By now, you know that David Rakoff, a prizewinning humorist championed by David Sedaris, died Thursday night after two public battles with cancer. Rakoff cultivated a following among listeners of This American Life, the beloved radio show hosted by Ira Glass. In May, he made one of his last appearances on the show when TAL presented “The Invisible Made Visible,” a live stage performance beamed to movie theaters nationwide. Here, Rakoff reads the story, “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather,” about “the invisible processes that can happen inside our bodies…and the visible effects they eventually have.” You won’t want to his miss his poignant last dance. It’s yet another reminder of why he’ll be sorely missed. We’d also recommend spending time with his appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Twenty-five years ago a group of friends gathered in a San Francisco apartment to memorialize companions who had died of AIDS. They used one of the oldest techniques around to honor their loved ones: they made a quilt, the now-famous AIDS Memorial Quilt, with unique panels for each person felled by the disease. Now including some 48,000 panels, the quilt has grown into a massive, public expression of grief. Its panels come from around the world. It was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. (Find more on the history of the quilt here.)
Like any good archive—and the quilt is an archive of life and loss—the AIDS Memorial Quilt serves as a historical repository, a storehouse of sentimental information for scores of people. But beyond that the quilt is a piece of political folk art. AIDS, after all, is a uniquely political disease, at least in the United States. The idea for the quilt was conceived during a candlelight march for assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Efforts to lift the stigma of AIDS are closely linked to gay rights activism.
While the quilt is on view in Washington, D.C. this summer, Microsoft offers the world up close and personal access. Even if the Mall is too small to hold the entire quilt, the Internet isn’t. All 48,000 panels are newly digitized through a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California and the Names Quilt Foundation.
You can fly like a bird over the whole, beautiful piece. You can zoom in to read the thousands of names—some in block letters, others stitched in cursive. You can count the rainbows, too.
You can also search the quilt by name or, if you know it, by the block number of a particular panel through the AIDS Quilt Touch interface. The site allows unique searches for each time the quilt has been displayed. This is important because the quilt is so massive that the Mall in Washington can’t hold it all. It’s always displayed in sections, so if you want to know where a special panel has been on view, recently, it’s now possible to find out.
Kate Rix is a freelance writer based in Oakland. See more of her work at .
Back in 1975, Tom Davis and Al Franken, two Minnesota-born comedians, joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, a new late-night comedy show. Together, Franken & Davis sketched out some unforgettable SNL characters — The Coneheads played by Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman. Nick The Lounge Singer, a character inhabited wonderfully by Bill Murray. Julia Child brought to life by Aykroyd again. 37 years later, Saturday Night Live is still going strong.
The Franken & Davis comedy team broke up in 1990. Time passed. And, in 2009, their lives went in very different directions. Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate. Tom Davis was diagnosed with throat and neck cancer — the disease that finally took his life yesterday. In recent months, Davis wrote openly about his journey with cancer. In a blog post called The Dark Side of Death, he joked about indulging in medical marijuana (“These days I get my marijuana through airport security by hiding it in the morphine”) and the day he’d “de-animate.” But he also talked movingly about the perspective the disease gave him, writing:
I wake up in the morning, delighted to be waking up, read, write, feed the birds, watch sports on TV, accepting the fact that in the foreseeable future I will be a dead person. I want to remind you that dead people are people too. There are good dead people and bad dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people. Dead people have fought in every war. We’re all going to try it sometime. Fortunately for me, I have always enjoyed mystery and solitude.
Many people in my situation say, “It’s been my worst and best year.” If that sounds like a cliché, you don’t have cancer. On the plus side, I am grateful to have gained real, not just intellectual empathy. I was prepared to go through life without having suffered, and I was doing a good job of it. Now I know what it’s like to starve. And to accept “that over which I have no control,” I had to turn inward. People from all over my life are reconnecting with me, and I’ve tried to take responsibility for my deeds, good and bad. As my friend Timothy Leary said in his book, Death by Design, “Even if you’ve been a complete slob your whole life, if you can end the last act with panache, that’s what they’ll remember.”
I think I’ve finally grown up.
When Davis said that “some of my best friends are dead people,” he was probably thinking of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia too. Here, you can watch Davis and the Grateful Dead frontman cook a meal together, and above we bring you Franken & Davis conducting a Grateful Dead trivia contest in 1980. Thanks to Tom for the memories and laughs.
Metafilter recently featured this Big Think clip of Henry Rollins telling the story of his most life-changing decision. This choice, of course, was the one that brought him to the front of punk rock band Black Flag. Before he made it, he could call himself only a college dropout assistant-managing a Washington, D.C. Häagen-Dazs. In 1981, after catching one of Black Flag’s New York shows — during which he happened to climb onstage and sing a song with them — he decided to try out to become the group’s actual singer. When Rollins ditched the ice cream game for the day (a forfeit, he recalls, of no more than $21) to audition, Black Flag went from his favorite band to his band. Thinking back, he realizes he had little to lose: if he didn’t give it a shot, he’d find himself looking down the barrel of a long, hard existence on his feet, answering to customers all day, every day. If he gave it a shot and didn’t make it, he’d at worst feel humiliated, but, as he puts it, “humiliation and young people kind of go together.”
