‘Which is to say, I decided to write a poem.’ →

Ocean Vuong, writing for The New Yorker:

Reading and writing, like any other crafts, come to the mind slowly, in pieces. But for me, as an E.S.L. student from a family of illiterate rice farmers, who saw reading as snobby, or worse, the experience of working through a book, even one as simple as “Where the Wild Things Are,” was akin to standing in quicksand, your loved ones corralled at its safe edges, their arms folded in suspicion and doubt as you sink.

The final sentence in this piece is the most perfect summation of writing that I’ve ever read.

The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali →

David Remnick, writing for The New Yorker:

In his early career, when he declared his allegiance to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, rid himself of his “slave name,” and lost his heavyweight title rather than fight in Vietnam, Ali was vilified as much as he was admired. Millions hated Ali; he threatened a sense of the racial order; he was, in his refusal to conform to any type, as destabilizing to many Americans as he was to the many heavyweights who could not understand why he would just not come to the center of the ring and fight like a real man. He was, for many years, a radical figure for many Americans. For years, many refused to call him by his new name. “I pity Clay and abhor what he represents,” the columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote. Even Red Smith, the most respected of all sports columnists, compared Ali to the “unwashed punks” who dared to march against the war. 

If you read one Muhammad Ali piece, make it this one.

A Guy Trained a Machine To "Watch" Blade Runner. Then Things Got Seriously Sci-Fi.

Aja Romano, writing for Vox:

Just a routine example of copyright infringement, right? Not exactly. Warner Bros. had just made a fascinating mistake. Some of the Blade Runner footage — which Warner has since reinstated — wasn't actually Blade Runner footage. Or, rather, it was, but not in any form the world had ever seen.

Instead, it was part of a unique machine-learned encoding project, one that had attempted to reconstruct the classic Philip K. Dick android fable from a pile of disassembled data.

In other words: Warner had just DMCA'd an artificial reconstruction of a film about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from humans, because it couldn't distinguish between the simulation and the real thing.

I don't understand—couldn't they have picked like, Home Alone? Why Blade Runner, of all the movies for this specific project? Oh, I see:

In other words, using Blade Runner had a deeply symbolic meaning relative to a project involving artificial recreation. "I felt like the first ever film remade by a neural network had to be Blade Runner," Broad told Vox.

Mark this one down in the event that it's the beginning of the end.

"I would take Elizabeth to see "Hamilton.'" →

Joe Posnanski:

The thing about seeing Hamilton RIGHT NOW at its peak moment is that even before it begins, the entire theater is filled with wonder. Every single person would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. As a sportswriter, I often feel that sort of energy at the biggest events, at the Masters or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, but it’s even more pronounced in this theater. People look at each other with the same wide-eyed expression: “Can you believe we’re here?”

And then the show begins, Aaron Burr on the stage, talking about that bastard orphan Hamilton, and within about two minutes you realize the thing makes Hamilton magical is this: It’s going to be even better than you had hoped.

If you're a parent, prepare yourself for this one. If you're a father of a daughter that is a lot like you, even more so.

Trump Universitygate →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

When it began, Trump University offered online classes, but it quickly switched its focus to live classes and seminars, the first of which was free to attend. One of the company’s ads said of Trump, “He’s the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. . . . And now he’s ready to share—with Americans like you—the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.” The ad said that Trump had “hand-picked” Trump University’s instructors, and it ended with a quote from him: “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”

In fact, Trump hadn’t handpicked the instructors, and he didn’t attend the three-day seminars. Moreover, the complaint said, “no specific Donald Trump techniques or strategies were taught during the seminars, Donald Trump ‘never’ reviewed any of Trump University’s curricula or programming materials, nor did he review any of the content for the free seminars or the three day seminars.” So what were the attendees taught? According to the complaint, “the contents and material presented by Trump University were developed in large part by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and Seminar and timeshare rental companies.” The closest that the attendees at the seminars got to Trump was when they were encouraged to have their picture taken with a life-size photo of him.

It's amazing, the lengths that so many people (the writer, the judges, the DAs, the employees, etc., etc.) will go to to paint this patriot in such a negative light.

(On a serious note, if you uprooted this entire story and Donald Trump himself from reality and made it fiction, nobody would publish the story. That's how on-the-nose the entire situation is re: Trump University as a metaphor for his presidential run.)

