1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
[…]
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
Amanda Palmer reads “Questionnaire” by Wendell Berry – a poem of astonishing prescience, written a decade ago.
To those who bristle at the notion of politically-tinted poetry (or any art), I point to Chinua Achebe’s fantastic forgotten conversation with James Baldwin:
“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”
Border wall seesaws – a boundlessly heartening and hope-giving project by activist architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, who installed three of them at the U.S. Mexican border. The concept was developed several years ago and appears in Rael’s 2017 book Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.
For a heartening counterpart, see Borderless Lullabies.
via Kottke
Tiny drawing robot programmed to chart the sun’s daily movement across the sky for a particular location and date – a collaboration between artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Carlo Ratti. What a glorious addition to humanity’s long history of charting the heavens.
(via dezeen)
German filmmaker Felix Dierich uses several years of public data from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 to render this haunting timelapse of Earth seen from space.
Couple with this lovely animation of Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot monologue. (“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”)
via Aeon
More than a century later, Tolstoy’s writings on kindness and the deepest measure of love remain beautiful and needed.
Borderless Lullabies – musicians and authors stand up for refugee kids, with 100% of proceeds from the record benefiting KIND: Kids In Need of Defense – a wonderful nonprofit that partners with pro-bono attorney at law firms and law schools to represent unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children in their deportation proceedings – kids many of whom have fled severe violence in their home countries, and many have been abandoned, abused, or trafficked – to ensure that no child stands in court alone.
The record, which features Yo-Yo Ma, Esperanza Spalding, Meryl Streep, Rosanne Cash, Lizz Wright, and more, is available on a pay-what-you-can model. Download it here, and please share far and wide to help this massive labor of love travel on the wings of globe-spanning goodwill.
Original cover art by the wonderful Shantell Martin. All artists involved donated their time and talent to the project.
Happy Pride! Stunning, sensual illustrations for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from a rare 1913 edition by the artist Margaret C. Cook. (Many are available as restored prints.)
