small blows

It’s vital to remember that in the face of dispiriting, soul-crushing contemporary civics and politics that we have allies against the forces of regression—and indeed allies worth celebrating, including the witty and insightful contributors to McSweeney’s. Since 2016, the publishing house has been offering a regular feature that helps cope with the paralysing apoplexy that uncivil discourse can bring about in an anthology of thoughtful, modest and inspiring essays on the theme of One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. Be sure to visit and indulge in their expansive archive fighting for social justice, for yourself and for the greater good.

it takes one to know one

We’ll see how much history is determined by the historic meeting between the leadership of the US and North Korea but it does already strike me as a little hollow and quite asymmetrical with the regime of Kim Jung-un being accorded the legitimatising recognition that it’s sought for some time and preternaturally under the same terms and conditions that Trump bewailed his predecessor as concessions to Iran, making America look weak and dopey.
Much in the same way that the Manchurian Candidate’s revolting behaviour has markedly improved the image of loveable, old war-criminal Bush II, not only does his eagerness to meet with Kim deflect attention from the hermit kingdom’s atrocious human rights standards (zero freedom of movement, zero freedom of speech and mandatory, universal adoration—not to give Dear Leader any more ideas) with the optics, this plum bargain asks little in concrete terms from North Korea while having US military presence on the peninsula characterised as “provocative” (after so much mutual sabre-rattling) and pledges to suspend large-scale training exercises with the South and Japan.

tear down this wall

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, that on this day—among many other momentous occasions—the US president Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987, publicly challenged General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the barrier that had physically divided the city since 1961.
Though not the first time the Wall itself was the subject of an address—having previously made similar overtures to the “evil empire” from 1982 onwards and not accorded with its legacy and influence until the Wall actually came down a year and a half later and was criticized at the time respectively by US and Soviet advisors as extreme and unpresidential and provocative and war-mongering, the speech looms large in the popular imagination, perhaps at the expense of appreciating the complexities of geopolitical undercurrents in East and West Germany and the Soviet Union.

zone out

Having hosted the debut of the first film script written by a neural network, Ars Technica was already versed with the screen-writing talents of an artificial intelligence named Benjamin, who is now re-enlisted the acting talents of the cast of his first short film, Sunspring, for a bolder experiment in which Benjamin was given full creative control and nearly single-handedly responsible for production from start to finish. Sponsored by the recently concluded Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Challenge, Benjamin adhered to a few basic movie prompts and a few other criteria and drawing on footage from public domain cult classics The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and The Last Man on Earth and digitally inserted the performers into his film.

blogosphere

Chillingly, via Slashdot, we learn that Tanzania is besting its neighbours Uganda and Kenya in severely curtailing internet freedoms, requiring all blogs and online forums to be registered or suspend all operations immediately, on pain of high fines or imprisonment. For a website to continue posting, authors or moderators must pay a licensing fee that just tops the average annual salary for a Tanzanian labourer and one would suppose further acquiescing to not being a general nuisance to the government.

4,645

Eight months after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, devastating the island and many residents in remote areas are still without basic utilities, the official government tally of fatalities has stood at sixty-four.
An impromptu memorial two weeks ago (and we’re all ashamed for having overlooked such a powerful and important gesture, which illustrates how beastly and uncaring and so easily called away we can be) on the marble courtyard of the San Juan capitol grew into thousands of pairs of empty shoes being neatly lined up to represent a truer number of the number lost in the storm.

6x6

empanelment: ten anti-Trump cartoons that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette refuses to publish

won’t you be my neighbour: Anthony Bourdain was like Mister Rogers (previously) for adults, plus the article that launched his career, via Coudal Partners

binney & smith: Crayola launches a cosmetic line based on its crayons

race to the bottom: a business-model based on the destruction of the resources it relies on is strikingly uneconomic

here we come on the run with a burger in a bun: dinosaur taco-butlers

bodyguard: a profile of the elite Nepalese Gurkha contingent protecting the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore