A Funkaoshi Production

The profile of Brendan Fraser I didn’t know I wanted.

Holy shit this story is terrifying.

An old article from 2006 about the drama and squabbling behind the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. My friend Terry sent it to me. It’s a fascinating read, even if you aren’t into mathematics.

The Fields Medal held no interest for him, Perelman explained. “It was completely irrelevant for me,” he said. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.”

For once in my life I didn’t feel like the nigger. As I sat comfortably at a coffee shop, gawking at a group of Israeli soldiers harassing a Palestinian teenager, it was clear who was the nigger. My American passport, ironically, had awarded me a higher position in the social hierarchy of Jerusalem than it did in my hometown of Chicago. As insensitive as it sounds, it was almost a feeling of relief to be out of oppression’s crosshairs for a moment, albeit a very short one.

This comic is worth your time.

Some serious Caligula in San Fransisco. A follow up from Paul Biggar touches on how things are even more fucked up.

If you haven’t seen the original video, it’s amazing. As he notes, “as soon as the video opens immediately it’s offensive. immediately.” The video opens with a white guy rapping, and if you don’t know who Joyner Lucas is, you’re going to assume he’s this white guy who starts his rap as follows:

With all due respect
I don’t have pity for you black niggas, that’s the way I feel
Screamin’ “Black Lives Matter”
All the black guys rather be deadbeats than pay your bills
Yellin’ “Nigga this” and “Nigga that”
Call everybody “Nigga” and get a nigga mad
As soon as I say “Nigga” then everyone react
And wanna swing at me and call me racist ‘cause I ain’t black

This is awesome. “Portland’s top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage—so we grabbed theirs.”

In the final moments before Laura crossed the bridge, she turned to Agent Garza. “When I am found dead,” she told him, “it will be on your conscience.”

Trump is now planning on revoking status for 250,000 people from El Salvador.

This is probably the biggest and most wide spread security vulnerability in the last … well, very long time.

This article is amazing:

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

This article is so quotable I don’t know where to start:

“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”

Or:

“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

Another person locked up indefinitely by our border services agency has died in custody. This is shameful.

This is some serious pulp fiction—but the story is real!

Hoffman’s wife writes about the death of her husband.

There is another important feature of the bitcoin market that could both explain its high valuation and suggest an imminent correction. The crypto market is insanely concentrated. Approximately 1,000 people own 40 percent of all bitcoin in circulation, according to Bloomberg. Just 100 accounts control 17 percent of the market. Many of these accounts have held bitcoin for years because they believe fervently in its value. But if a handful of them sell even a small portion of their shares, it could dramatically move bitcoin’s price, potentially triggering a massive correction, as retail investors (who only bought in because the price was going up) try to sell en masse to avoid losing all of their money. There is an upside to this concentration, however, which is minimal contagion effects. If the bitcoin bubble crashes, it likely won’t spill out into the general economy, like the subprime mortgage crisis did one decade ago.

This article is fascinating. A few of my coworkers are crushing hard on Bitcoin right now. I still think it’s really stupid. I just can’t get over that feeling.

The terrible irony here is that the article focuses on a women who was studying why black women die at such high rates.

Another story about the darker side of YouTube.

TIME picks the women who’ve spoken out against sexual assault and harassment as their person of the year. Trumps going to love that. Well, he does get a shout out.

Discussions of sexual harassment in polite company tend to rely on euphemisms: harassment becomes “inappropriate behavior,” assault becomes ­“misconduct,” rape becomes “abuse.” We’re accustomed to hearing those softened words, which downplay the pain of the experience. That’s one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who would become America’s 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by any standard, vulgar. He didn’t just say that he’d made a pass; he “moved on her like a bitch.” He didn’t just talk about fondling women; he bragged that he could “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

That Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women’s March the day after his Inauguration. It’s why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump’s Inauguration crowd size. “All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors,” says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump.”

This pairs well with stories of TripAdvisor censoring stories of sexual assault at resorts. TripAdvisor is dumb.

Tony Zhou’s series of movie making was amazing, and i’m sad to see it go. The first thing I learned reading this article was that there was a second person involved in making the films, Taylor Ramos.

But as always, there’s a difference between what the law says and how the law is implemented. You could make a video that meets the criteria for fair use, but YouTube could still take it down because of their internal system (Copyright ID) which analyzes and detects copyrighted material.

So I learned to edit my way around that system.

Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’ films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID.

It’s annoying they had to deal with this, but it’s also interesting that the constraints YouTube placed on them helped produce the series unique style. Unfortunately, this could only get them so far.

The script you’re reading right now is the ultimate example of our failure. We could not figure out how to turn this script into a video essay. Half of the things in this script required filming new footage, or using still images or extensive re-writes to fit other people’s footage. In other words, this script shows the limits of the style we forged three years ago — and frankly, it was pretty constricting.

More than a decade before Parks became a civil rights hero for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, Parks led a national campaign against sexual assaults on black women.

Why wouldn’t you also talk about this when talking about Rosa Parks?

This is fire.

This is a very quotable article.

NYT reporting on the under reporting of civilian deaths in Iraq. Shameful.