A painting of me
  • Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Memoirs: Published for the first time. 

    For nearly 11 years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been a prisoner in Guantánamo. In 2005, he began to write his memoirs of his time in captivity. His handwritten 466-page manuscript is a harrowing account of his detention, interrogation, and abuse. Although his abuse has been corroborated by U.S. government officials, declassified documents, and independent investigators, Slahi tells his story with the detail and perspective that could only be known by himself and the people who have kept him captive. It is impossible for us to meet with him or independently verify his account. Until now, it has been impossible for him to tell his story.

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Like Somone in Love

   1 May 2013, late morning

I was at the Lightbox again last week to watch Like Someone in Love. Iranian super-star director Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film is set in Tokyo and is wonderful. Akiko is a call girl, presumably to pay for her schooling and board in her new home Tokyo. The film begins with her being sent off to meet a retired professor, forcing her to skip out on meeting her grandmother. Like Someone in Love is a film all about deception and human relationships. Most everyone in the film is lying about who they are, who they are with, etc. It’s slow and methodical. A good chunk of the films dialog takes place with characters who appear off screen. (I think every character in the film is actually first introduced via off screen dialog.) A lot of conversation happens about stuff that the viewer doesn’t see till much later. The movie feels very alive. The actors are all fantastic. I really enjoyed this film. Also, great ending.

Learn more about Like Someone in Love at the Lightbox website.

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  • Feed Wrangler. 

    A new RSS service. $19 a year, and it comes with an iPhone application. Feedbin is what i’m thinking of switching to right now, because I really just want something that syncs with Reeder. (So I also might simply go back to Fever.)

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Upstream Color

   30 April 2013, mid-morning

It’s been a week of movies for me. I’m rocking it like it’s 2005. I watched Upstream Color at the TIFF Lightbox a week ago. This is the second film by Shane Carruth, the man behind Primer. Like Primer, it has an unusual narrative structure. There is almost no dialog. A lot of the details about the plot are left unsaid, you just need to infer what’s going on based on what you see and how the characters react to the situations they are in. It’s a film about relationships, another similarity to Primer, but without the whole ‘the plot is a puzzle’ element of Primer. It’s a beautiful film, one that’s hard to describe in a sentence or two. Lucky for you, the trailer is fantastic. It’s probably not a film for everyone, but I think it’s well worth watch.

The official Upstream Color website.

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  • Wikipedia's Sexism. 

    I’d be curious to see what the demographics of the editors of Wikipedia are.

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  • The next generation of Instapaper. 

    Instapaper has been sold to BetaWorks. I spend most of my commute listening to podcasts or reading books, so I find I use the service much less than I used to. It has strong competition now from VC backed project Pocket.

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  • BitTorrent Sync. 

    BitTorrent’s Dropbox alternative goes live. Like Dropbox, Sync will keep folders on various computers in sync, with changes on one being mirrored at another. Unlike Dropbox, there is no cloud service hosting your data. It’s just being shuttled between your computers. (Of course, Dropbox plays nice with your iPhone/iPad, and does versioned backups, etc, etc.)

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  • How I Met My Dead Parents. 

    “You think you know your mother and father, who they are, and what they mean. Then they’re gone and the photos and letters they leave behind tell an entirely different story.”

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