Dispatches

“You can be an outlaw and be anything you want”: A Memory of Lester Bowie

I knew Lester Bowie had been dead for a long time, and I think I know that dead people do not get up and dance at the funerals of people they have loved. But I never could escape an eerie feeling. I felt that Lester would twirl into the sanctuary behind the Bosman Twins, his signature white coat flowing open, waving his shining trumpet and finally blowing it with the voices of edgy angels.

Not Being John Malkovich: TCR at the DNC

The reporter was the same height as John Malkovich, and baldheaded, and got a similar pissy look on his face when he was tired. (Malkovich grew up 15 miles from where the reporter grew up.) The reporter felt as if he looked like John Malkovich in that movie where he was walking through the crowd in a station, trying to look normal, but doing it so obviously that Bruce Willis just had to laugh.

The Aural Prison of Leaf Blowers

(Wiki-CC)

 

 

 

A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car…

Humanity’s Tiny, Ultra-Durable Insurance Policy

The “eternity crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.

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