It is with heavy hearts that we bear the news that John Mayall passed away peacefully in his California home yesterday, July 22, 2024, surrounded by loving family. Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world's greatest road warriors. John Mayall gave us ninety years of tireless efforts to educate, inspire and entertain.

John Mayall, pioneering figure of British blues, dies aged 90 [Grauniad] John Mayall, tireless and influential British blues pioneer, has died at 90 [NPR] Jagger leads tributes to blues pioneer John Mayall [BBC] The John Mayall Interview (Complete) [Jake Feinberg Show] Mick Jagger - Ronnie Wood - Eric Clapton - Christopher Watkins - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - Guitar World

Readers with an intimate experience of oppression and cruelty have often responded sympathetically to Fanon's insistence on the psychological value of violence for the colonized. In a 1969 essay, the philosopher Jean Améry, a veteran of the Belgian anti-fascist resistance and a Holocaust survivor, wrote that Fanon described a world that he knew very well from his time in Auschwitz. What Fanon understood, Améry argued, was that the violence of the oppressed is "an affirmation of dignity," opening onto a "historical and human future." That Fanon, who never belonged anywhere in his lifetime, has been claimed by so many as a revolutionary brother—indeed, as a universal prophet of liberation—is an achievement he might have savored. from The revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Schatz [Coda.]

An excerpt from Schatz's book The Rebel's Clinic

True knowledge and life cannot, of course, be quantifiable, and Plath did not live by simply numbering her days and ways—intellectual, social, and sexual. No biography, without a narrative, can succeed. Neither Plath nor her biographers have considered her life as just one damn thing after another. But when the numbers drop out of narrative, avoiding the tedium of indexing a life, something is also lost. from From Shopping to Sex: Indexing the Life of Sylvia Plath [LitHub]

CW: suicide, depression, abuse, language is NSFW

It is strange to hear of a subject needing to be restored to the discipline that claims to study it. But it's characteristic of an age when literary discourse is in flight from the literary, in favor of the personal, the political, or, more often, the consumerist and careerist, in favor of thinking about systems instead of individuals, which is to say writers. At the conjuncture of these tendencies is another set of institutions perpetually said to be in crisis – because of the public's failure to read enough books; because of questionable business decisions; because of the threat of new technologies to books themselves; or simply because of the rising costs of paper – that is, the publishing industry. from Literature Without Literature by Christian Lorentzen [Granta; ungated]

When working on Buttplug applications, something that should be at the forefront of your design thinking is: Someone is going to fuck this. The context of this usage should influence all levels of design, from UI/UX to low level code decisions. Assuming the user will approach a piece of software that involves Buttplug in the same way they would, say, a word processor, will end up in a fuckable word processor. If that's what you were aiming for, great, but otherwise this will just end up in a frustrated user and something that looked like a cat walked across the keyboard. from Butts Are Difficult (in The Buttplug.io Developer Guide) [Probably NSFW]

What is today called "artificial intelligence" should be counted as a Copernican Trauma in the making. It reveals that intelligence, cognition, even mind (definitions of these historical terms are clearly up for debate) are not what they seem to be, not what they feel like, and not unique to the human condition. Obviously, the creative and technological sapience necessary to artificialize intelligence is a human accomplishment, but now, that sapience is remaking itself. Since the paleolithic cognitive revolution, human intelligence has artificialized many things — shelter, heat, food, energy, images, sounds, even life itself — but now, that intelligence itself is artificializable. from The Five Stages Of AI Grief by Benjamin Bratton [Noema; ungated]

On November 14th of 2022, I received an FTX sponsored bobblehead of Jordan Poole. This was only a few days after the FTX collapse. I realized I had a collectors item and found other similar sports related collectors items at home such as a Webvan hockey puck. Combining my passion for entrepreneurship, risk taking, and collectibles, I built a collection of artifacts from failed companies, products, toys, and sports.

