#Katherine Rodden | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

an-ephemeral-blog · 5 years

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Linkspam #5

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How to Survive America's Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:

The question before Collyer would challenge the most gifted legal mind. At issue is the fact that America, in the wake of 9/11, has become two countries. One is a democracy, visible to the population and governed by the lofty laws and rules and constitutional principles we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock. The second nation is an authoritarian state-within-a-state, governed exclusively by the executive branch. In this parallel world, all rights redound to a bureaucracy that may kill anyone it pleases at any time, restrained only by the inclinations of the executive. Essentially, Kareem’s lawyers are appealing to the first America – Collyer’s courtroom – to force the second, secret America to hear him out.

Nobody seems to know what would happen if Kareem or Zaidan tried to come to court, another thing that makes this case uniquely bizarre. Would Kareem be allowed to walk in and take a seat at the plaintiff’s table? Would he be placed under arrest outside the courthouse? Stuffed in the trunk of a Crown Victoria at the airport?

America’s Uncivil Protests Are Straight Out of Latin America by Omar G. Encarnación at Foreign Policy:

Two central questions are raised by the arrival of the escrache on U.S. shores: Do they work, and are they any good for democracy? Based on the Latin American experience and that of Spain, where escraches became a massive political headache in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. The tactic can serve to raise societal awareness about moral wrongs; it can also promote solidarity across a variety of causes. Most important, however, it can lead to a change in policy and even transform politics. The answer to the second question is less clear: The escrache is an unambiguous assault on civility — but it’s also a telling sign that something is already very rotten in the body politic.

The Queer Art of Failing Better by Laurie Penny at the Baffler:

Give a man a makeover and you fix him for a day; teach a man that masculinity under late capitalism is a toxic pyramid scheme that is slowly killing him just like it’s killing the world, and you might just fix a sucking hole in the future.

In the age of Trump, can Mr. Rogers help us manage our anger? by David Dark at America Magazine:

As he nears the end of his testimony, he asks if he might recite a song whose title is the question of the hour (maybe every hour): “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” It is as if he has treated everyone present to a psychic blast of blessedness. Rogers pauses to note that the question was purloined from a child struggling with this very issue aloud. We each have the power to stop, stop, stop, Rogers instructs, as he gently strikes the table, when we have planned something, in word or action, that will go badly for ourselves and others. There is something deep within us—an inner resource, our intuition, our core—that can come to our aid when we need it most. Our feelings, we can access the realization at any moment, are mentionable and manageable. We can become what we are supposed to be.

Other Favorites

Science

A Pottery Barn rule for scientific journals by Sanjay Srivastava at his personal blog - “Once a journal has published a study, it becomes responsible for publishing direct replications of that study.” Best paired with Reproducibility meets accountability: introducing the replications initiative at Royal Society Open Science.

The day when three NASA astronauts staged a strike in space by Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times

The Evolution of High-Speed Throwing by Neil Thomas Roach at their personal blog

MTurk vs. The Lab: Either Way We Need Big Samples by Joe Simmons at Data Colada - brb emailing this to every researcher I know

The Science Wars Redux by Michael Bérubé at Democracy - on the Sokal hoak, postermodernism, objectivity, multiplicity, and the way the right has appropriated leftist critique

After the methods crisis, the theory crisis by Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks - a recommendation of a list of recommendations ;)

Spoiled Science: How a seemingly innocent blog post led to serious doubts about Cornell’s famous food laboratory by Tom Bartlett at the Chronicle

Tech

The woman who taught internet strangers to actually care for one another by Claire Evans at Quartz - “Rather than deputized members of our own community, they are a precarious workforce on the front lines of digital trauma.” On digital community moderation and how it’s changed over the last thirty years.

ASLCore: stress/strain curve zoom levels by Mel Chua - on the art and science of translating engineering terms into ASL

UTC is enough for everyone, right? by Zach Holman - a history of time and programming with time

Saving a non-profit six figures a year using Squarespace, Airtable and Glitch.com by Danilo Campos at Future Fluent

Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg for ReCode

IP addresses & routing by Julia Evans at their personal blog

Out-of-the-Silicon-Valley-funding-box by Hallie Montoya Tansey at their personal blog

Reading postmortems by Dan Luu at their personal blog

CSS Utility Classes and Separation of Concerns by Adam Wathan at their personal blog - via Julia Evans

Careful with negative assertions by Ned Batchelder at his personal blog - included largely for Jonathan Hartley’s comment

On Testing by Bill Sempf at his personal blog - this is basically just a roundup of testing jokes made on Twitter but I love it

Politics

From Charleston to Pittsburgh, an Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy by Jelani Cobb at the New Yorker

Putting a Face (Mine) to the Risks Posed by GOP Games on Mueller Investigation by Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel

How Contemporary Antitrust Robs Workers of Power by Sandeep Vaheesan at Law and Political Economy

Sorry to Bother You by Liza Featherstone at The Baffler - participation in modern politics

The junk debt that tanked the economy? It’s back in a big way. by Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post - collateralized loan obligations are the new subprime mortages

