Martha Edelheit,
Tattoed Lady
, 1962, oil on canvas
Hello friends and welcome to my (new) newsletter.* Here’s some things I’ve been enjoying lately. Most are articles; some might be an image or a tweet. I’m awfully suspicious of the way sites now tell you how many minutes something will take to read, but am using ~ to indicate fairly longreads here. I’ll leave these first few public, but going forward these will be for (free!) subscribers only, out every week. Please tell everyone you know and encourage them to subscribe; the world’s getting warmer, but maybe we can make it a little weirder too.
thanksgiving
Words spoken before all others – the Ohenten Kariwatekwen or Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address
Roaches taste like Blue Cheese, and other Bugsgiving revelations
Thanksgiving in Mongolia ~ (graphic)
How a single mom created a plastic food storage empire
Wombats’ cubed-shaped poop could solve a manufacturing mystery
language
We thought the Incas Couldn’t Write. These Knots Change Everything
No Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan? on the BJP’s anticolonial-yet-ethnonationalist renaming spree
This very excellent dictionary of lost words
A conversation between poet-grammarians
The Race Man – on Wesley Yang’s Souls of Yellow Folk
Examples of Tajik national dress from the official government guidebook
♫ + ☥
How the Kung Fu Fighting melody came to represent Asia
Welcome to the witch capital of Norway
Sweet Bitter Blues – on the popularity of blues music in Tokyo
Music without a destination – “The childlike dreaminess of some of Debussy’s music, his tendency to caress his musical materials like a kitten sitting in his lap, can veer into a sickly sweetness.”
Bidoun Mix 4: Ma’an Abu Taleb – on Arabic music criticism plus a mixtape
Divine Intervention – on the Maibi, Manipur’s mystic mediums
fashion
Fashioning normal – “What sort of psychotic wears Loeffler Randall heels without tottering? “
Tajikistan’s Hijab Ban and the Politics of Fashion in Post-Soviet Central Asia
The eternal seductive beauty of feathers ~
In fashion, oranges may be the new black – on silk spun from citrus peel
Yuja Wang and the art of performance
singularity watch
Fitbits for pigs & the Internet of Animals “Using machine learning, Rooda’s team trained the algorithm on hundreds of samples of porcine death squeals, so it can pick them out from more routine snorts and grunts.”
forest green
A country’s identity is hidden in its camouflage
Army green – “Those arsenic greens were as vivid as they were deadly; anodyne army green, while no less dangerous in the broadest sense, works a far more banal juju.”