Remember the fun of playing lawn darts? ALLAN this extension of the brand was too far for lovers of the motorcycle; reeked the scent of tobacco Raised $1.3B and lied to patients to keep partners and investors happy leading to it's demise in 2018. Search by Companies, Products, Sports & Toys

Everett doesn't often validate specific interpretations or theories of his work. The fact that this work often manages to be simultaneously hilarious, ambiguous, deeply moving, and filled with a kind of muted anger at America complicates efforts to interpret either it or Everett's politics. When he is in the humor to indulge interpretations, he will often entertain a potential reading by saying that it's not what he intended, but, as far as he is concerned, the process of meaning-making, insofar as it can be said to be a duty, belongs to the reader alone—and it is the reader alone, through their engagement with the text, who completes this process of meaning-making. Everett refuses to hold your hand or tell you what to think. from Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett [The Millions]

Percivalously

In an artist statement, Sikander noted that "Witness" forcibly reinserts women as participants in and spectators of patriarchal law and morality, demanding agency and autonomy through natural elements in light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Justice Ginsburg's 2020 death. When it came time for the works to be installed at the University of Houston campus last February, Sikander and the school were met with intense backlash from far-right, anti-choice lobbyists and organizations that decried the work as a "satanic abortion idol" and petitioned for the exhibition's cancelation. from Shahzia Sikander Says No to Repairing Her Beheaded Sculpture [Hyperallergic]

Shahzia Sikander's public sculpture vandalised [Art Review] Vandals Target Shahzia Sikander Sculpture Honoring Women's Rights [ArtNet]

The modern world turns out to rely greatly on unprotected bits of equipment in remote places. "We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia," says Katarzyna Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo. "This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor and to protect. This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage." from A Subsea Cable Went Missing. Was Russia to Blame? [Bloomberg; ungated]       

Undersea shenanigans, Previously

The Best New TV Show Is Somehow This Chevy Dealer's Surprisingly Good Parody Of 'The Office'

Swear words and profanities from around the world. [CW: swear words and profanities from around the world]

100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read [LitHub]

Consumers often find broken Oreo cookies to be a disappointment, viewing them as imperfect and less enjoyable. However, the philosophy of Kintsugi teaches that there is beauty in imperfections and that items can become more valuable when repaired thoughtfully. from Oreo — Kintsugi By Leo Burnett Tailor Made, São Paulo [CW: advertising, ad agency preening]

Moreo: Oreo x Game of Thrones Title Sequence Previously: Kintsugi, Oreology, Ⓞ Ⓡ Ⓔ Ⓞ, a series of small starchy tubes, and Oreo by Fran Ross

Making Hitler funny may be a break with the reverence Hitler demanded at gunpoint. But it also ends up being a way to give Hitler back his aesthetics and part of his glamor. When Downfall Hitler launches into an attack on road construction, it's incongruous and absurd. But it's also Hitler getting you to cheer along as he attacks the incompetence and inconvenience of a sclerotic democratic bureaucracy—and attacking sclerotic democratic bureaucracy is a thing that the real Hitler actually did. A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down easy, not least because it distracts you from the fact that the "establishment" in question is just anyone the fascists decide to target. As the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein explains, "drain the swamp" is a successful slogan precisely because it's a catchier way to say "liquidate our enemies." from Fascists Know How to Turn Mockery Into Power [Foreign Policy, from 2020; ungated]

One wonders if he could picture our current moment, when desire and expression are so ready-made, so undemanding and yet so effortlessly able to mollify and monopolize our attention. Open your streaming services—film, TV, music. The choices are overwhelming. Funny, then, that so much of it looks and feels the same, that every artist and writer and musician can tell of unproduced passion projects, that dissenting voices are so easily drowned out. Quantity drowns quality. That which exists is good; that which is good exists. What doesn't exist is a challenge to this state of affairs. from The Last Avant-Garde [Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier's "With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation." in the L.A. Review of Books; ungated]

