Houston, we have a problem.
Another quick entry this week as the Easter weekend collides with my well placed plans and intentions and leaves it gasping for air in its blazing, sunshine laden wake. Links, then?
Links
I missed this short story, called The Quiet Boy from Nick Antosca (of Hannibal, Channel Zero, and a sadly unproduced Friday the 13th script) when it was published back in January. It's suitably creepy and disturbing with a hell of a last line.
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Scottish Labour want to give workers the right to buy the companies they work for if they are up for sale or are facing closure. More policies like this please.
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Cal Newport (whose latest book Digital Minimalism is worth a read) has an interesting blog that's worth your time. His most recent post is on AOC's recent decision to quit Facebook and the media's subsequent spin and the complete misunderstanding of the point AOC was trying to make.
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'The Most Depressing Post of the Week' award probably goes to this post from Waypoint on Sargon of Akkad (aka Carl of Swindon) and his recent membership of the UKIP party here in the UK. For those (blissfully) unaware of Akkad, he's a right wing apologist and full on GamerGate acolyte. The piece discusses the real possibility of GamerGate and the shitty beliefs that come with it seeping into a political system already incredibly hijacked with bullshit. Just what we need.
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Jeanna Kadlec at Electric Literature talks about the (self-imposed) pressure of being published before 30.
"Millennials, the oldest of whom are well past 30, have been raised by Baby Boomers with a particular mind toward productivity and achievement. If Gen Z has been raised to perform to the test, our educations were designed around the question, “what are you going to do with your life?” The question of purpose, of career, pervaded every class choice, every college conversation. In a culture where media fed an onslaught of images of prodigy—young Oscar winners, young Olympians—it all fed the question: when was our chance to shine?"
As well as touching on the cultural expectations of youthful creativity ("There is a tension between our economic reality and cultural expectations."), Kadlec also speaks to factors of privilege transferring across to creative endeavors too:
"Because writing is not traditional production, it’s easy to think that we have a built-in workaround, that the rules that govern Wall Street do not apply to those of us whose offices are in Flatiron or Brooklyn or, hell, not in New York at all. We are artists, after all. Art is valuable for its own sake, outside of some capitalist system: this is a seductive line of thinking. But it’s faulty, of course. The same factors that give the privileged a leg up in other industries apply to publishing as well. It’s much easier to be a “self-made” billionaire at 21 years old when you are a Kardashian—and it’s a lot easier to have a book by 30 when you’re already in, or at least adjacent to, the room where it happens."
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Journalist Lyra McKee was murdered in Derry this week after riots broke out in the Creggan area. She was 29. The Guardian, this week, ran a copy of a blog post McKee wrote in 2014 to her 14 year old self about being gay, the joy journalism would bring her and the happiness friends bring. I urge you all to give it a read.
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Sticking with The Guardian they published a piece this week in their 'Long Read' section on the ownership and hoarding of land in the UK. It's a shocking example of corporate interests (domestic and foreign) holding onto assets for purely monetary gain in the face of an ever worsening housing crisis.
The revelations inlcude Tesco hoarding enough land to build 15'000 homes on and that Legal & General owned land is mostly in green-belt areas with a view to making a profit on them in the future once legislation stopping the building process is dismantled.
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Roy Scranton imagines Houston as a hyperobject in the context of climate change.The piece starts with a terrifying scenario of a hurricane bearing down on the city and the subsequent destruction that would ensue. The bad news? The modeling for said hurricane doesn't even take climate change into consideration. As Timothy Morton mentions in the piece:
"Ecological thinking is about never being able to be completely in the center of your world. It’s about everything seeming out of place and unreal. That’s the feel of dark ecology. But it isn’t just about human awareness: it’s about how everything has this uncanny, looped quality to it. It’s actually part of how things are. So it’s about being horrified and upset and traumatized and shocked by what we’ve been up to as human beings, and it’s about realizing that this basic feeling of twistedness isn’t going away.”
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Finally The Vulture posts about the fascinating history of the (maybe) Da-Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi. The discovery of the painting goes from a giddy joy at the potential unearthing of a forgotten masterpiece to the piece essentially becoming a bargaining chip between two hyper-capitalist states in the Middle East. Bizarre, but it does lean heavily into our current zeitgeist, no?
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Apologies for the truncated edition again this week. Warren Ellis' ramblings about kind of just winging it with his newsletters (usually on a Saturday evening) are far more representative than you imagine.
That said, I would like to expand and retool the newsletter somewhat so it delivers something of value beyond a fortnightly link dump. Food for thought.
See you in two!