New York Times, December 8, 1985:  

For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few… On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

In 1985, the New York Times claimed a weekday circulation of just over one million copies. Specifically, 1,013,211 on March 31. In 2015, when most Americans have computers in their pockets (and even use them at the beach and on trains), print sales of the New York Times have fallen to around half that figure, and the paper is chiefly read via the kind of devices once dismissed as implausible. Rather than “whiling away the hours reading the sports or business section,” the majority of readers are now “flybys,” their stays lasting for an average of four minutes, generally to read something linked via email and social media. And browsing one article isn’t quite the same thing as reading a newspaper.  

Via Kevin D Williamson. 

Beatboxing, opera and MRI. // Add rain to your day. // An interactive solar system orrery. // Compare the planets dot com. // Crimes against cheese. // More joys of parenthood. // Space probes sent by Earthlings. // The wisdom of Twitter. (h/t, dicentra) // Toothbrush machine is a partial success. // Blindfolded water boxing. You heard me. // Smartwatch for the blind. // Lionel says hello. // Soylent 2.0 is made of soy, not people. // Deadpool. // One minute in London. Stress and unpleasantness not depicted. // What if the slopes were flattened in Paris? // Smartphone-controlled paper aeroplane. // Robot, lacking leotard, does rhythmic gymnastics. // And finally, The Fantastic Four Radio Show (1975). Narrated by Stan Lee and starring a young Bill Murray as The Human Torch.

Annah Anti-Palindrome is recounting a tearful tale to readers of Everyday Feminism: 

I remember being ten years old and grieving my girlhood – that short period of time when I was allowed to exist without a preoccupation of my physical appearance constantly looming in the front of my mind – a time when my self-esteem wasn’t rooted in whether or not I was pretty enough, skinny enough, busty enough, sexy enough. Time passed and the more unattainable and oppressive heteronormative femininity felt, the more I grew to hate myself and everybody around me.

Hence, of course, the feminism. One mustn’t let all that hatred and self-involvement go to waste.

I let my leg and armpit hair grow long, and I let the hair on my head spiral into a nest of cords, matts, and tangles (a hairdo I would later ignorantly and appropriatively refer to as dreadlocks).

Bad dog. Minus ten points.

I ran away from home – started hitchhiking all over the country, going to feminist music festivals, entrenching myself amidst the company of other (mostly white) grrrls who were shirking their feminine hygiene routines (shaving, bathing, hair combing, general beauty maintenance regimens of all types). 

We must warn The Patriarchy. Some woman hasn’t washed.

In navigating through a predominantly white, feminist punk subculture, I never gave a second thought to whether wearing my hair in dreadlocks was offensive — at least to anyone other than The Patriarchy.

Because if there’s one thing The Great Patriarchal Hegemon™ fears, it’s an unwashed woman with pretentious hair.

Douglas Murray on the loudly throbbing brain of Mr Paul Mason: 

Mason writes, “In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire.” Nothing about Hamas rocket-fire or any context about a long-running war. Instead he describes this apparently naked aggression as an example of “how ruthlessly the elite will react” to defend modern capitalism. But why would anyone bomb Gaza to do that? As well as holding many of the other worst views in the world, are Hamas also in possession of a particularly devastating critique of late capitalism?

Mr Mason’s adventures in radical thought have previously entertained us. 

Thomas Sowell on the politics of self-congratulation: 

T.S. Eliot once said, “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” This suggests that one way to find out if those who claim to be trying to help the less fortunate are for real is to see if they are satisfied to simply advocate a given policy, and see it through to being imposed – without also testing empirically whether the policy is accomplishing what it set out to do. The first two steps are enough to let advocates feel important and righteous. Whether you really care about what happens to the supposed beneficiaries of the policy is indicated by whether you bother to check out the empirical evidence afterwards.

And George Will on the Planned Parenthood horror show: 

In partial-birth abortion, a near-term baby is pulled by the legs almost out of the birth canal, until the base of the skull is exposed so the abortionist can suck out its contents. During Senate debates on this procedure, three Democrats were asked: Suppose a baby’s head slips out of the birth canal — the baby is born — before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby then have a right to live? Two of the Democrats refused to answer. The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams confidently declares,   

Miscarriage culture is, from a feminist perspective, an amplification of the shame involved in being female in the first place.

Setting aside the notion of there being an entire miscarriage culture, I don’t follow Zoe’s leap to “shame in being female” as the obvious emotion of the moment. Grief, yes, dashed hopes, yes, anxiety about future pregnancies, quite possibly. A reluctance to share private pain publicly with friends, relatives and workmates – and thereby reliving it – yes, that too. And of course there’s the profound awfulness of being congratulated on imminent parenthood by someone no longer in the loop, and their subsequent mortification as they’re brought up to speed. But shame in being female? Does that even make the list of nightmares? Are we living in the sixteenth century, in the court of Henry VIII?

Of the two miscarriages I’ve known about, neither involved, to my eye, any attempt to shame the bereaved would-be parents. Very much the opposite. Such that the avalanche of sympathy could itself be hard to bear. And both instances highlighted practical explanations for why pregnancies are often private matters for the first few months – a custom Zoe dismisses as “a cult of silence,” one that “clings on to an infantile squeamishness around the particulars of reproduction.” It is, I’d imagine, quite stressful to repeatedly explain this most intimate loss to friends and relatives who are expecting good news – and also explaining it to any existing small children, whose little brother or sister will not be arriving as promised.  

But in Zoe’s mind, enlightened as it is by feminism, these things are merely “an amplification of the shame involved in being female,” an “enraging thing,” one that’s “kept alive by everyone who goes anywhere near a pregnancy.” 

The Guardian’s Julie Bindel, mentioned here recently, is once again unhappy with the world: 

Today, the old butches are a dying breed. The veterans of the Gateways [lesbian] club are now as likely to blend in with the rest of us than wear a suit, tie and starched shirt… During a recent trip to Sweden I thought most women I saw in the street were lesbians, and the men sitting around in cafes with their babies, gay dads.

Yes, it’s a bold statement. A classic sentence for our series. The gist of which being that the 53-year-old Ms Bindel, for whom radical lezzer is a profession, is having trouble telling which team a person, a younger person, is batting for. Imagine the indignity.   

A number of lesbians I know who are on the butch side have been asked [by other lesbians] when they are transitioning. Being openly and proudly butch has now… become something that many in the lesbian community look down on. At the same time, within gay male culture, being camp or in any way “feminine” is derided.

I don’t follow such things closely, or at all, but apparently bull dykes and mincing nancies are so last century. Affected burliness for gay ladies and girliness for gay gents is no longer deemed fashionable, and the quaint term “straight acting” has all but vanished into history. The donkey jacket dyke, of which Big Grumpy Jules is so fond, is now a museum piece. Well, a lot can change in half a century. However, this lack of enthusiasm for acting like a caricature is for some a source of rancour and rumblings of conspiracy:

This, I would argue, is a product of plain old sexism and misogyny.

This being the Guardian, Ms Bindel doesn’t offer much in the way of actual argument. But as fashions in lesbianism have changed since Julie’s first flush of youth back in the Seventies, this must be the doing of The Patriarchy and its phallic tentacles: 

“Top 10 Medieval butt-licking cats.” // Channelling Whitney Houston, a robot professes its love. // A gentle ballet of hippo pooping. // Children pawing at light. // This parrot seems to like The Lego Movie. // Stairs for small dogs. // Designer dog digs. // The sounds of sci-fi movies. // At last, bespoke water. “We’re putting the peninsula in your mouth without any strain on the environment.” // Interchanges. // Overviews. // Carnivorous plants up close. // Add caption of choice. // The art of the car chase. // Comprehensive school, 1962. “Those who need to express themselves through art also have good opportunities.” // Bursts of man-made sunshine. // Headline. // And finally, the Lexus luxury maglev hoverboard is way better than that crappy old hoverboard you make do with.

