Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Read Joining the Indieweb, the web that's been here all along by Bill Doyle (vil.lv)
It's been a long time. How have you been?
I left Twitter over one year ago, with the intent that I would reappear on some more open platform. Mastodon seemed like the obvious choice, but profile migration still doesn't exist, and I didn't want to join what was effectively yet another silo.
Congratulations Bill!
Listened to Ken Kesey's Acid Quest from On the Media | WNYC Studios

We have never-before-heard tapes from Ken Kesey, the man who taught the hippies how to be hippies and inspired the psychedelic 60's.

Happy New Year! In this pod extra, we're celebrating what might be your first hangover of 2020 — whether it's fueled by alcohol or just the thought of the year ahead. So, we thought we'd bring you the story of an odd holiday known as Bicycle Day, April 19: the day in 1943, when Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann rode his bike home from work after dosing himself with his lab concoction, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. The first acid trip.

Hofmann’s wobbly ride is what launches us into an exploration of a moment, when Ken Kesey, an evangelist of acid would emerge from a Menlo Park hospital lab, and plow through the nation’s gray flannel culture in a candy colored bus. Some know Kesey as the enigmatic author behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — others, as the driving force in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s seminal work in New Journalism. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of Acid Test, Brooke spoke in 2018 with Wolfe (since deceased) and writer River Donaghey about how acid shaped Kesey, spawned the book and de-normalized American conformity.

This segment is from our April 20, 2018 show, Moving Beyond the Norm.

Listened to Hindsight Is 2019 from On the Media | WNYC Studios
We take a walk down memory lane, and ask ourselves some existential questions.

2019 started on a note of fakery, as we made sense of the conspiracies and simulacra that distort our information field. It's ending with a similar air of surreality, with impeachment proceedings bringing the dynamics of the Trump presidency into stark relief. Along the way, we've examined forces, deconstructed narratives, and found the racist core at the heart of so much of the American project. And as we've come to look differently at the world, we've come to look differently at ourselves.

With excerpts from:

  1. When The Internet is Mostly Fake, January 11th, 2019
  2. United States of Conspiracy, May 17th, 2019
  3. Trump Sees Conspiracies Everywhere, October 4th, 2019
  4. Understanding the White Power Movement, March 22nd, 2019
  5. Why "Send Her Back" Reverberated So Loudly, July 19th, 2019
  6. The Scarlet E, Part II: 40 Acres, June 14th, 2019
  7. Part 1: The Myth Of The Frontier, March 29th, 2019
  8. Empire State of Mind, April 5th, 2019
  9. The Perils of Laundering Hot Takes Through History, March 1st, 2019
Read No Technically Speaking in 2018 by Cate (Accidentally in Code)
About three years ago, Chiu-Ki and I were wondering around Copenhagen and we came up with the idea for Technically Speaking. We sent the first issue to ~100 people from the hotel lobby in Malmö, Sweden (we were both speaking at Øredev). It’s been such a great experience t...
Read How to Get a Completely Free Website by Jan-Lukas ElseJan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
In this post I want to show with which services and tools it is possible to run a completely free website. An own website not only offers the possibility to create your own professional web presence, it can also make you independent from silos like Facebook, Twitter or Medium. It is always better to...
Listened to Lecture 13: The Return of English as a Standard from The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth LererSeth Lerer from The Great Courses

This lecture surveys the history of English from the late 14th to the early 16th centuries to illustrate the ways in which political and social attitudes returned English to the status of the prestige vernacular (over French). In addition, you'll look at institutions influential in this shift, examine attitudes toward the status of English in relationship to French, and more.

cover of The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer

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Listened to Lecture 12: Medieval Attitudes toward Language from The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth LererSeth Lerer from The Great Courses

Here, unpack some attitudes toward language change and variation during the Middle Ages in an effort to understand how writers of the past confronted many of the problems regarding social status and language. Many of these problems, you'll discover, are similar to those we still deal with today.

cover of The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer

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Listened to Lecture 11: Dialect Representations in Middle English from The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth LererSeth Lerer from The Great Courses

Learn about some of the major differences in Middle English speech and writing. The goals of this lecture are threefold: to look at some of the linguistic features of the dialects themselves; to illustrate some of the recent methodologies of dialect study; and to appreciate the literary presentation of dialects in Middle English poetry and drama.

cover of The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer

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Read WordPress en webmentions by Frank Meeuwsen (Digging the Digital)
Op Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon en LinkedIn is het vrij normaal om andere gebruikers te vermelden door hun accountnaam in je update te noemen. Groot gemaakt door Twitter is de @-mention nu een bekend fenomeen op het web. De netwerken zijn zo slim om deze gebruiker een notificatie te sturen...