Years before the complaints from Flint's citizenry about their water provoked action from the state, Governor Rick Snyder spent $440,000 to supply better water to the GM factory, where the new water supply was corroding the car parts on the assembly line.
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Sunday 31 January 2016
Ten hard truths about the Flint water atrocity
Whimsical treasure hunt turns into a grim search-and-rescue
When Forrest Fenn, a retired antiquities dealer, hid $2m worth of gold, jewels and artifacts in the Rockies and teased the location of the treasure with cryptic clues in his self-published memoir The Thrill of the Chase, he'd hoped to inspire readers "to get the kids off the couch and away from the game machine."
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FBI thought Pete Seeger was a commie
Legendary folk singer, activist and countercultural icon Pete Seeger died in 2014 at the age of 94, but we're only now learning that the FBI thought he was a communist as a young man because of the artist's "subversive" connections.
In a security investigation triggered by a wartime letter he wrote denouncing a proposal to deport all Japanese-Americans, the Army intercepted Seeger's mail to his fiancee, scoured his school records, talked to his father, interviewed an ex-landlord and questioned his pal Woody Guthrie, according to FBI files obtained by The Associated Press.
Investigators concluded that Seeger's association with known communists and his Japanese-American fiancee pointed to a risk of divided loyalty.
Seeger's "Communistic sympathies, his unsatisfactory relations with landlords and his numerous Communist and otherwise undesirable friends, make him unfit for a position of trust or responsibility," according to a military intelligence report.
Famously, Seeger was later blacklisted during the Red Scare as a member of The Weavers, his band…
Seeger and Lee Hays were identified as Communist Party members by FBI informant Harvey Matusow (who later recanted) and ended up being called up to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. Hays took the Fifth Amendment. Seeger refused to answer, however, claiming First Amendment grounds, the first to do so after the conviction of the Hollywood Ten in 1950. Seeger was found guilty of contempt and placed under restrictions by the court pending appeal, but in 1961 his conviction was overturned on technical grounds. Because Seeger was among those listed in the entertainment industry blacklist publication, Red Channels, all of the Weavers were placed under FBI surveillance and not allowed to perform on television or radio during the McCarthy era. Decca Records terminated their recording contract and deleted their records from its catalog in 1953. Their recordings were denied airplay, which curtailed their income from royalties. Right-wing and anti-Communist groups protested at their performances and harassed promoters. As a result, the group's economic viability diminished rapidly and in 1952 it disbanded. After this, Pete Seeger continued his solo career, although as with all of them, he continued to suffer from the effects of blacklisting.
Then the 1960s happened. And then, everything else. May you build a ladder to the stars; may you stay forever young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezyd40kJFq0
Watch: AMAZING slam poem about policing women's speech habits
Melissa Lozada-Oliva's spoken word piece "Like Totally Whatever," performed at the National Poetry Slam 2015, in Oakland, CA. Kick ass. (via Pro Choice America)
Friday 29 January 2016
Classic internet weirdness: “What What (In The Butt),” Samwell (2007)
With all the talk of Kanye West, Amber Rose, butt play alleged and butt play denied, it's a good time to revisit one of the great internet memes of yore. Internet sensation Samwell's “What What (In The Butt),” with a music video produced by Brownmark Films. Famously parodied in a South Park episode.
Breastfeeding stickers turn mom's nursing breast into “fruit”
Ad agency Boone Oakley created a provocative campaign in posters and stickers for hospitals to promote breastfeeding to first-time moms.
Hackers release data from Fraternal Order of Police, largest U.S. police union
Sensitive electronic files from America’s biggest police union were posted online this week after a hacker breached the Fraternal Order of Police website. The ill-gotten dump includes officers' names and addresses, message board posts bashing Barack Obama, and details of eyebrow-raising contracts made between the union and city authorities.
'The Art of a Political Revolution' for Bernie Sanders
In Los Angeles and starting tonight, you can check out an #ArtistsForBernieSanders show in support of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. My beautiful friend Souris Hong is one of the curators/organizers/promoters, and you should really read her personal story of involvement. “I live in a country where I can come from a refugee camp and end up on the campaign trail,” she writes.
Included in the exhibition are artists and performers we've blogged about here at Boing Boing over the years--Kozyndan, Ron English, and Shepard Fairey among them. I can't wait to get down there in person.
