasure felt by other people. As one of these unlikely ‘superhumans’, Mary, a 53-year-old therapist, explains: ‘If I see pain inflicted, I feel pain myself. If I see gentleness in a touch of a hand, I get pleasure from the softness and love I can feel in that touch.’ In neurological circles, Mary is known as a mirror-touch synaesthete. She literally feels what other people feel.​
- read the full article Superhumans (from Aeon)​
 
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The cause of this recent spike in graffiti on public lands is unclear, but some park personnel say there is reason to believe that it coincides with the rise of social media. “In the old days,” said Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree, “people would paint something on a rock — it wouldn’t be till someone else came along that someone would report it and anybody would know about it.”

She added, “with social media people take pictures of what they’ve done or what they’ve seen. It’s much more instantaneous.” And that instant gratification could stimulate the impulse to deface.​
- read the full article As Vandals Deface U.S. Parks, Some Point to Online Show-Offs (from The New York Times)​
 
Army medic Nicholas Walker returned home from Iraq after 250 combat missions, traumatized and broken. His friends and family couldn’t help him. Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him.​
- read the full article How A War Hero Became A Serial Bank Robber (from Buzzfeed Buzzreads)​
 
It was a Saturday, market day in Port-au-Prince, and the chance to meet friends, gossip and shop had drawn large crowds to the Haitian capital. Sophisticated, French-educated members of the urban ruling class crammed into the market square beside illiterate farmers, a generation removed from slavery, who had walked in from the surrounding villages for a rare day out.

The whole of the country had assembled, and it was for this reason that Fabre Geffrard had chosen February 13, 1864, as the date for eight high-profile executions. Haiti’s reformist president wished to make an example of these four men and four women: because they had been found guilty of a hideous crime—abducting, murdering and cannibalizing a 12-year-old girl. And also because they represented everything Geffrard hoped to leave behind him as he molded his country into a modern nation: the backwardness of its hinterlands, its African past and, above all, its folk religion.​
- read the full article The Trial That Gave Vodou A Bad Name (from Smithsonian Magazine)​
 


Anybody who publicizes a nice place is promoting its destruction. For that reason, I no longer tell anyone about nice places.




Laurel said:
618_348_californias-lost-coast.jpg


On the western edge of Northern California, due north of where Route 1 ends in Humboldt County, the earth rises some 4,000 feet in less than three miles. Here, along 35 miles of steep roadways beneath the towering King Range Mountains, are coastal redwoods, rocky shorelines, and black sand beaches, as well as a menagerie of fauna: black bears, mink, deer, and river otter traverse the land while peregrine falcons and bald eagles patrol above. This essentially untouched strip of land has been dubbed "The Lost Coast" for good reason: It's the only significant stretch of California without a shoreline highway, and so has thus far escaped tourism's aggressive paws.​
- read the full article California's Lost Coast (from Men's Journal)​
Click to expand...

Laurel said:
PARKS-articleLarge-v2.jpg


The cause of this recent spike in graffiti on public lands is unclear, but some park personnel say there is reason to believe that it coincides with the rise of social media. “In the old days,” said Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree, “people would paint something on a rock — it wouldn’t be till someone else came along that someone would report it and anybody would know about it.”

She added, “with social media people take pictures of what they’ve done or what they’ve seen. It’s much more instantaneous.” And that instant gratification could stimulate the impulse to deface.​
- read the full article As Vandals Deface U.S. Parks, Some Point to Online Show-Offs (from The New York Times)​
Click to expand...
 
09well-articleInline.jpg


“For hundreds of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular beverages on earth… Studies have linked moderate coffee drinking — the equivalent of three or four 5-ounce cups of coffee a day or a single venti-size Starbucks — with more specific advantages: a reduction in the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the most common skin cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer recurrence.”​
- read the full article This Is Your Brain on Coffee (from The New York Times Magazine)​
 
oldie but goodie

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Why would the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey hire a former top CIA honcho to torment a hapless freelance writer for eight years?​
- read the full article The Greatest Vendetta on Earth (from Salon)​
 
Mix 10 cups of Yellow Dent #2 corn extract with one drop sulfuric acid, one teaspoon Alpha-Amylase, one teaspoon Glucose-Amylase, and one teaspoon Xylose, strain through a cheesecloth, and heat. Then, once the slurry has reached 140 degrees, add Glucose Isomerase, bring to a boil, let cool, and enjoy!

Sound appetizing? That's the recipe for small-batch, artisanal High-Fructose Corn Syrup that artist and designer Maya Weinstein, 32, came up with after months of research, recipe testing, and ingredient sourcing for her DIY HFCS kit, her thesis project for her M.F.A. in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design.

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- read the full article DIY High-Fructose Corn Syrup by Artist Maya Weinstein (from Bon Appetit)​
 
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