Elon Musk Thinks We All Live in a Video Game. So What If We Do? →

David Roberts, writing for Vox:

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our five senses, which we experience internally (as neurons firing, though Descartes wouldn't have put it that way). How do we know those firing neurons correspond to anything real out in the world?

After all, if our senses were being systematically and ubiquitously deceived, whether by demon or daemon, we would have no way of knowing. How would we? We have no tools other than our senses with which to fact-check our senses.

Because we can't rule out the possibility of such deception, we can't know for certain that our world is the real world. We could all just be suckers.

This kind of skepticism sent Descartes on an internal journey, searching for something he could know with absolute confidence, something that could serve as a foundation upon which to build a true philosophy. He ended up with cogito, ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am" — but that has not fared well with subsequent philosophers.

Start your Friday off right and get those meaning-of-existence wheels spinning in your brain!

(Bonus comment: imagine trying to explain this concept to Donald Trump? Better yet, imagine Donald Trump trying to explain this concept to someone else?)

Primitive Technology →

Giri Nathan, writing for Adequate Man:

There is a man in Australia who goes out into the bushland of Far North Queensland to live out his caveman fantasies. The practice is called primitive technology, which he describes as “a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials.” Lest the vagueness of “things” mislead you into thinking he’s building tire swings and humble tree forts, just play his videos and know that my dude is building functional weapons and livable huts, chronicled in his wordless, tightly edited, hypnotic tutorials.

I have one rule for this guy's videos—never start them before bed. You will wind up staying up much later than you planned. Please make sure you watch the one I included above. Don't balk at the run-time; you won't even notice the time going by, I promise.

Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise →

Rose Gray, writing for BuzzFeed:

I introduced myself to Taylor as he tried to adjust the fluorescent lights in the beige conference room that would play host to the weekend’s lectures. He had invited me to cover the conference and when I approached, he invited me to sit at a table near the front so we could talk.

We were unable to get a word in edgewise as soon as we sat down. First, a tall college-age man approached Taylor and asked shyly if he would autograph one of his books. Taylor did. He asked Taylor if he would translate into Japanese the “14 Words,” a white supremacist slogan that is a cornerstone of the movement. (Taylor grew up partly in Japan, the son of missionary parents.) Taylor demurred.

A second man came up, bearing a gift for Taylor: a round ceramic plate, about the size of a saucer, with markings on it. He made Taylor guess what it was. Part of a pulley system, maybe? No, the gift was a tribal Ethiopian lip plate, which the man had picked up on his travels. Taylor, who has written that Africa is an “utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy,” accepted it with enthusiasm.

Most years, the American Renaissance conference is an obscure event in an obscure park, attended by a handful of the same fringe figures and elsewise only sparking the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That was before Donald Trump.

Now, I know what Trump supporters are going to say. These aren't the views of Trump himself. He's not at the rallies. He doesn't have a say in who decides to support him. And they are right. But it's not like we see white nationalists lining up to support Hillary Clinton. Or Bernie Sanders. Or hell, even Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or any of the rest of the inhabitants of the Republican clown car. When Donald Trump loses the election in November, white nationalists and neo-Nazis are going to be disappointed.

That means something.

How New York Harbor Pilots Master These Treacherous Waters →

Shayla Love, writing for Gothamist:

He was tall for 13, but lanky. The burly crewmen dwarfed him. The captain offered the pair black coffee and Blake accepted, to feel like one of the grown-ups. The ship was transporting molasses and the air had a thick sweet smell, overpowering enough that when Blake steps on a molasses ship today, he is immediately taken back to that moment: the bitter black coffee, and the warm, sickly smell of sugar.

“That was not a good night,” Blake said. “But when my father walked up on the bridge of the ship, it was like he was king. He’s in charge. Ever since then, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a pilot.”

I happen to be very good friends with a Sandy Hook harbor pilot and I can vouch for the article; everything he has explained to me about the job over the years really is that fucking crazy.

The Backstory Behind David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech

Sam Levine, writing for The Huffington Post:

David Foster Wallace wanted to know who had thought bringing him to Kenyon College to deliver its commencement address was a good idea.

Meredith Farmer, an English and philosophy double major in the class of 2005, nervously claimed responsibility.  

“Go fuck yourself,” Wallace told her. “Fuck you.”

As a famous embracer of cliche, D.F.W. would appreciate the fact that the only way the 'This is Water' speech can be described now is by saying that is has "taken on a life of its own."

/via The Howling Fantods