Young girls react to seeing the new 2016 Barbie dolls for the first time
https://youtu.be/g02M5s5QwuQ
“We asked young girls what they think about traditional Barbie dolls, and then we showed them the new Barbies to see how they'd react to her new shapes and sizes. Here's what they had to say.”
Dinomania: The Lost Art of Winsor McCay, The Secret Origins of King Kong, and the Urge to Destroy New York
See sample pages of Dinomania at Wink.
Cartoonist Winsor McCay was best known as the creator of the hallucinatory Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend newspaper comic strips. Fewer people know that he was also the creator of the first animated dinosaur to appear in the movies (Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914). But hardly anyone knows that when McCay died in 1934, he was at work on a new comic strip called Dino, about a dinosaur that awakens after sleeping for 65-million years and befriends a young girl and her brother in New York City.
One person who knows is McCay historian Ulrich Merkl, who has put together a massive, astounding book about McCay and his influence in depictions of rampaging dinosaurs, robots, apes, and monsters in popular culture. Every page is loaded with eye-popping art from the early 20th century, much of it never reprinted before now. People of that era were just as hungry for city-destroying cinematic behemoths as we are today, and Merkl convincingly makes the case that it was McCay who whetted our appetite for them. If you like illustrations from the 1900s, you will go ape over Dinomania.
Dinomania: The Lost Art of Winsor McCay, The Secret Origins of King Kong, and the Urge to Destroy New York
by Ulrich Merkl
Fantagraphics
2015, 304 pages, 11.9 x 15.9 x 1.2 inches
$54 Buy one on Amazon
Donald Trump with a cockney accent
Peter Serafinowicz says, "I gave Mr Trump a tough guy cockney accent. No words were changed."
Did you know the Kray Twins were really the Kray Triplets?
Wisdom teeth removal is rarely necessary
People are more likely to experience complications caused by having their wisdom teeth pulled than they are from keeping them in their head, according to several studies cited in this Fusion article by Rob Wile.
Indeed, Britain’s National Health Service now advises the following on wisdom teeth removal:
Your wisdom teeth don’t usually need to be removed if they’re impacted but aren’t causing any problems. This is because there’s no proven benefit of doing this and it carries the risk of complications.
Even if they’re impacted!
Over 2000 pages, the Akira series is a sci-fi epic
See sample pages of Akira at Wink.
At the far too early age of seven I watched Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Akira. In a time before the internet, my parents had made the mistake of thinking that since it was a cartoon it couldn’t be that bad. If you’ve seen the movie you know just how wrong my parents were. If you haven’t, what followed was two hours of high-octane animated violence, drugs, and mind-bending psychokinesis. Being too young to really appreciate what many critics believe to be one of the greatest animated movies of all time, which helped bring Japanese anime into American culture, I retreated to the warm comfort of Disney. Thankfully as I got older I rediscovered this great movie, and this even better comic series.
This isn’t me just saying “Well, I read the book which is far better than the movie.” (Imagine me saying that with a snooty condescending accent). The movie barely skims the surface of the comics. It would be like if HBO took all the Game of Thrones books and turned them into a single two-hour special.
Spanning over 2000 pages the Akira series is a sci-fi epic. The story follows a teenage delinquent as he unknowingly gets caught up in psychic warfare that leads to an all-out revolution. Like the amphetamine that the main characters eat like candy, you’ll get addicted to this book – also, you might lose your teeth, but that could be unrelated.
Dark Horse did an exquisite job reprinting the comics into six volumes (although I did notice a typo in Volume 2 on page 228, so someone might want to contact Dark Horse about that). Each book starts with some beautifully colored pages, and then transitions into amazingly detailed black and white illustrations. If you liked the movie, like comics, or just like impractical yet totally cool future-bikes, read Akira.
Bonus: If you like the Akira series check out Domu: A Child’s Dream. It’s much shorter but still very enjoyable. It feels very much like a precursor, a Hobbit to Lord of the Rings (Okay, I think I just reached my nerd-reference quota for this review).
– JP LeRoux
Akira Vol. 6
by Katsuhiro Otomo (author) and Satoshi Kon (illustrator)
Dark Horse Manga
2002, 440 pages, 7.4 x 9.9 x 1.5 inches (softback)
$7 Buy a copy on Amazon
$5 Akira Vol. 5
$5 Akira Vol. 4
$14 Akira Vol. 3
$2 Akira Vol. 2
$17 Akira Vol. 1
Guy builds a gadget to blast loud music back at neighbors
YouTuber Matthew Br made a gadget that senses when the rude people in the apartment next to him play loud music and blasts especially annoying music back at them through the wall. The device gives the neighbors a short grace period that stops it from triggering if the neighbors sneeze or drop something heavy, but if the loud music goes on too long, the device kicks into action and punishes them with a high decibel onslaught.
