Offshore, Act Two: New owner repowers 20-year-old wind farm off Swedish coast
via Ars Technica http://bit.ly/2s0BOlv
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Book tells the inside story of how Reddit came to be the Internet’s “id”
via Ars Technica http://bit.ly/2EVarRv
Mining co. says first autonomous freight train network fully operational
via Ars Technica http://bit.ly/2RmHUuH
Media All the Way Down: Art and Conspiracy at the Met Breuer
CONSPIRACIES RESIST DESCRIPTION. Should one write about them with curious dispassion, and risk reducing them to a cheap Wunderkammer of fringe ideas, or should one follow each strand in a web of nested citations and risk becoming tangled in tedious pedantry? Thankfully, the Met Breuer’s recent exhibit, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy , curated by Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer, offers an alternative, one that will hopefully bring new energy to the tired discussions about a broad range of American conspiracies. As the curators explain in their handsome and deeply researched exhibition catalog , they deliberately avoided the term “conspiracy theory,” which seemed reductive and dismissive (famously, the CIA encouraged operatives to use the term in their quiet campaign against alternative explanations of JFK’s assassination). “Theory,” with its etymological root in spectatorship, is not their aim. Instead, the exhibit does something far more compelling: it dramatizes conspirac...
Need You — Baby
HISTORY, ESPECIALLY in times of revolutionary change, never progresses as assuredly and purposefully as accounts written decades after the fact would have us believe. Historians have the benefit of knowing how the story ends, and can gently rearrange events in such a way as to show how all signs pointed more or less inevitably to the now-familiar outcome. Even contemporaneous newspaper stories tend to hide the more shambling moments of human doubt and indecision that make up the bulk of real daily life during even the most exciting times. But a look below the surface — at diaries, letters, and other unscrubbed, under-the-radar communication — will always fill in essential pieces of the big picture that received history has little room for. One now-famous example is “A Bintel Brief,” a section in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper that ran starting in 1906. “A Bintel Brief” was an advice column that aimed to help Forward readers (mostly Yiddish-speaking immigrants to the United State...