Living in London, the Guardian’s Aisha Mirza is, naturally, unhappy:

I understand there is a psychic toll of living in a place where you have to fight, for space, time, money. But what these Why I am Leaving London articles are missing is that, while the psychic burden of living in the city with the highest living costs in the developed world is very real,

Wait for it. 

for a brown person, the cost of living surrounded only by white people is worse.

“Please, no more white people writing smug articles about leaving London,” writes our Guardianista, smugly, before claiming that “the world will validate your beautiful white children,” wherever they are, “forever.”

She continues,

I feel the comfort of London peel away whenever my train pulls out of King’s Cross and the threat of overt racism is increased… Outside London, I am put immediately into a position of defence. This is something my white counterpart will never understand.

Because, obviously, outside of the capital, folks ain’t never seen a woman whose skin is slightly brown. Behold ye, then, a mysterious, alien creature unknown to Northern brutes:  

This just in: 

On August 21, the world’s first official, naked public performance art festival will occur in the streets of Biel, Switzerland, featuring projects from 18 international artists. 

Local artist Thomas Zollinger has organised a two-day display of self-imagined transgression, during which he and his fellow artists will “increase beyond gallery walls the presence of the naked body as an artistic medium,” and will “explore the possibilities of the naked body in the urban space.” But sadly, not in the way that people with particular tastes might actually want to pay for. Instead, “nakedness is employed as a sculptural element in dialogue with the architectural environment, ground structures and pedestrian traffic.”

Be still my girlish heart.

Given the lack of pornographic appeal, and with it a lack of public interest, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some funding issues have arisen:

Although Biel’s culture office and other institutions helped fund over half the festival’s cost, the organisers are seeking donations online to cover artists’ lodgings, security measures, and other expenses. Incentives to contribute include options to participate in a nude performance of one’s choosing: for 111.55 CHF (~$127 USD), one may partake in “Naked Audience,” which involves stripping and sitting on a chair on a sidewalk while watching pedestrians; 280 CHF (~$290 USD) earns one an invitation to a “Naked Lunch” during which a series of “creative activities” will unfold.

Oh don’t pretend you’re not tempted.

Mr Zollinger’s earlier forays into Incredibly Daring Nude Performance Art™ can be beheld at length here. Where, for instance, you’ll find a seven-minute piece titled Naked UFO, also staged in Biel, in which members of the public cope quite well with the Incredibly Daring Nude Performance Art™ – a composure that rather deflates the ostentatious claims of transgression and taboo, and the alleged “challenge and confrontation of the naked body.” A handful of people wait around looking slightly puzzled, possibly hoping that something interesting will happen, eventually. Two children look amused before wandering off to be amused by something else. And for the most part passers-by pass on by, their minds somehow unshattered by the Incredibly Daring Nudeness™ of it all.  

Hey, Franklin found it. 

Tim Blair brings terrifying news from the world of Australian taxpayer-funded art: 

Readers may recall the brutal warning handed down last month by journalist and tax-funded art enthusiast Ben Eltham. “The arts are a powerful latent force in Australia’s political landscape,” Eltham wrote following Arts Minister George Brandis’s rearrangement of arts funding. “George Brandis and his colleagues would be wise to reflect on this, and whether they can win a war of symbols against some of the most creative and energetic people in our society.”

We Brits have of course endured the full brunt of such a clash. The references to Derrida were particularly distressing.

There are, however, signs of low morale among the art world’s would-be storm troopers:

“Maybe the best option really is to get out of the country,” Hobart-based sculptural artist Theia Connell told Vice magazine last week. That’s Connell’s response to news that previous Arts Start grants for emerging artists have been cut. “The likelihood is that I’ll find myself in a day job,” complained Sydney’s Luke Devine.

Ah, yes. Plan B.