‘Red’ America is an illusion. Postindustrial towns go for Democrats. and This is why Democrats lose in ‘rural’ postindustrial America by Jonathan Rodden in the Washington Post

John Roberts and the Second Redemption Court by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic

History

A two-part podcast on the only successful coup d’etat in American history by Stuff You Missed In History Class

Follow up: UNC's Football Stadium: Memorial to the Leader of a White Supremacist Massacre by Craig Calcaterra at their personal blog

When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig by George Prochnik at the New Yorker - Zweig was an Austrian who fled Europe in 1941, so this is a reflection on the rise of Nazism in particular

A twitter thread by Kevin Kruse on how the Democrats and Republicans changed their positions on civil rights

What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics by Blair Kelly in the New York Times

Misc

Pyramid Scheme by Ilana Gershon at Allegra Lab - how organizational structure can facilitate abuse

David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words by Aaron Bady at the New Inquiry - I have never read Debt but I’ve practically made a hobby of reading critiques and reviews. I like this one a lot, although the best quote is too long for this linkspam.

Here, have a somewhat meandering but very interesting Twitter thread by Malka Older about charity, stigma and formal systems of aid.

Black Educators Share Their Thoughts on What Happens When White Women Cry in Schools by Kelli Seaton at Philly’s 7th Ward

White Women Aren’t Afraid of Black People. They Want Power. by Stacey Patton at Dame

Foreign Key by Sumana Harihareswara at their personal blog - in which racism causes people to hallucinate accents

Augmenting Long-term Memory by Michael Nielsen at Y Combinator Research - I have started using the tool, Anki, that Nielsen recommends in this post, and have no regrets thus far

How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook

Women’s Anticipation of the Employment Effects of Motherhood: Evidence and Implications by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

What is it like to be a man? by Phil Christman at Hedgehog Review - reflections on masculinity

Autism from the inside by Katherine May at Aeon

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins in conversation with Sarah McFarland Taylor and Diane Winston - I particularly liked Sarah McFarland Taylor’s section and her discussion of plausibility structures

What It Takes to Be a Trial Lawyer If You’re Not a Man by Lara Bazelon at the Atlantic

Three philosophical schools by siderea at her personal blog

Jacob Levy’s Liberalism of Tragedy by Adam Gurri at Liberal Currents

#linkspam

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londontheatre · 7 years

Link

The Significant Other Festival (c) The Pensive Federation

It never takes that long for a group of British people to find themselves talking about the weather, and so it is almost inevitable that this edition of The Significant Other Festival, in which – to summarise – two’s a party but three’s a crowd, should at some point take ‘Conditions’ as an overarching theme.

Despite ten (very short!) plays and an equally short musical having different writers, different actors and (mostly) different directors, there were some links between the plays. Some links were more explicit than others, with the same props coming up time and again, serving different purposes. As for the subtler links, well, that would be giving too much away.

Humid by Anthony Cozens opens proceedings with a bit of a ‘swearathon’, a point I didn’t personally pick up on at the time but it was commented on by fellow audience members in the interval. There are, of course, people who do tend to swear as naturally as they breathe, but here, when all three characters are at it, there’s little to distinguish one from another. Miles (Michael Shon) is at a fairground with his partner Izzy (Olivia Negrean). He is carrying around a goldfish that he won earlier in the day by putting some hoops through some objects. This being a funfair, the fish has been in a bag for an indeterminate period and has now died, presumably through lack of oxygen. The fish’s fate gives Izzy’s friend Hannah (Katherine Jee) the impetus to hurl insults at Miles (yep, more swearing). The ending is open-ended enough to leave a question in my mind about the fish being a metaphor for Miles and Izzy’s relationship unanswered.

Flurry by Olu Alakija was the darkest of the plays, and not just because it was set in a forest in the middle of the night. It is, to be blunt, gradually revealed that of the three characters, played by Leanne May Bennett, Ashleigh Cheadle and Virginia Lee, one shows no remorse or pity whatsoever for the death of a man who “shattered” their own lives, which understandably horrifies the other two. It is not made entirely clear – perhaps it wasn’t considered important – precisely what the deceased man did, or was alleged to have done, but it’s clear that this isn’t a motiveless murder. The play got me thinking about how I would react to discovering if I were complicit in the taking of another person’s life: I might well have ended up being the character in this play that started panicking and needed calming down.

One more thing: I couldn’t help but scribble down a line in this play about the weather. “The wind is howling like an X-Factor contestant.”

Inclement by Emma Allison sees Mark Bentham (John Rayment) and his second wife Nina (Rekha John-Cheriyan) meet up with his ex-wife Linda (Pat Garrett). Or, rather, Linda meets up with them, in order to join in with the many arrangements required for Simon and Louisa’s wedding. The bride is Mark’s daughter by Linda. Nina has no patience for Linda’s fretful personality, and the play quickly becomes beautifully dramatic and explosive. The fears and insecurities of both Nina and Linda are palpable, though it is Nina’s forthrightness that ends up putting a substantial dent in Mark’s diplomacy, with almost devastating consequences.

