Nina Paley, the ridiculously-talented artist, cartoonist, and animator, has just posted her latest video, God-Mother, and it's another jaw-dropper. Nina is known for intense, highly arresting animations, like This Land is Mine, my vote for one of the greatest visual indictments of war, cycles of violence, and the horrors of human conquest. She's also done the feature-length trip through the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues, Death of the First Born Egyptians, and Copying is not Theft. Nina is also a free culture activist.
God-Mother is Nina's ode to Mother Earth and goddess religions. Her haunting, mesmerizing animation is perfectly paired with the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, singing the Bulgarian folk song, Godmother Denkou. The life-affirming spirit of the video ends with a sad and snarky grace note that is pure Paley. God-Mother is part of Seder-Masochism, an eventual animated feature for which Nina has been amassing content.
Location platform Here Technologies calculated how far one hour of driving can take drivers out of major American cities starting on Friday at 4, 7, and 10 pm. (more…)
Master luthier Mark Erlewine takes us through the fascinating process of repairing Trigger, the same guitar Willie Nelson has played for nearly 50 years. (more…)
This video of the January 12, 1999 broadcast of Nightline is really quite remarkable. It shares clips of voice recordings made in the mid-twentieth century of black people born into U.S. slavery.
That's right, it features the voices of real (former) slaves.
To get these interviews, folklorists traveled the South in the 1930s and 1940s carrying around 200 lb. "portable" 78 RPM disc recorders.
The technology to clean up and digitize the scratchy memory-filled discs only became available in the 1990s.
Now the vivid real-life stories of these men and women who lived as slaves are available online through the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center. They truly give a sobering look at life in the United States before abolition:
The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.
All known recordings of former slaves in the American Folklife Center are included in this presentation. Some are being made publicly available for the first time and several others already available now include complete transcriptions.
One of the interviews highlighted in the Nightline broadcast is with an elderly Baltimore gentleman by the name of Fountain Hughes. The former slave shares, quite plainly, that his grandfather was owned by Thomas Jefferson. He also recollects many details about his own life as a slave.
He also shares this:
If I thought, had any idea, that I'd ever be a slave again, I'd take a gun and just end it all right away. Because you're nothing but a dog. You're not a thing but a dog.
Singer Bonnie Tyler will perform her 1983 hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on Royal Caribbean's Total Eclipse Cruise, a cruise ship that will be in the path of the total solar eclipse come Monday. Tyler will take time off her world tour to belt out the power ballad -- just as the moon crosses the sun -- on the ship, Oasis of the Seas.
Tyler told TIME, ""The eclipse of the sun lasts 2 minutes and 40 minutes, I’m told. Unlike my song. It had to be chopped about, because it was so long."
"Obviously this was done very tongue-in-cheek," the middle-aged co-anchor solemnly explained to his young female colleague, who was until that point having fun with the segment.
Thersa Matsuura was born and raised in the USA but spent the past 25 years -- more than half her life -- living in a small Japanese fishing village with her husband and son.
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This is an article about my old friend, UVa housemate, fellow Glee Club member, and all around wonderful character, D.R. Tyler Magill, who took on Nazis in Charlottesville and has now suffered a stroke.
In the video below we see Tyler doing the right thing, in a smart, calm way, as he chased Nazi organizer Jason Kessler from the podium along with a group of fellow protesters. This, despite having already been doused in torch fuel and struck with torches by fascist thugs as he and a group of 25 students were surrounded by the alt-right mob at the base of the statue on Saturday night. At one point he was struck in the neck, which damaged an artery, leading to his stroke.
Tony Fadell is best known "one of the fathers of the iPod" at Apple, and as the former CEO of Nest. We've agreed to forget that he led the Google Glass division for a while, too. Today, news broke that the serial inventor and investor is now working with companies including Samsung Electronics and Foxconn's parent company, Hon Hai Precision Industry, to develop new technology that would allow mobile phone devices to “transfer large amounts of data without using wires or WiFi connections.”
Barcelona-based DJ and music producer Eclectic Method (aka Jonny Wilson) has brought back Mikey, Data, Mouth, Chunk, and the rest of The Goonies gang in his latest remix music video.
On The Late Late Show with James Corden, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said that, while on a recent vacation, he digitized all the VHS home movies he made in his childhood.
Writing in MIT Tech Review, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne points out the secret and, in retrospect, obvious driving force behind tech: it reduces the often awkward and unreliable process of dealing with people, so you can buy music without asking friends for recommendations, take a cab without talking to a dispatcher, buy your groceries without speaking with a clerk, and get your money out of the bank without seeing a teller.
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The old ice cream scoop we had wasn't really an ice cream scoop. It was a disher, and was more suited for scooping mashed potatoes than ice cream. When the trigger mechanism on it finally broke, I happily got rid of it and replaced it with the OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop ($15). This surprisingly heavy scoop is made from a solid chunk of stainless steel with a comfortable rubber grip, and comes with a pointed end that digs right into hard ice cream, especially if you run hot water over it. It's supposedly dishwasher safe but why put it in the dishwasher? Just rinse it and dry it with a towel.
Today, a U.S. appeals court reversed a previous ruling that barred the state of Arkansas from halting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, after the release of setup videos secretly recorded by anti-abortion, hard-right media provocateurs.
Ohio governor and 2016 presidential candidate John Kasich was fired up on the Today Show this morning, speaking out against the way Trump handled the Charlottesville violence over the weekend that lead to the death of a 32-year-old woman and injured many others. Before he was even asked a question he began his criticism.
"Pathetic! Isn't it? Just pathetic...It's terrible. This is terrible."
"The President of the United States needs to condemn these kinds of hate groups. Think about what you have seen!...reminiscent of what we saw in Germany in the 1930s. The president has to totally condemn this...This is a very serious matter"
"There is a bitterness setting in that may not be able to be removed...He's got to fix this and republicans have got to speak out, plain and simple. Who cares what party you're in?"
Kasich was right on the mark with everything he said, until he was asked this: "Would you be willing to be the guy who goes around to republican leaders and say that 'this is our moment, we will tell our president we no longer support him, period."
Unfortunately, Kasich couldn't follow all the way through. He choked. He looked a bit tongue-tied for a split second, and then back-pedaled. "Well Matt, look, he's our president, okay?...He's our president, but he needs to correct what he has said..."
CEOs on President Donald Trump's business advisory councils today jumped ship via hastily-issued statements condemning hatred and racism. A flood of resignations from Presidential advisory councils followed Trump's bizarrely candid support of the Nazis and white supremacists who marched with torches in Charlottesville this past weekend. As news of the CEO resignations spread, Trump tweeted that it was he who'd decided to disband, not the execs.