[via]
NASA's Mars Rover sends back a sandy selfie
The latest self-portrait from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the car-size mobile laboratory beside a dark dune where it has been scooping and sieving samples of sand.
Watch a clay vase take shape from the potter's wheel's perspective
TORTUS: SPIN from Tortus Copenhagen on Vimeo.
It looks like the room and everything in it is spinning around a fixed potter's wheel.
[via]
Read: The End of Big Data: space weapons, UN inspectors and personal data
James "New Aesthetic" Bridle writes, "I wrote an SF short story about satellites, space weapons, UN inspectors, and the end of personal data! I hope you like it."
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How to remove all tourists from your travel shots
On Reddit, OmerRAnderson explains how to remove people from a photo. The idea is to put a camera on tripod and take several pictures every ten seconds or so over the course of a few minutes or more. Then open Photoshop and go to File > Scripts > Statistics, and select "median." This operation will remove the things that don't appear in every photo, leaving only the things that didn't move.
The rise and fall of a Fox News fraud
Fox News invited bullshitting fraudster Wayne Simmons to appear on its "news" programs over 100 times posing as a CIA operative. Based on his hawkish proclamations, the Pentagon hired Simmons as a shill analyst to propagandize for them. Now that Simmons has been exposed, arrested, and charged with with multiple counts of fraud, he will never appear on Fox News again, but the lies he told on the network will forever be regarded as gospel truth by fear-addicted Fox TV viewers.
From Rolling Stone:
Simmons claimed to have spent 27 years with the CIA, but Paul Nathanson, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said in a court filing that Simmons "never had any association whatsoever with the CIA." (The CIA declined to comment – as a rule, it never confirms or denies agents – but said it is "working closely with the Justice Department on this matter.") Instead, prosecutors say Simmons spent those 27 years doing just about everything else: He ran a limousine service, a gambling operation and an AIDS-testing clinic; worked for a hot-tub business, a carpeting company and a nightclub; and briefly played defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Along the way, he accrued criminal convictions, including multiple DUIs, plus charges for weapons possession and assault, and an arrest for attacking a cabdriver in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. "Fuck you, you can't do shit to me – do you know who I am?" Simmons told a cop, according to a police report, before insisting that he was CIA, and that the cabbie, who was Pakistani, had a bomb. A police dog found no explosives, and a CIA representative told the cops to take whatever actions they deemed necessary.
FBI releases video of militiaman shooting
The FBI has released footage that shows militiaman LaVoy Finicum's death at the hands of law enforcement officers manning a roadblock.
In the video, Finicum's vehicle tries to evade the block only to plunge into a roadside snowbank after narrowly missing one of the officers manning it. He jumps out the car with his hands up, but keeps moving and reaches into his pocket. Someone shoots him and he falls to the snow.
The 8-minute version is above. The confrontation begins at about 5:30m. They also published a longer tape of the event. The moment when Finicum is shot is embedded below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvzzyNFFIWc&feature=youtu.be
One one hand, his movements seem more confused than aggressive. On the other hand, he's an armed man, running around and reaching for his pockets after almost mowing a guy down at a roadblock. He did not have his hands in the air when he was shot (as at least one witness claimed) but he didn't have his piece out, either.
What are the key facts, legally speaking?
Highball tumblers with tiny Mt Fujis in their base
They're handmade and the tiny mountains change color based on the color of the drink you serve in them, come in a gorgeous gift box, but they're also a whopping $88 each.
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Hunger is a mood: the psychology of weight loss and self-control
Michael Graziano, a psychologist, lost 50 lbs in 8 months by experimenting on himself to see how different dietary choices affected his feelings of hunger, reasoning that the major predictor of weight control isn't calories consumed versus calories burned -- but the extent to which your unconscious mind exerts pressure on you to eat more and exercise less.
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Watch: Florida climate survivors travel to New Hampshire to confront Marco Rubio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qChpapWBljE
Brant from Climate Truth writes, "A fishing boat captain, a restaurateur, and a Cuban refugee being displaced by rising seas in South Florida are setting off for New Hampshire next week to harangue Rubio for being shitty on climate change."
