Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
BuzzFeed staffer Jessica Misener considers how it would have looked if online media convered the first Thanksgiving:
A Touch of Brooklyn in…Plymouth? A hip, young crowd from England brings the latest trends in hats and contagious diseases from overseas.
Vlad Dudau asks, “Amazon is launching diapers?”
Amazon is known as a visionary internet company that’s managed to expand from a small book company to a huge international retailer with an eye on the pulse of technology and of the global markets. So it wouldn’t surprise anybody to find out that Amazon is now launching its own brand of diapers.
Can a video really do justice? Perahps not in the case of Eric Garner:
Last night, I spent the better part of two hours walking the streets of midtown Manhattan, chanting with angry but peaceful protesters about the death of Eric Garner. We waved signs. We took pictures. We called loved ones, asking them to join us in this demonstration against the systemic injustice of a state that could take a man’s life in broad daylight and yet hold no one accountable. If America hadn’t reached its breaking point on the topic of race in 2014, this surely had to be it. Because on a Wednesday afternoon — less than a week after a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury failed to hold police officer Darren Wilson responsible for the death of Michael Brown — a Staten Island grand jury, despite video evidence that went viral in the months before the hearing, decided not to indict another white police officer in yet another unarmed black man’s death.
Alan Montefiore at Standpoint asks, “Do We Speak the Same Language as God?”
Rowan Williams opens the introduction to his new book by asking, “Does the way we talk as human beings tell us anything about God?”, adding immediately, “This may sound a slightly odd question.” The answer that his book would seem to suggest might be better understood as directed to the question of what our way of talking may tell us about what it is to be a human being and just why that way (or ways) may lead us to go on to talk about God, a God or even Gods. But, if I have understood that answer aright, my use of the word “just” in the preceding sentence may itself be taken to be a fair exemplification of a typically misleading linguistic habit, with its suggestion of an answer claiming to be more exact than, according to its own underlying argument, it could possibly be. It is remarkably hard to pin down in any very exact terms “just” what this centrally underlying argument amounts to. But that, paradoxically (or perhaps not so paradoxically) enough, would seem to be one of its own main points.
A review of John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van by Scott Dill at Books & Culture:
John Darnielle opens his new novel, Wolf in White Van, with a description of a father carrying his son to bed. This child, however, isn’t exactly cradled in his arms. Following a devastating disfigurement, 17-year-old Sean Phillips cannot walk. His father hoists Sean up over his back, resting Sean’s torso on his shoulders, and slowly shuffles toward the bedroom. Carefully turning at the door so that they can both fit through, he eases Sean pain-prone body down onto the bed. Then, “Dad squeezes my hand like I remember him doing when I was very small. We look at each other. Teamwork.” It’s a typically gentle scene in this tender novel about working through a life-altering trauma.
Please put your cell phone away while visiting the museum:
Art museums, which once asked visitors to pocket cell phones upon entry, are now embracing what the New York Times callsa “digital first” mindset. No longer considered unwanted distractions, smart devices are being touted as vehicles for “multiple platform” museum experiences. “You want the way people live their lives to happen in the museum,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Carrie Rebora Barratt. This mindset is self-defeating, however. Good art should challenge the way people live their lives.
Grantland’s Rembert Browne interviews Chris Rock in a piece entitled “School of Rock” which covers rap, comedy, Bill Cosby, and movie casting:
I once saw Chris Rock in New York attempting to be a New Yorker. I was getting a sandwich near my office in a building that shared a space with a gym. There was Rock, alone. On his ears sat a pair of cartoonishly large, Princess Leia–like headphones. I’m sure there was music playing on those headphones, but they screamed to me, “Please, just let me be for a moment.” They were world-blocker-outers, those musical earmuffs. They seemed to work, too. Sure, there was a head nod here or there, but for the most part, he got to just be. At that moment — for a moment — I was happy for him, a man who I had never met and had been watching nearly my entire pop-culture-absorbing life.
First Things petition urges pastors to divorce the rite of marriage from marriage certificates:
Should pastors stop signing marriage certificates at the weddings they officiate? In response to same-sex marriage, should churches get out of the wedding business?
A prominent conservative Christian magazine, First Things, thinks so. As do the more than 300 pastors and laypersons who have signed a pledge to “no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage.”
Jonathan Rée on Foucault, the subject, and the functional of avowal in justice:
Throughout his frantic career as teacher, writer and activist, Michel Foucault kept returning to the same old question: what does it mean to think of someone as a “subject”, or in other words as a locus of conscious experience, of knowledge and error, innocence and guilt, or reason and desire? And is the meaning of subjectivity always the same, or does it alter as circumstances change? These were classical philosophical questions and, as a diligent student in post-war Paris, he had grappled with the answers proposed by a succession of master-thinkers from Plato to Descartes, and from Kant and Hegel to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. But in 1951, at the age of twenty-five, he got a job as an instructor in psychology, and started to dabble in participant observation on the wards of the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, the largest psychiatric institution in Paris. What began as a sideline soon turned into a passion, as Foucault began to suspect that the archives of lunatic asylums might throw more light on the nature of subjectivity than the classics of philosophy ever could, and that philosophical theories of reason were merely the obverse of popular notions of insanity. His first major publication, in 1961 – the monumental Histoire de la folie – was not just an account of the history of madness, but also a challenge to traditional histoire de la philo.
How they produced sounds in the film Interstellar (a flick worth watching, if you ask me):
A look at the sound design of Interstellar, including some of the cool rigs they built to record sounds for the movie, including a truck driving through a corn field, sand hitting the outside of a car, and robots walking.
SoundWorks Collection – The Sound of Interstellar from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.
How video game graphics developed over time:
From Stuart Brown, a five-part video series on the history of graphics in video games. Here’s part one: