Author: Chad
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Making Migrant Mother
You probably know of Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother” (aka Florence Owens Thompson), an icon of the Great Depression. Perhaps you don’t know, as I didn’t, just how much the photo was staged and later altered. Evan Puschak of the video series The Nerdwriter breaks down the photo’s origin, the alterations (ghost thumb!),…
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My favorite podcasts right now
After examining my current newsletter situation, I thought it would be a good time to look at the podcasts I’m into right now. I say “right now” because since my September purging, I’m constantly looking for reasons not to follow a podcast. (For the record: I use Apple Podcasts, and I never increase the audio…
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DuckDuckGo to Apple?
From Macworld: Apple should buy DuckDuckGo and make it into Apple Search: Yeah, Apple could start from scratch in building its own search engine, but why? Buying DuckDuckGo would give Apple several years’ head start on building core search technology and a huge index of the whole web along with a talented team of engineers…
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Help, History is Addictive
Magazine mashups from Sports Illustrated (forgot to write down issue date). More here.
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Refer Madness: Librarian as Point Guard
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. On Tuesday I hosted a discussion at the library on the films of 2018. It was an informal time to swap favorites (or least favorites) from the year, and discuss the Oscar nominations that had just been announced. Opinions abounded, of course. I brought…
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Get thee a blog and an RSS reader
Two belated New Year’s resolutions: 1. Get more of my intelligent, articulate friends to start blogs. Maybe some of these intelligent, articulate friends aren’t the writing type or won’t have the time or inclination or find Instagram sufficient for digital socializing, thank you very much. Still I will try. (I halfway succeeded already with my…
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Perfect Bid
Remember Terry Kniess, the guy who made the perfect bid on the Showcase Showdown of The Price is Right? Someone made a documentary about the guy behind that bid, and it’s surprisingly thrilling. Ted Slauson is a math whiz and The Price is Right superfan who’s attended dozens of tapings of the show and even…
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Why I love Kanopy, Hum, and System Information
Want to give some love to three services I’ve enjoyed lately: Kanopy Kanopy is a free streaming service available through your public library. (If it isn’t, ask them to get it!) Abundant with titles from A24, The Criterion Collection, and other high-quality providers, it’s rife with a delightful array of foreign films, indies, and documentaries…
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Queer Eye and Straight Guys
Karamo Brown of Queer Eye recently gave a free talk nearby, so I availed myself of the opportunity to see him in the flesh. He was the same as you see on the show, except this time he made himself cry. He got emotional as soon as the talk began because an old college friend…
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Long Quotes on the ‘Prairie Fires’
Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is about 150 pages too long, and spends a lot more time with Laura’s daughter Rose than I expected or desired. But the first third of the book, with the Ingalls family and Laura as a young adult, was quite illuminating. (Great Scott am…
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Now available: ‘The Wonder Of It All’, a new album of old demos
Surprise! I just released a new album of old demos called The Wonder Of It All, now available on SoundCloud. Since 2010, when I first got my MacBook Pro, I’ve used GarageBand to record song ideas. Some of them remain fragments and half-songs, but many have become full songs. This album is a collection of…