“I don’t have talent,” Rollins insists. “I have tenacity. I have discipline. There was no choice for me but to work really hard.” You may recall him making a similar point in his previous Big Think video we featured, in which he recommended going at one’s pursuits with a “monastic obsession.” But this time, he adds a note of fear. He talks about coming to understand that, without relying on his four pillars of “application, discipline, focus, repetition,” an entity he calls “the America” would have gotten the better of him. This term seems to refer to the constant threat of crushing mediocrity he feels in the United States. “Every moment I am alive is because I have not been murdered by the America,” he says in another interview. “The tasks I set out for myself are what I do to beat the perfect pointlessness of life.” Even if you don’t conceive of your own situation quite so grimly, Rollins offers a perspective worth considering. Perhaps his recruitment into Black Flag strikes you as a lucky break; he certainly considers it one. But as Brian Eno, another cultural figure as well known for his point of view as his music, once said, “Luck is being ready.”
Author of the novel Giovanni’s Room and the nonfiction collection “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin was also a scathing social critic, a witty yet formidable media personality, and a literary ambassador for civil rights. And, as an outspoken gay man, he decried discrimination against gays and lesbians. In 1965, he accepted an invitation by Cambridge University to debate the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley on the subject, “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.” In the video above, Baldwin (introduced as the “star of the evening”) delivers his stirring opening remarks, setting the tone he maintains throughout and pulling his nearly all-white audience to the edge of their seats.
Buckley, founding editor of the conservative journal National Review, had come out four years earlier against desegregation and Civil Rights legislation and was in the midst of his ultimately failed 1965 New York City mayoral campaign. He was always willing to engage with his ideological adversaries (see him debate Noam Chomsky in 1969 on his long-running television program, Firing Line), but remained a staunch opponent of liberalism. In this clip from the debate, Buckley responds to many of Baldwin’s assertions:
Baldwin had just finished his novel Another Country when this debate took place. He was 41, Buckley 40. While both are well-known for the rhetorical savvy on display here, in this case at least, Baldwin proved the more persuasive voice. After the debate, the Cambridge Union Society took a vote and decided the issue in his favor, 540–160.
In 1984, Jon Stewart graduated from The College of William & Mary. In 1999, he began hosting Comedy Central’s news program The Daily Show. In 2004, he returned to his alma mater, immeasurably more influential than he’d left it, to give its commencement address. Despite a dated crack or two — this was the heyday of George W. Bush, the President who arguably gave Stewart’s Daily Show persona both its foil and raison d’être — the speech’s core remains sound. You, Stewart tells the massed graduates, have the power to become the next “greatest generation,” though the chance appears especially clear and present because of how the last generation “broke” the world. “It just kind of got away from us,” he half-jokes, his grin compressed by seriousness. That admission follows a stream of self-deprecation hitting everything from his tendency toward profanity to his unusually large head as an undergraduate to how his presence onstage devalues William & Mary’s very reputation.
Whether or not you find the world broken, or whether or not you believe that a generation could break or fix it, Stewart still packs a number of worthwhile observations about the place into fifteen minutes. He perhaps delivers his most valuable words to these excited, anxious school-leavers when he contrasts the world to the academic environment they’ve just left: “There is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.” Stewart communicates, as many commencement speakers try to but few do so clearly, that you can’t plan your way directly to success in life, whatever “success” might mean to you. He certainly didn’t. “If you had been to William and Mary while I was here and found out that I would be the commencement speaker 20 years later, you would be somewhat surprised,” he admits. “And probably somewhat angry.”
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard that Nora Ephron, the screenwriter best known for “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died yesterday in Manhattan. She was 71. Her bout with leukemia apparently wasn’t widely known, but discerning readers of her 2010 book, I Remember Nothing, could have sensed something was wrong. The book closes with two lists, each revealing on a couple of levels.
What I Will Miss
My kids · Nick · Spring · Fall · Waffles · The concept of waffles · Bacon · A walk in the park · The idea of a walk in the park · The park · Shakespeare in the Park · The bed · Reading in bed · Fireworks · Laughs · The view out the window · Twinkle lights · Butter · Dinner at home just the two of us · Dinner with friends · Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives · Paris · Next year in Istanbul · Pride and Prejudice · The Christmas tree · Thanksgiving dinner · One for the table · The dogwood · Taking a bath · Coming over the bridge to Manhattan · Pie
What I Won’t Miss
Dry skin · Bad dinners like the one we went to last night · E‑mail · Technology in general · My closet · Washing my hair · Bras · Funerals · Illness everywhere · Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism · Polls · Fox · The collapse of the dollar · Joe Lieberman · Clarence Thomas · Bar mitzvahs · Mammograms · Dead flowers · The sound of the vacuum cleaner · Bills · E‑mail. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it. · Small print · Panels on Women in Film · Taking off makeup every night
Even more than in the U.S., women in Europe lag behind men in the science and engineering professions, accounting for barely a third of science researchers. Understandably concerned about the gender gap, European Union officials launched a campaign targeting girls between the ages of 13 and 17. Their message: Science is cool. Girls can do it and make a difference in the world.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, the resulting video “Science: It’s a Girl Thing” is about as on point as a Spice Girls video.
The first clue is the lipstick i in Science. Three vamps are silhouetted Charlie’s Angels-style as dance music pulses away. A young man in glasses gazes over his microscope in curiosity as each girl tosses her curls or shows her perfect foot in a high heel.
Science? Yay! Let’s shop!
One hot babe does indeed take some time to write formulas willy-nilly on some plexiglass while others giggle between shots of beakers, rouge and exploding eye shadow.
When my 13 year old daughter watched the video, she thought it was an ad for a cosmetics company.
The European Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn defends the video as a way to “show girls and women that science does not just mean old men in white coats.” No, it means a young man in a white coat who seems to wonder what the three ditzy dames are doing in his lab. The video has generated so much criticism that the E.U. has pulled it off the Science: It’s a Girl Thing website and replaced it with an interview with a young Polish woman working on her PhD in virology.
This video is much better. But what’s with the silly cutaways to frozen yogurt?
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. Check out more of her work at .
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