Current interventions to combat misinformation, including fact-checking, media literacy tips and media coverage of misinformation, may have unintended consequences for democracy. We propose that these interventions may increase scepticism towards all information, including accurate information. ... Accordingly, this project addresses an overarching question of theoretical and practical importance: how can we improve interventions against misinformation to minimize their negative spillover effects? from Prominent misinformation interventions reduce misperceptions but increase scepticism [Nature]

Related: A Bugatti car, a first lady and the fake stories aimed at Americans

POET AS CYBORG PORNSTAR is one of Seven Poems by Hasti [The White Review]

Sci-fi is an amazing genre. It helps us explore our feelings about the unknown, the future, and the possible. It lets us imagine "what if" scenarios, and then build out rich worlds that our minds can occupy. It depicts dystopias we should fend off and utopias we should seek – and it teases us with the scintillating possibility that humans may actually be able to build the world we want. But over the last few generations, it's been harder for us to imagine this better world – and our sci-fi reflects that. from who killed the world? [The Pudding]

As consumers in general, we've gotten very good at completely disregarding things that don't offer us anything worthwhile, even when they want to be noticed. "Banner blindness" is a particularly acute form of this adaptation to capitalism. Our almost subconscious filtering of our perception to things that seem worth the intellectual effort allows a lot of ubiquitous features of products to fly under the radar. Buttons that we just never press, because sometime a decade ago we got the impression they were useless. from the contemporary carphone by j.b. crawford [computers are bad]

There is one checkbox. You all have to share it.

Previously

Did Sontag and Steiner get along? Don't be silly. Like two positively charged particles, they were kept apart by powerful forces of repulsion. They 'disliked and mistrusted one another,' Boyers says; 'the loathing they came to have for each other clearly had much to do with the sense that there was room on the current scene for only one such person.' It seems hardly worth saying that Sontag and Steiner were alike not just as critics but as psychological case studies. Two False Selves, two mosaic-builders, busily building. If there is one true thing about a False Self, it's that it loathes and despises other False Selves, perceiving in them, of course, the falseness that it can perceive in itself only at the cost of its existence. from The Devouring Mind by Kevin Power [Dublin Review of Books; ungated]

An essay around a review of Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers

"Does this country have any heroes?" Gatalo asked. "We do not," came the reply. A minute later there was another answer. They did have a hero. His name was Bruce Lee. from The Wild True Story of the Bruce Lee Statue Heist [DailyBeast]

Where are all the sad young men in literature, then? The male equivalent of My Year of Rest and Relaxation's droll narrator? The modern-day Holden Caulfields? As far as the Internet is largely concerned, there aren't any. Or at least very few of them receive the same hype as books by and about women. Perhaps it's because there's a certain stigma surrounding male vulnerability, but in contemporary fiction, the subject is wildly overlooked. This discrepancy isn't just a matter of representation, though: It's reflective of wider attitudes toward masculinity. If social norms dictate that men should embody strength and stoicism, there's little space left for those who don't. Ultimately, fiction plays a crucial role in shaping our self-image and reality; it's why the relative absence of young men in recent fiction profoundly affects how we perceive and understand the emotional lives of men more broadly. from Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature? by Katie Tobin [Esquire; ungated]

Fog fills spaces, like water or darkness. Like grief. I am in Souris, a fishing town of a few hundred on the northeastern edge of Prince Edward Island. In my left hand is a paper cup of lukewarm coffee. In my right is a brown bag with a breakfast I no longer want. The paper is stamped with the bright phrase, "bonne journée!" Have a good day! I'm not having a good day. The tire Nick had cautioned me about is the least of my concerns. My motorcycle won't start. from'I'm Not Sure What I'm Doing Here' by Emily Zebel [Longreads]

This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may "bake in" bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $134,400 per person for an intervention that could cut the probability of being shot by half. from Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It [NBER; direct link to working paper (PDF)]