Tornado by Lydia Rynne is set at Simon and Louisa’s wedding, or rather, the reception, though the (presumably) happy couple remain off-stage characters. The best man, Adrian (Nick Pearse) and a bridesmaid, Kyla (Kate Tulloch) are lost in a maze at the reception venue. There is, probably, some imagery going on with being lost without a roadmap and only the weakest of mobile phone signals with which to attempt to contact a friend. It wasn’t altogether clear to me what the ‘tornado’ in Tornado was, except to say that this pair initially seemed too different from one another to commence a relationship, even one that, for reasons unfolded within the narrative, would only last a relatively short time. The ‘significant other’ role, a fired waiter (Roberto Landi) is rather underwritten and plays an ultimately negligible part of the play.

Gust by Alexander Williams begins with Gail (Elizabeth Guterbock) taking her friend Steve (Anthony Cozens) out of doors for a badminton match. The standard of play is inconsequential to the dialogue, particularly when Robin (Kamran Vahabi) appears. Robin has, in Gail’s own words, betrayed her trust, and while Robin and Steve are more than reconciled, Gail remains uncompromisingly unresponsive. The play is an intriguing observation into how certain people who busy themselves trying to ‘help’ are often themselves unable to swallow the sort of medicine they insist others must take in order to get over the past.

Overcast by Rob Greens had me in a combination of laughter and deep thought. Becca (Christi Van Clarke) and Angie (Hanna Lucas) are using a pair of binoculars to spy on people. Not just any people, but people they know. There isn’t much difference between this and looking people up on social media and reading about what they have been up to. Warren (Jamie Coleman) enters the scene after an altercation with an off-stage character (one the ladies are spying on) from which he has both physically and psychologically run away from. The implications and applications of this storyline are vast – it seemed to me to be a reminder not to draw conclusions too hastily from what can be seen at face value without being aware of the bigger picture.

Thaw by Reece Connolly sees another dead goldfish as a narrative driver. Colin (Luke Lampard) and his girlfriend Jenny (Evelyn Lockley) are attempting to bury ‘Gary’, the late fish belonging to Colin’s sister Abbie (Flora Ogilvy). Abbie is distraught at the news, and there’s a hilarious moment in which, in desperation, she attempts to use body heat and friction to warm the frozen ground up. This came across as a coming of age story, and in burying the fish, Abbie is also saying goodbye to an age of innocence and, one would hope, able to go onwards and upwards in life.

Haze by Sylvia Arthur begins provocatively. “I’ve just seen Mother in bed with a fascist,” declares Sidney (Laura McGrady), a statement that becomes all the more strange, and macabre, once it is established what has happened to ‘Mother’. Shelley (Laila Alj), the firstborn of these three siblings, has a long-standing secret that can now be revealed to both Sidney and Sonny (Alex Dowding) now their mother has passed away. Why wasn’t anything being done about a corpse being assaulted though, irrespective of the assailant’s political beliefs? Hazy indeed.

Cold Front by Brian Eley considers what happens when loyalties are tested by the practicalities of life. Squidge (Rachael Oliver) is naturally defensive at the change in living arrangements between herself and long-term friend Becks (Rachel Smart) and relative newcomer Jess (Katherine Rodden). The narrative took a while to really get going. A lot of time in the first half was given over to establishing that this trio get on very well with one another through fun, games and singing, and at first sight I couldn’t see the point of it all. On further reflection, it’s an example, par excellence, of how people prepare for awkward conversations by living in the moment and crossing the bridge of confrontation only when it is reached.

Drought by JFW Nutt starts with an apt question: “Why is it called London Luton?” It is indeed in Bedfordshire and well outside both the Oyster public transport travel zone and the M25 motorway. A stream of silliness is quickly established as Tamsin (Jayne Edwards) and her partner Ben (James Lawrence) try to enjoy an afternoon out with Ben’s older sister Annette (Lydia Smart). Annette speaks her mind, and all of her thoughts spill out, however unsavoury, without any filtering or leaving out of even the most trivial of details – Tamsin later points out that Annette must do better to take her “meds”. It isn’t easy for the likes of Ben, trying to care for family members while trying to live out his own life. A good combination of hilarity and poignancy.

Sunny Spells by Frances Bushe (with music composed by Lemon and Franner Otter) skilfully tells a story through song – there is some spoken dialogue, too, and a suitably big finish allows for the rest of the cast throughout the evening to join in a rousing closing number. The lyrics are witty, even if the narrative isn’t, with characters played by Antonia Bourdillon, Clark Alexander and Sydney Aldridge dealing with what to do with an increasingly frail elderly relative who now requires round-the-clock care (and no, a one-way plane ticket to Switzerland is absolutely not on the cards). If a fuller version of Sunny Spells were of the same quality as this short musical, it would be worthy of a West End run – there’s something about looking to the future and carrying on even when one is frightened of messing things up along the way that places this well-devised show firmly within the canon of musical theatre.

Review by Chris Omaweng

The Significant Other Festival 14th to 18th March 2017 http://ift.tt/2kUAXNu

http://ift.tt/2m0r5aj LondonTheatre1.com

#IFTTT #LondonTheatre1.com

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