Melodrama. (h/t, Julia) || Maintain focus. || Forbidden love. || Forbidden love 2. || Lighting and focal length. || “Allahu Akbar.” || Can confirm. || Masked hero rescues cat. One of these. (h/t, Tim) || Snail versus baby carrot. || Soviet synthpop, 1989. Big hair, cool shades. || On the origins of sports mascots. || On screenwriting. || A ride through the West End of London, 1959. || Just how wide is the neck of the Enterprise? || A heart-warming tale. || Today’s words are educator – and also poisonous harpy. || At last, director’s viewfingers. || The vanishing anus. You heard me. || Gives good tongue. || The treasures of Google Earth. || Possible lair location #46. || And finally, a premonition of trouble ahead.

Via Rafi, a peek into the world of Brooklyn hipsterdom, where the “unsung heroes of the new new left” – who are “culturally potent” and “extremely online” – gather at a loft party in search of love, and to announce how radical and fabulous they are:

The roster tonight is heavy on extremely online political-media types. The podcaster and performer Katie Halper tells me she’s a fourth-generation socialist from the Upper West Side who used to attend a summer camp once affiliated with a communist organisation called the International Workers Order… Nearby, Sarah Leonard, who, at 30, is a veteran of the lefty-journalism orbit, tells me she’s launching a Marxist-feminist glossy called Lux, named for Rosa Luxemburg.

We learn,

At least in Brooklyn, and the spiritual Brooklyns of America, calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there.

Yes, sexy socialism.

The guests of honour tonight are the creators of Red Yenta, a new DIY dating platform: Marissa Brostoff, 33, a grad student at CUNY, and Mindy Isser, 28, an organiser in Philly. “I was complaining about how socialist men don’t date socialist women and it really bothers me,” Isser says.

Now there’s a sentence. It seems that the ladies and gents who feel compelled to announce their revolutionary ambitions, and their pronouns, and various mental health issues, aren’t meeting quotas for finding each other attractive. Which is baffling, really, given the bait on offer:

Dr Deborah Cohan is a self-described “dancing doctor” and mistress of “embodied medicine,” the aim of which is to “bring compassionate presence to healing encounters” via “a collective experience of dance.” Being, as she is, so in touch with the rhythms of her innards, the doctor’s statements of hard-won profundity are varied and numerous, including:

I am inviting myself to live at the speed of one second per second.

And,

There’s something edible inside incredible.

And,

A tree is never alone in the forest.

And,

Imagine new-born babies teaching medical students how to dance and touch empathetically.

Given the above, these fruits of “shamanic healing,” readers may not be entirely surprised to hear that Dr Cohan is also entranced by the potential of woke theatre. And so we turn to the New England Journal of Medicine – specifically, an article titled Racist Like Me — A Call to Self-Reflection and Action for White Physicians – in which our dancing doctor tells us many things. We begin, as is the custom, with a lengthy, somewhat tedious, confession of pallor, and therefore inherent wrongness:

I am racist. I would love to believe otherwise and can find evidence that I am not — my career dedicated to caring for underserved women of colour, my support of colleagues and trainees who are people of colour, my score on the implicit-association test.

That would be this test. The one in which the random positioning of a chair can be construed as damning evidence of racial antipathy.

Right, I’m taking a few days off. Call it a long weekend. A revitalising interlude. By all means amuse yourselves by sharing links and snippets in the comments and then bickering about them. I’ll leave you with some conversational possibilities, including an inadvisable solution; an activity for the weekend, the rules of which are somewhat unclear to me; some stop-motion cross-sections; a small boy’s sporting monologue; and, via Damian, how to spot a classy diner.

The reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

Performance artist Angeliki Chiado Tsoli is, we’re told, “interested in… contributing her knowledge as an artistic and pedagogical tool.” Her work, we learn, “explores the political, poetic and displaced body through actions in the public space, photography, video, sound, installation and experimental writing.” Further exploration is done “through a visual and mental poetic space.” If the magnitude of her labours is somehow unclear, we’re also informed,

Angeliki aims to… challenge the existence of social, economic, cultural, and class-based inequalities.

Do bear these things in mind as you thrill to the video embedded below, in which Ms Tsoli unleashes a fearless, selfless and terribly radical “intervention” at a crossing on Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Said intervention, titled Attempting to Reach Equilibrium in Times of Dystopia, is of course crammed with aesthetic value. A particular highlight occurs around 2:30 when a passing police car stops, resulting in a need to explain that what is happening is actually art.