I’ve sometimes thought that that’s why I became a painter, because I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, yes, it hurts me when they keep popping up again and again, like visions almost, and in all kinds of contexts, and I can’t do anything about it, the only thing I can do is paint, yes, try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away, one by one
“While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected”. So begins The History of the Devil, wherein this perceived wrong is to be righted by Paul Carus, a self-described “theologian of science”.
Although an unfamiliar name now, at the end the nineteenth century Carus was hailed for his attempts to “conciliate science and religion”. He also played a key role in the introduction of Buddhist thought to the United States, to which he emigrated from his native Germany in the mid-1880s.
An Early Bronze Age metalworker and shaman discovered over 200 years ago in a lavish burial near Stonehenge and long assumed to be male was actually female, a new genetic analysis reveals.
The results of the ancient DNA analysis of the “Upton Lovell Shaman,” carried out by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, break the previously held stereotype of Early Bronze Age women, according to a statement from the Wiltshire Museum, where the remains and grave goods are housed.
“It completely tears up previous assumptions,” David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum, told The Guardian. “We’re so used to the assumption [that] men do everything, men are the leaders, men are the metalworkers. Here we have smoking gun evidence of a female metalworker. And metalworking was the space science of its day.”
I was rather hoping to find a scan of Mike Moorcock and Mal Dean’s JERRY CORNELIUS comic, as I seem to have misplaced my old copy of Moorcock’s MY EXPERIENCES IN THE THIRD WORLD WAR, so pretend there’s a picture of Jerry Cornelius saying “dem bones” here.
My problem, apparently, is that I’m interested in too many things. In fact, someone made a point of writing to my office a few weeks ago specifically to tell me that my interests aren’t interesting.
I never had a problem with being a generalist – it’s a big world and it’s been around a long time and I want to learn as much about it as I can. But, these days, to get ahead you have to niche down hard, to become a trusted expert in one particular thing. You want to be the one voice the AI reaches for to answer a question, or the single speaker in your specific pigeonhole.
So this here is where I don’t do any of that and wander all over the place, because my stupid brain is only happy when it roams.
A Midori A6 commonplace book: with, apparently, “instructions” only in Japanese. Worth reading THE NOTEBOOK by Roland Allen for a sense of what a commonplace book can be. I actually first heard of commonplace books when I was young – I read a short autobio piece by Alfred Bester in, I think, HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS, and he used one. I really have to hunt around for a new copy of that book.
“Afropresentism says, I am here bearing witness, yes, and it aches. And yes, I am grieving. And most importantly, yes, I celebrate still being alive enough to feel all of that. I see that you are also grieving and I see that you are alive too… Yes, I celebrate the rage I know I’m not alone in. Yes, I see the everyday barrage— the advertisements and the architectures that have grown so elaborate, so unrelenting in their reminders of our compromise. And, yes everything I bear witness to that wounds me and wounds you I will meet with my own technology of refusal.”
Building from this philosophy and from the dialogue with Mutemi, Githere made the case for the kinternet–a conceptual model for a network that weaves together myth and ancestors; theory and practice. Sketched out by hand and distributed on paper to everyone in the audience, the kinternet is a technology of repair, rooted in grief, rage, slowing down, and connecting with one another in the present.
Sea levels are just the start of how climate change will upend the ocean. Rising temperatures are also threatening a critical artery that runs through the ocean known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. This current, in short, sends warm water northwards and dumps colder water southwards in a giant loop, massively influencing the world’s weather systems along the way.
If temperatures keep soaring, scientists fear that AMOC could collapse — and with it, climate patterns across the globe. Temperatures in Europe would plunge without the injection of warm water it brings. Rainfall in the tropics would be disrupted. And sea levels on the US east coast would rise.
To save AMOC from demise, two researchers have proposed a daring Hail Mary: building a giant dam across the Bering Strait, the channel that separates Alaska from Siberia, to stop the proverbial bleeding. As outrageous as it sounds, the megaproject could in theory stabilize the ocean current, according to the findings of a new study they published in the journal Science Advances.
20th Century Studios has released the first trailer for Whalefall, the adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ novel coming to theaters in October.
The film — which stars Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz and more — is described as The Martian meets 127 Hours, centering on a scuba diver in search of his deceased father’s remains. The diver gets swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.
A team of astronomers led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin identified the lucky dot in question: GLIMPSE-17775. By carefully analyzing the dot’s spectrum captured by Webb—the deepest spectrum to date of a little red dot—the research team has identified multiple lines of evidence, all of which support the interpretation that GLIMPSE-17775 is a supermassive black hole enveloped in a dense cocoon of partially ionized gas, a model referred to as the BH* (black hole star) scenario.
Among his many mythopoeic pronouncements, the great Sun Ra maintained that he was making music for the future. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and more than 30 years after he left the planet for the last time, his music is gaining more recognition than ever before. A recent slew of reissues, new compilations and previously unheard live recordings continues unabated. His Arkestra – under the direction of long-time member, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995 – continues to delight audiences worldwide. Just last year saw the release of two new feature-length documentaries about him. The Magic City examined his early life in Birmingham, Alabama; and the more comprehensive Sun Ra: Do The Impossible did the festival circuit before being shown on the PBS TV network this February as part of its American Masters series of artist biographies – bringing Ra’s improbable story to its widest audience yet.
