š” ā 2023-07-28
Friends! I hope youāre well. Another brief one this week as Iāve been swamped working on two new, and largish projects (on top of the rest of having to live life). Not to vaguepost, but the brevity of these newsletters will be more than excused by the eventual release of what Iām pulling together, I promise.
On to the stuff!
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Only Italians Will Understand This
Only Italians Will Understand This | Michael Nicholas
On social media, Italian culture gets flattened to the lowest common denominator.
In a world tipping towards monoculture, itās not hard to understand the nostalgic appeal of regional accents, local food, and traditions. But when exaggerated to the point of caricature, Italian American culture becomes little more than engagement bait. While Italian Americans have long been generally integrated in the United States, the internet cannot resist the cultural cachetāand hearty follower countsāthat comes with emphasizing difference.
Barboncino, a Brooklyn Pizza Restaurant, Becomes a Union Shop
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/dining/barboncino-brooklyn-pizza-union.htmlThereās been an increase in labor organizing for restaurants in recent years as the pandemic, inflation and a national discourse on racial inequity have highlighted the low pay and harsh conditions that many American workers face. But unions in restaurants are rare because high employee turnovers make it challenging to build an employee base.
Mr. Kemmett joined the unionization effort after an incident in June 2022 with the restaurantās previous owner. The basement flooded after pipes, some with sewage, leaked. Mr. Kemmett said that he and a busboy spent hours cleaning out the water by using buckets and were so dirty they had to throw out their clothes. But the owner asked Mr. Kemmett to stay and serve customers. When he refused, he said the owner made it sound like he was fired.
This was āa public-health nightmare,ā Mr. Kemmett said.
Rat Kings of New York
Rat Kings of New York | Travis Diehl
In New York, any real gains against the rat problem will require more than just futuristic trash cans. We need a total overhaul of trash collection.
What you quickly learn is that the rat problem is really a trash problem. Alone among great cities, New York City residents and businesses drag some forty-four million pounds of garbage to the sidewalk every evening, providing the rats a situation that evokes Templetonās binge at the fairgrounds in Charlotteās Web.
New York City agrees to pay $13 million to 2020 racial injustice protesters in historic class action
New York City agrees to pay $13 million to 2020 racial injustice protesters in historic class action | AP News
New York City has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of roughly 1,300 people who were arrested or beaten by police during racial injustice demonstrations that swept through the city during the summer of 2020.
The lawsuit focused on 18 of the many protests that erupted in New York City in the week following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. With certain exceptions, people arrested or subjected to force by NYPD officers at those events will each be eligible for $9,950 in compensation, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.
The agreement, one of several stemming from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, allows the city to avoid a trial that could be both expensive and politically fraught.
Folk Etymologies
Folk Etymologies ā The New Inquiry
Ā sensitive speaker of English could consider removing the phrase ārule of thumbā from their vocabulary. The term has its roots in domestic violence: a British law stipulated that a man could beat hā¦
As the hedging about the lack of records hints, there is no evidence that the expression ārule of thumbā has its roots in spousal abuse. In fact, this claim has been consistently debunked by scholars for decades. Itās a folk etymology, and an incredibly persistent one at that, that arises with whack-a-mole insistence as fast as linguists and historians can challenge it.
āRule of thumbā isnāt the only English idiom haunted by folk linguistic history. Nor is it the only case in which that false history is redolent of past (and present) atrocities: domestic violence, slavery, brutal class inequality.
Barbieās Capitalist Critique Will Make BlackRock Millions
https://bloodknife.com/barbies-capitalist-critique-will-make-blackrock-millions/Itās only when people start guilelessly claiming that this film contains ideas that are new, or subversive, or potentially change-making, that it feels necessary to point out that while movies from major studios can be a lot of thingsāinspiring, heartbreaking, terrifying, too long, too quiet, and really boring, to name a fewātheir ability to change the world has limits. While representation of certain groups has been proven meaningful to an extent (for example, seeing gay people on TV was undeniably huge for little gay me), each āgroundbreaking firstā also represents a tipping point wherein the depiction of a certain identity has been deemed worthwhile, in a money-making way.
Do people believe in misleading information disseminated via memes? The role of identity and anger
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448231186061Do people believe in misleading information disseminated via contemporary Internet memes? Do they believe in it more compared with information provided via text? This research explores these questions via a 3 (modality: contemporary internet meme vs text-only vs text-with-explanation) Ć 2 (identity-congruence: congruent vs incongruent) between-subject online experiment, using two contexts of investigation (crime and taxes). Findings indicate that identity-congruent posts (vs incongruent), regardless of modality, were perceived as more credible. These effects occurred due to the invocation of the self-identity heuristic (if content is similar to my identity, then it is automatically credible) and the other-identity heuristic (if content is similar to the identity of others in my network, then it is automatically credible). However, the effects of identity-congruent posts were diminished when the content was presented as a contemporary Internet meme (vs text). This occurred because identity-congruent posts in meme modality evoke anger.
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š My pal Ben talks about some of his favorite tools with Kevin Kelly
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Folks itās been EXCLUSIVELY Vampire Survivors these last two weeks.
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Working on a ton, but nothing to share yet. Most immediate upcoming thing will be the RETURN TO [The Return to] Fun City! Itās been 9 mos since our last canon Fun City game, in NYC 2102 ā weāll be publishing new eps with Lash, Luxe, TK and Viv in the next month or so. So if you need to catch up, NOW IS THE TIME!
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That what I got and itās all I got! See yāall in a couple weeks! xo