DreamYard—A Community Project in the Bronx Where Art Saves the World →

Ian Frazier, writing for The New Yorker:

The DreamYard Project has a patriotic attachment to the Bronx. Two young actors, Jason Duchin and Tim Lord, founded it, twenty-one years ago, to teach public-school kids in grades K through twelve by using the arts. The idea was to recruit teachers from among working artists of Duchin’s and Lord’s acquaintance in New York and match them with schools whose funding for arts education had been cut. Through a few changes, that has been DreamYard’s basic mission from the start. For some years, the teaching program was in several boroughs, but today it’s only in the Bronx, where DreamYard-sponsored artists in forty-five schools teach about ten thousand students.

DreamYard also holds poetry contests between local kids and kids in other countries via Skype, makes posters for political protests, supplies art work for parks and other public spaces, holds acting workshops for adults, helps to paint designs on local apartment-building rooftops in heat-reflecting paint, and runs arts festivals. It believes that art can save the world.

What an amazing story. I wish I could accurately describe the pride I felt reading this. As someone who spent 20+ years growing up in the Bronx, and has written two novels about the borough, my goal in 2016 is to figure out some way to help with DreamYard.

The Foundation Collection—A Huge Sale of Some Classic Fonts →

MyFonts:

The Foundation Collection provides 75 versatile fonts spanning the most essential serif and sans serif categories – along with a functional set of script and display styles.

This carefully-curated type collection draws from the acclaimed Monotype, Linotype, ITC, Bitstream and other libraries to provide a strong foundation for any designer’s type library – be it beginning creatives or seasoned typographic professionals alike. The Foundation Collection is a go-to typographic tool that will empower you to create effective designs across myriad projects, all without breaking the bank.

75 fonts—worth $490—for $50. If you care about this type of thing (or you have a Mac), you might have some of them already, but chances are you won't have most of them. And even then, it's still a steal. Act now, though. The deal is only available until 12/11.

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue →

Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman, writing for The New York Times:

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century.

First, can I just say—I pity the interns who were responsible for the analysis of "every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week." Second, while I remain firmly entrenched in the "There's nothing to see here, folks" camp re: Mr. Trump's presidential run, this article raises a very important point—his words count. His words, at the very least, will have an effect on public discourse. Our still quite young democracy has a fierce majority view re: what constitutes ideas like "liberty" and "freedom." Democracies far older than ours have already dealt with these issues (dealt with; not solved) and have come to a general consensus regarding the preservation of personal freedom while existing within the boundaries of public freedom without the garish, petulant insistence on freedom as an absolute. It's something that this country, over the course of the next couple hundred years, will be forced to reckon with. Mr. Trump, if nothing else, is a harbinger of it.

The Hard-Working Italian Origins of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree →

Jim Dwyer, writing for The New York Times:

Dressed in overalls and jackets, wearing work boots and hats, the men lined up five dozen strong on Christmas Eve 1931 for that week’s pay at a Midtown Manhattan construction site.

Behind them stood a fine Christmas tree. It had been mounted by the men and draped with the traditional cranberry strings and garlands.

They also decorated it with the foil wrappers from blasting caps, a tool of their trade: dynamiting ancient rock to make way for the modern city.

The rubbled ground where they stood would become Rockefeller Center. Two years later, after 30 Rockefeller Plaza opened, the annual lighting of a giant Christmas tree became the five-star, traffic-stopping pageant that will unfold again on Wednesday.

Now that’s a Christmas story that I can sink my teeth into.

(Also—good thing the politicians weren’t hellbent on keeping out immigrants back then, eh?)

Terrorism in the Age of Twitter →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

Today’s information technology mediates our awareness of dreadful events, such as terrorist attacks, in a manner that makes them feel closer and more pressing. Unless we are dreadfully unlucky, the actual bombs and bullets don’t affect us directly; thanks to social media, though, we are all a part of the aftermath.

One danger is that this distorts the way we perceive such happenings and the scale of the threat that they represent to us. Obviously, ISIS and other radical Islamist groups now represent a real security issue. But how large is it compared to other causes of death and injury?

100 Years of American Tattoos

Good luck ever beating her in a “What does your tattoo mean?” conversation.

/via Devour

Why I Haven't Had a Conventional Christmas in 20 Years →

Steve Albini, writing for The Huffington Post:

Nineteen years ago, my wife Heather Whinna stopped by the post office on the way home. She found bins there full of letters addressed to Santa Claus, left out by the post office for people to read and answer. Curious, she read a few of the letters and couldn't believe what she saw.

These weren't impish requests for toys or a new bike; mostly, they were desperate pleas from heads of households asking for help. It was staggering. People let down by the remnants of a social safety net, without families or abandoned by their families, people suffering sickness, poverty and abuse. People so far out on a limb that they swallowed what pride they had left, took pen in hand and wrote down everything that had failed them, everything that had broken or been stolen, everything that had hurt them and made them feel fear and shame and worry.

Spoiler: they did something about it, and have kept at it for the past 20 years.