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Elizabeth Warren's new 1%: the percentage of fraudulent profits companies pay in fines
In Rigged Justice: 2016
How Weak Enforcement Lets
Corporate Offenders Off Easy, a 12-page booklet, Senator Elizabeth Warren documents corporations that were caught undertaking grossly fraudulent, highly profitable actions, and were made to pay a trivial fraction of those profits in fines -- fines become a part of the cost of doing business, not a deterrent to criminal behavior.
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The science of skipping stones
The tl;dr: hit the water at a 20% angle. But the answer isn't as interesting as the question…
Bocquet’s quest to understand how this happens — how a solid object can skim along water without immediately sinking — began more than a decade ago, while he was skipping stones on the Tarn River in southern France with his young son. ‘‘He turns to me,’’ Bocquet says, ‘‘and asks, ‘Why does the stone bounce on the water?’ ’’ To answer that question satisfactorily, Bocquet and his colleagues built a mechanical stone skipper and analyzed the angle of each toss using high-speed video. They also created a set of mathematical equations to predict the number of skips.
Fleen's stark generative art would make wonderful wallpaper
I can't quite explain why I love John Greene / Fleen's generative computer art so much. It's cold and mechanical, yet seems to encode a spookily human sense of culture (see also: the Kingdom of Aurillia)
Be sure to catch the full set of this particular form. [via]
EA reveals the Xbox One sales total that Microsoft prefers not to
Microsoft long ago stopped saying how many XBox Ones it had sold, but figures released by Electronic Arts expose numbers far short of rival Sony's Playstation 4.
On a financial call with reporters, CEO Blake Jorgensen said the combined install base of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was about 55 million units. With Sony boasting of 36 million PS4s shifted, that makes for 19 million Xbox Ones.
The numbers tally with rumors, but both machines are doing well given that we're still only 2 years into the current generation of hardware. The big loser this time around is Nintendo, thought to have sold only about 11m Wii Us.
U.S. Highway Administration orders return to vintage typeface
In 2004, a more legible typeface, Clearview, was approved to improve America's road signs. But after a decade of use, U.S. Federal Highway Administration has decided to return to the old typeface, publicly available as Highway Gothic.
The reasoning isn't clear—they claim that it's actually more legible than Clearview, but are yet to explain why or offer research to back up the decision. Highway Gothic, designed in the 1940s, has peculiarities held to compromise its legibility. Clearview's letter forms were designed to be visible at greater distances and under less favorable lighting and weather conditions.
“Helen Keller can tell you from the grave that Clearview looks better,” (designer) Meeker says. At the time, the FHWA agreed. In its 2004 approval memo, the agency noted that Clearview boosted highway-sign legibility for drivers traveling at 45 miles per hour by 80 feet of reading distance—or 1.2 seconds of bonus reading time… From the start, Clearview was greeted as a civic, social, and design success. Around 30 states have adopted the font, making it arguably the dominant design paradigm on U.S. roads. Print magazine called it one of the 10 typefaces of the decade in 2010. The Clearview typeface family was the first digital font ever acquired by the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. People behind the font spoke about it with swagger.
One possibility is that Clearview must be licensed on a per-user basis, making it too expensive. Also mentioned is its resemblance to other official signage typefaces such as Transport. It may, therefore, be insufficiently exceptional for official U.S. tastes.
How about Papyrus, guys?
Get this Ultra-Stealth Nano Drone for 50% off in the Boing Boing Store
You throw this drone up into the air, and it’s gone. OK, not really, but it really might look that way. It’s sky blue and will indeed appear to disappear. That’s what makes it awesome. This sunny-day stealth is going for 50% off right now and if you’re going to get a drone, which you totally should because they’re awesome, make it this tiny blue and white beast. Is that a cloud? Or is that the awesome, picture-taking flying machine that you can control with your hands? Only you can say.
Unlike other drones, this nano actually has eight frequency points which means it really knows boundaries. It won’t crash or bump into anything around it while in the air, even when it’s flying with other drones in a pack. It has 6-axis gyro technology and calibration for maximum stability and maneuverability. It can even do 360 degree flips like a boss. The LED lights indicate which channel it’s on and because of its super sensitive design it can cut tight corners and navigate crazy narrow spaces. It’s quick and easy to charge up and once the battery is locked and loaded, you’ve got nearly ten minutes of fly time.
