Bitcoin, Bees, Fat, Composing, Fungi
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Bitcoin, Currency, And Bubbles
Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Academia | 23rd June 2021 | PDF
Bitcoin's value has been driven mainly by the enthusiasm of miners, and will fall to zero when all Bitcoins have been mined. It will fall sooner if the near-certainty of an eventual collapse is more widely understood and discounted. Bitcoin is a failed currency with no redeeming virtues. "With the exception of Salvadoran permanent residence (three Bitcoins) there are no prices fixed in Bitcoin" (3,200 words)
City Of Bees
Tim Maendel | Plough | 21st June 2021
Nature notes from an urban beekeeper. "I don’t understand half of what is going on. I can discover a problem only to find the bees are already halfway to fixing it themselves. I have seen a queenless hive, doomed to fail, and rushed out to buy a queen – only to find on my return that the bees were well on the way to making their own, feeding a larva with the special food that transforms her" (1,200 words)
Fat Suits In Hollywood
Hazel Cills | Jezebel | 22nd June 2021
Using padding so that thin actors can play fat characters is a practice that peaked in US entertainment of the 1990s as the "obesity epidemic" was climbing up the news agenda. It's a costuming choice that highlights the real life star's thinness while underlining the moral traits that are often linked to being overweight. The body shape, not the performance, becomes the spectacle (1,890 words)
Audio of the Week: Behind The Scenes
Episode: "The Composers" | Podcast: Mission Commission | 36m 54s
Six-part series documenting the process of creating a new work of classical music in today's arts industry. This episode introduces the three composers being profiled, who each talk eloquently about their process when starting a new piece. The finished works are also on the feed, and are worth listening to after experiencing them coming together over the different episodes (36m 54s)
Book of the Week: Entangled Life
by Merlin Sheldrake | Courtesy of Five Books
A reevaluation of the role of fungi in the natural world. Where there are plants, there are mycelial networks so small that we simply weren't aware of them. The task of unravelling what exactly fungi do requires an interrogation of many of our basic assumptions and principles about the natural world. Sheldrake takes up this task with a sense of wonder that one cannot help but be caught up in (368 pages)
Afterthought:
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing"
— Salvador Dali