/via Pitchfork

The Doomsday Invention →

Raffi Khatchadourian, writing for The New Yorker:

He believes that the future can be studied with the same meticulousness as the past, even if the conclusions are far less firm. “It may be highly unpredictable where a traveller will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination,” he once argued. “The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict.” He offers an example: if history were reset, the industrial revolution might occur at a different time, or in a different place, or perhaps not at all, with innovation instead occurring in increments over hundreds of years. In the short term, predicting technological achievements in the counter-history might not be possible; but after, say, a hundred thousand years it is easier to imagine that all the same inventions would have emerged.

Bistro calls this the Technological Completion Conjecture: “If scientific- and technological-development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.” In light of this, he suspects that the farther into the future one looks the less likely it seems that life will continue as it is. He favors the far ends of possibility: humanity becomes transcendent or it perishes.

In the nineteen-nineties, as these ideas crystallized in his thinking, Bostrom began to give more attention to the question of extinction. He did not believe that doomsday was imminent. His interest was in risk, like an insurance agent’s. No matter how improbable extinction may be, Bostrom argues, its consequences are near-infinitely bad; thus, even the tiniest step toward reducing the chance that it will happen is near-­infinitely valuable. At times, he uses arithmetical sketches to illustrate this point. Imagining one of his utopian scenarios—trillions of digital minds thriving across the cosmos—he reasons that, if there is even a one-per-cent chance of this happening, the expected value of reducing an existential threat by a billionth of a billionth of one per cent would be worth a hundred billion times the value of a billion present-day lives. Put more simply: he believes that his work could dwarf the moral importance of anything else.

I don’t remember the last time that I read something that effected me on an emotional level so much. I’ve been having dreams about this article. I can’t stop thinking about it.

‘Thank God for AIDS! You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse! #red.’ →

Adrian Chen, writing for The New Yorker:

It was easy for Phelps-Roper to write things on Twitter that made other people cringe. She had been taught the church’s vision of God’s truth since birth. Her grandfather Fred Phelps established the church, in 1955. Megan’s mother was the fifth of Phelps’s thirteen children. Megan’s father, Brent Roper, had joined the church as a teen-ager. Every Sunday, Megan and her ten siblings sat in Westboro’s small wood-panelled church as her grandfather delivered the sermon. Fred Phelps preached a harsh Calvinist doctrine in a resounding Southern drawl. He believed that all people were born depraved, and that only a tiny elect who repented would be saved from Hell. A literalist, Phelps believed that contemporary Christianity, with its emphasis on God’s love, preached a perverted version of the Bible. Phelps denounced other Christians so vehemently that when Phelps-Roper was young she thought “Christian” was another word for evil. Phelps believed that God hated unrepentant sinners. God hated the politicians who were allowing the United States to descend into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. He hated the celebrities who glorified fornication.

Phelps also believed that fighting the increasing tolerance of homosexuality was the key moral issue of our time. To illustrate gay sin, he described exotic sex acts in lurid detail. “He would say things like ‘These guys are slobbering around on each other and sucking on each other,’ ” Megan said. In awe of his conviction and deep knowledge of Scripture, she developed a revulsion to homosexuality. “We thought of him as a star in the right hand of God,” she said. Westboro had started as an offshoot of Topeka’s East Side Baptist Church, but by the time Phelps-Roper was born its congregation was composed mostly of Fred Phelps’s adult children and their families.

Nevertheless, Phelps-Roper didn’t grow up in isolation. Westboro believed that its members could best preach to the wicked by living among them. The children of Westboro attended Topeka public schools, and Phelps-Roper ran track, listened to Sublime CDs, and read Stephen King novels. If you knew the truth in your heart, Westboro believed, even the filthiest products of pop culture couldn’t defile you. She was friendly with her classmates and her teachers, but viewed them with extreme suspicion—she knew that they were either intentionally evil or deluded by God. “We would always say, They have nothing to offer us,” Phelps-Roper said. She never went to dances. Dating was out of the question. The Westboro students had a reputation for being diligent and polite in class, but at lunch they would picket the school, dodging food hurled at them by incensed classmates.

It’ll take you about 40 minutes to read this piece, but if you’ve ever spent any time thinking about the Westboro Baptist Church (and in 2015, who hasn’t?), there’s no way you can’t take the time. I would just assume that the film rights to this story have already been bought. Jennifer Lawrence was born to play Megan Phelps-Roper. 

How to Recommend My Podcast in Overcast in 5 Easy Steps

Step 1

Download the podcast app Overcast. It’s free and terrific.

View fullsize

Step 2

Search for and subscribe to I Better Start Writing This Down by tapping the “+” in the upper righthand corner. Once you’ve done that, IBSWTD will show up in the main list of podcasts.

View fullsize

Step 3

Tapping the show in the list will bring you to a list of episodes. The “All” section will show you—yeah, all of them. Tap the “information” button to the right of the episode name.

Step 4

In the popover menu, tap the “Recommend” button.

Step 5

Repeat for all of the IBSWTD episodes that you enjoyed.