[embed]https://youtu.be/SALW315JrtI[/embed]
Coolest of all? This drone’s a team player and doesn’t like to fly solo. It’s actually designed to fly in a pack of other drones so call up your friends and throw up a whole flock of flying cameras. It’s 50% off right now so you could even stock up yourself. Check out the link below for even more details, plus a picture of this little high tech flyer in action.
Thursday 28 January 2016
Slipstick funnies: in case of power-outage...
Rodney sez, "Wayne Pollock, a Computer Science instructor at Hillsborough Community College (FL), has this on his office wall. He says, 'I had that idea years ago, and my dad made the darn thing one year as a gift.'"
Wednesday 27 January 2016
The Only Child – Searching for a companion while lost in fantasy
See sample pages of The Only Child at Wink.
The Only Child portrays a lonely tot who becomes lost in a winter landscape. While her parents scour the city and surrounding countryside, the child scampers in snow, clouds, and seas with a mystical buck. This only child left the safety of home to visit Grandma; thankfully, the deer protects the child while guiding their journey. The discoveries made by the pair show how important companions are in life.
The book is illustrated in soft charcoal and chalk pastels, some images filling small boxes, others covering a full page. By using charcoal and pastel, images feel gentle and dreamlike, especially in the fantasy scenes. In contrast, artist Guojing’s urban settings have sharper lines and a gritty texture. In each image, the reader feels the child’s loneliness through the absence of color, the blank snow surrounding the child’s adventure, and the utterly silent text. I felt truly lonely reading the book, scanning the tot’s face and accompanying landscape. I saw that the new companions – the buck, a polar bear cub, and a blue whale – must be temporary, for they do not exist in the ordinary world of adults. I heard the longings for friends and family, as each page tugged me toward the next in hopes of being embraced by Grandma and Mom and Dad.
The Only Child whispers of loneliness, dreams, friendship, family, and adventure. The book reverberates with the timeless yearnings we all have, drawing the reader into the story with its familiar emotions and contrasting world of fantasy. Both young and old alike will enjoy the tale, especially when shared with a much-loved companion.
– Lora Poser-Brown
The Only Child
by Guojing
Schwartz & Wade
2015, 112 pages, 8.4 x 11.5 x 0.6 inches
$11 Buy a copy on Amazon
Tuesday 26 January 2016
Unmaking a home: A story of life, death, Christmas and trash bags
[I'm a huge fan of Bill Barol's podcast, HOME: Stories From L.A. It's the first podcast Bill has produced, and he knocked it right out of the park. HOME is one of the best narrative podcasts I've ever listened to. If you haven't listened to the six episodes from the first season yet, you are in for a treat. I'm very excited that for its second season, HOME has found a home in the Boing Boing podcast network. Thanks for sharing your work with Boing Boing's audience, Bill! – Mark]
HOME: Stories From L.A. asks the questions: What do we mean when we talk about home? And what does it mean to be at home on the edge of the American continent? In Season 1 we looked at the midcentury house on a hill where a forgotten genius from Hollywood's Golden Age lived out his last years; the empty spot on a Hawthorne street where Brian Wilson first dreamed of the harmonies that would make The Beach Boys great; the chicken magnate who's trying to keep a desert town on the old Route 66 from vanishing; the wandering that led an ex-Buddhist monk to the tech sector of Venice Beach; what it means, and what it meant, to grow up in the San Fernando Valley; and the fight to keep a venerable old Hollywood apartment building weird.
This week, to kick off Season 2:
When an elderly parent dies after a long life of lovingly acquiring things, she leaves behind more than memories for her kids. She leaves something much more tangible: The things. So many, many things. Is it things that make a home?
HOME: Stories From L.A. is proud to join the Boing Boing Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe.
Home, a dystopian adventure by Tom Abrahams
Tom Abrahams' Home introduces us to a prepper nightmare. His vision of life in a post-plague America is worse than I'd imagined.
Former military expert and super prepper Battle has spent the last few years doing nothing but readying his 50 acres, wife and son for the impending doom of society. He has years of supplies, all the guns and ammo you could want, a special mineral rights deal with someone to supply never ending power to his fortress, he thought of every contingency! Sadly, his wife lets a plague ridden neighbor in for some tea.
Battle has to cope with this odd failure, while pretty much kicking the shit out of everything that gets even remotely intrudes on his home. While completely out of his control, Battle is fueled by this failure and sets out to save a stranger's son from an unknown fate. A lot of bullets fly, people get killed.
