SCALES #12
Hello!
Links only this week.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Koji on Gastropod. (Also excellent to see them live at the Museum of Science.)
As a fan of the "Disturbances" email newsletter, I was very excited to listen to the audio version of Jay Owens going deep on dust.
WBUR stories: Harvard exhibit on its ties to slavery, BPL repatriating stolen Italian artifacts.
Engagingly rambling discussion around "Junkspace" (mp3), Rem Koolhaas's "very late nineties/early noughties" essay on the incoherent, escalator-packed spaces created by postmodern, late-capitalist, arbitrarily-designed-and-redesigned architecture. (Led me to an utterly wild 2001 study by his architecture firm about Harvard developing its land in Allston, including the "Moses Scheme" of diverting the Charles.)
"An audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound": Tony Schwartz.
Links
Faculty talk about changes to the Harvard music curriculum that increase accessibility.
"Twenty students, clergy, and other activists were arrested Monday afternoon after they sat down, linked arms, and blocked the entrance to the Suffolk County House of Correction to protest the detention and deportation of immigrants who are living illegally in the United States."
The 18th-century extinction of Steller's sea cow, a megafauna holdover from the Pleistocene.
"Salty liquorice, also known as salmiak or salmiakki (in Finland), is a variety of liquorice flavoured with ammonium chloride, common in the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. ... The words salmiak and salmiakki are derived from an archaic Latin name for ammonium chloride, sal ammoniacus, meaning "salt of Ammon". "Ammon" in turn refers to the temple of Ammon at Siwa Oasis, where ancient Greeks found ammonium chloride."
The hoe-cultivation belt.
Tracing a shift to more socially conscious criticism.
Science!
Tracking volatile organic compound emissions in a college classroom: lots of siloxanes from deodorants/antiperspirants, a monoterpene peak most likely from someone peeling an orange!
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This little corner of canvas in the Botticelli MFA show!
—Adam