Kickoff For May 6, 2024
Welcome to May. Time marches on, and sometimes it feels like it's marching over us. No use complaining because that won't stop ye olde tempus from fugiting ...
It's a new month with new challenges and opportunities. Hope you're facing both without fear and with high expectations.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links.
The Woman Behind Borges — Wherein we learn about efforts of María Kodama, the Argentine writer's wife, to protect her husband's literary legacy, and learn a bit about Kodama herself.
From the article:
Kodama’s project of literary conservation has a comic aspect to it. It’s ironic, for instance, that the institution she founded and presided over was inaugurated in 1988, the year the theoretical concept of the “death of the author” spread through academic departments and literary magazines around the world. More ironic still is the fact that Borges was one of the idols many intellectuals associated with that strain of postmodernism.
The World's Last Internet Cafes — Wherein we find out about the rise and fall of those shops that helped so many people in so many places get online, and the few still clinging to life.
From the article:
For many, internet cafes represented the arrival of the future. “The first day I entered, I didn’t believe it,” a university student in Accra said about stepping into BusyInternet. “I didn’t believe it was Ghana.”
How America Nearly Forged a Different Path in 1916 — Wherein Jeff Greenfield looks at how an early 20th century election could have changed the course of America's racial history and why it didn't.
From the article:
Now in 1916, Republicans were eager to deny Wilson a second term. To do so, it was imperative to find a candidate who was acceptable to both the traditional and progressive wings of the party, someone who had not been embroiled in the 1912 GOP civil war.
Facts don’t change minds: a case for the virtues of propaganda — Wherein Anna Hennessey explores how propaganda, if used responsibly, can positively influence peoples' thinking — or, at least, cause them to think more deeply.
From the article:
Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people’s minds. Propaganda, on the other hand, works very well on this front, something we see clearly from how people and groups have used it over the past century.
How Might Life Migrate Through the Universe? — Wherein Roberto Battiston ponders the various ways in which life may spread from one point in the universe to another.
From the article:
Perhaps we will discover that aliens are particular biological life forms that have lived with us since the beginning of time; and we were looking for them on Mars or below the icy surface of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons!
Ancient Roman wine production may hold clues for battling climate change — Wherein Dimitri Van Limbergen looks at vine agroforestry in Roman times and how, counter-intuitively, it worked and how that method of farming adapted to periods of higher temperatures.
From the article:
In contrast to the low plants that blanket hillsides in modern vineyards, these vines grew high into the trees. Numerous scenes on Roman sarcophagi and mosaics depict harvesters picking grapes using high ladders, and collecting them in small, distinctive cone-shaped baskets.
Do hold your breath: on the benefits of conscious breathing — Wherein M M Owen takes use through how the mechanism of breathing evolved, and why people are focusing on the act of breathing as a cure to all of our earthly woes.
From the article:
Strange, that breathing can be at once so everyday, so forgettable – and also the material plane on which all of life and death manifests. In not exactly the sense that my meditation teacher meant it, the breath is without doubt, from the human perspective, the most powerful force in the entire Universe.
Why Kundera Never Went Home — Wherein Petr Drulak explores why the acclaimed Czech author didn't return to his native land after decades of exile — reasons that have as much to do with politics as with tensions between Kundera and another well-know Czech writer.
From the article:
[T]here are also many examples of intellectuals who were accused of neglecting their mission by prioritizing art over politics or failing to reflect the nation in their works: These include the greatest 19th-century Czech poet, Karel Hynek Mácha, whose poems were about love and death, not Czech virtues, and Antonín Dvořák, whose music was deemed too cosmopolitan.
How a Nuclear Weapons Lab Helped Crack a Serial-Killer Case — Wherein we learn how forensic scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used their expertise with multi-hazard substances to prove that a respiratory therapist murdered multiple patients.
From the article:
That’s the reason the Forensic Science Center is sometimes called “the lab of last resort.” In Saldivar’s case, Livermore scientists created new methods to identify degraded chemicals, and helped convict the man who became known as the “Angel of Death.”