Maud Newton

thisistheverge:

Who am I? Data and DNA answer one of life’s big questions

Genealogy’s next phase, which is quickly approaching, is actually its end game. The massive accumulation, digitization, and accessibility of data combined with recent advances in DNA testing mean the questions we have about our families — who they were, how they got here, and how they’re related to us — will soon be instantly solvable. Realistically, the pursuit of family history as it exists now probably won’t be around in 20 years: most of the mysteries are disappearing, and fast.

So, who are we? How did we get here? Where did we come from? And where are we going?

Some thoughts on the transformation DNA testing has wrought (and will wreak) on family research. 

lizbrown:

From Delsarte System of Oratory (1893).

How to read eyes in the late 19th century. Gonna compare with this modern empathy test.

irisblasi:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal financial ledger is now available online, including categories such as “Money Earned by Writing since Leaving the Army” and “Zelda’s Earnings.”

Among the revelations: Fitzgerald was a terrible speller, he was equally bad at arithmetic, and he earned less than $2000 for the original publication of Gatsby. (via)

Great supplement to Fitzgerald’s notebooks. (“Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory my younger, Anthony my worry. Dick my comparatively good brother but all of them far from home.”)

Molly Crabapple grew up thinking of art not as “something where you had to get an MFA from Yale then schmooze people in New York,” but as a trade that paid the bills. Her mother—a single mom—illustrated toy packaging for products like Cabbage Patch Kids and Holly Hobby. “Being an artist was how my mom fed me. … It was an almost working-class way to make a living.”

She’s carried this attitude with her. Although Crabapple is respectful of many who’ve gone through formal, higher training she finds the idea that you can apply credentials to art “morally objectionable. Art is a trade, and creativity and talent is a gift. … What people are essentially saying now, when they’re saying oh, you have to have an MFA to be a legit artist, is you have to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a legit artist, and to me, that’s so revoltingly classist.” There are many ways to make a living through art, Crabapple says, “and the Internet’s really magnifying that.”

For the New Republic, I write about art after Occupy Wall Street, Molly Crabapple’s view of art as a trade and creativity as a gift, and her politically charged work, including the massive paintings of her new show, “The Shell Game,” which Chris Hayes calls “bracing, exuberant altarpieces for the revolution.

A feverish E.B. White is haunted by his late dachshund (who probably wasn’t really a dachshund):

I am lying here in my private sick bay on the east side of town between Second and Third Avenues, watching starlings from the vantage point of bed. Three Democrats are in bed with me: Harry Truman (in a stale copy of the Times), Adlai Sevenson (in Harper’s), and Dean Acheson (in a book called A Democrate Looks at His Party). I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund, although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred, my dash-hound everlasting, dead these a many years. In life, Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse. All this dark morning I have reluctantly entertained him upon the rumpled blanket, felt his oppressive weight, and heard his fraudulent report. He was an uncomfortable bedmate when alive; death has worked little improvement — I still feel crowded….

I find it difficult to convey the peculiar character of this ignoble old vigilante, my late and sometimes lamented companion. What was there about him so different from the many other dogs I’ve owned that he keeps recurring and does not, in fact, seem really dead at all?

From “Bedfellows,” Turtle Bay, February 6, 1956, collected in the Essays of E.B. White. 

Over at Twitter, Susan points out that the pup pictured is Suzy, not Fred.

The Hivemind, from Molly Crabapple’s Shell Game. The show opens Sunday and it’s all about Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide protests of 2011, and the hope and despair that fueled them.