The action, motivations and organization of post-plague, Cartel run America felt right to me. Bad guys are not so cut and dry bad, unless they are at the very top, and the evolution of post-collapse society painted a scarily realistic picture. I'm looking forward to seeing where Abrahams takes this story next, and if the fallible prepper, Mr. Battle grows.
Home: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 1) via Amazon
3M Gel Wrist Rest $11
The bones in the heel of my hand start aching after a few minutes if I don't have support under them. Ive tried several different pads, and the 3M Gel Wrist Rest is my favorite. It has just the right amount of squish to it. It's on sale at Amazon for just $11.
Released today! Beverly – Six intertwined stories that show the underside of suburban life
Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, released today, is a brilliant set of six intertwined stories that show the underside of suburban life. Each story starts off with a smile, while pretty pastel colors and manicured lawns are plentiful. The art is crisp, geometric, simple and orderly. But scratch just a bit underneath the astroturf and horrific, heart-breaking details emerge. Broken-down parents cut their family vacation short after walking in on their sexually-repressed son in the middle of a cringe-inducing act. A teen girl who disappears from the diner she works at isn’t as innocent as her xenophobic town first thinks. A lonely housewife has stars in her eyes when she takes part in a sitcom focus group, only to find out she’s been duped.
With a structure like Richard Linklater’s Slacker and the temperament of Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, each story of bored, angst-filled teens and desperate adults features at least one character from one of the other stories, and yet each is its own separate tale. I was completely taken in, thinking at times that I was right there sharing the same stifled air as these folks, and now they exist in my mind as memories, rather than pieces of a graphic narrative.
Beverly
by Nick Drnaso
Drawn & Quarterly
2016, 136 pages, 7.5 x 9.5 x 0.4 inches (softcover)
$17 Buy a copy on Amazon
How to make a primitive cord drill and pump drill
YouTuber Primitive Technology says, "I made a cord drill and then upgraded it to a pump drill. A cord drill is basically a spindle with a fly wheel attached so it looks like a spinning top. the middle of a piece of cord is then put into a notch at the top of the spindle. The ends of the cord are then wrapped around the spindle and then pulled quickly outwards causing the drill to spin. The momentum of the fly wheel causes the cord to wrap back around the spindle in the other direction. When it stops the cords are pulled outwards again and the drill spins in the other direction.
[via]
Nude statues at Rome museum covered to not embarrass Iranian president
Classical nude statues at Italy's Capitoline Museum were covered up this week in anticipation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit. Some politicians and art critics called out the stupidity. From The Telegraph:
The president’s aides were also reportedly anxious that he not be photographed too close to a giant bronze statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback.
The Iranians objected to what one Italian newspaper delicately described as “the attributes” or genitalia of the huge horse, which dates from the second century AD.
Dashcam captures Oregon cop violently kicking motorcyclist
If you're a cop in Oregon, I guess the way to get promoted is to rear end your unmarked patrol car into a motorcycle and then violently kick the nonresistant rider with enough force to break his collarbone. It'll cost taxpayers $180,000 to settle the lawsuit against you, but that not your problem!
Teller explains how performance and discomfort make education come alive
The trend of making schools "safe places" to protect students from feeling uncomfortable is a bad idea, says Teller, the silent member of the magic comedy duo Penn and Teller, and a former schoolteacher. Here's a snip from an essay in The Atlantic:
And if Shakespeare (or Catullus or Vergil) makes students uncomfortable? That’s a good thing, Teller said. Learning, like magic, should make people uncomfortable, because neither are passive acts. Elaborating on the analogy, he continued, “Magic doesn’t wash over you like a gentle, reassuring lullaby. In magic, what you see comes into conflict with what you know, and that discomfort creates a kind of energy and a spark that is extremely exciting. That level of participation that magic brings from you by making you uncomfortable is a very good thing.”
As we were on the subject of discomfort I asked Teller what he thinks of schools’ efforts to protect students from discomfort as they learn through censoring teachers’ content and requirements for trigger warnings. For the first time in our conversation, Teller illustrated the power of his trademark silence, and the line went quiet.
Just as I’d begun to think we’d been disconnected, he replied,
“When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education.”
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Ben and Jerry's Bernie Yearning flavor exists -- sorta
Earlier this month, Ben "and Jerry's" Cohen spitballed with an MSNBC reporter about his idea for a Bernie Sanders ice-cream flavor: "Bernie's Yearning," a pint of mint with a disk of solid chocolate on the top, representing the fortunes of the 1%. Before you eat it, you use a spoon to smash the wealth and distribute it evenly through the pint.
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