Silent, but Active.

“Like many Argentines, Bergoglio ‘remained silent in the face of atrocity,’ but he was determined to thwart the death squads when he could, said Larraquy, who runs investigations for the Argentine newspaper Clarin. ‘He used back channels, did not complain in public and, meanwhile, he was saving people who sought refuge in the Colegio.'”

AP’s Debora Rey delves into the quiet heroism of Pope Francis during Argentina’s Dirty War. “Critics have argued that Bergoglio’s public silence in the face of that repression made him complicit, too…But the chilling accounts of survivors who credit Bergoglio with saving their lives are hard to deny. They say he conspired right under the soldiers’ noses at the theological seminary he directed, providing refuge and safe passage to dozens of priests, seminarians and political dissidents marked for elimination by the 1976-1983 military regime.”

After the Hitler youth of “God’s Rottweiler”, I presumed the worst when I’d originally heard of the new Pope’s silence during the Dirty War. Having come to think much more of him over his first year as head of the Church, I’m glad to read this.

The Fault in Our Stars.

“As the Sun follows the swirling motion of the Galaxy’s arms, circling around the galactic center, it also moves up and down, periodically crossing the plane that cuts the Galaxy into a top and a bottom half like the two bread slices in a sandwich. The authors suggest that as the Sun oscillates up and down, it crosses a denser layer of dark matter — like the ham in the middle — causing a gravitational push and pull that disturbs comets in the Oort cloud.”

By way of Dangerous Meta, did Dark Matter kill the dinosaurs? Extremely speculative here, but food for thought. “The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which launched last year, will map the gravitational field of the Galaxy and could rule out or confirm the presence of this darker disk.”

The Hopeless, Hungry Side of Town.


“In 1968, legendary badass Johnny Cash reportedly visited Nickajack Cave in his native Tennessee, with the intention of killing himself. Instead, he had something of a spiritual experience in that cave…This macabre personal narrative is visually represented in a new music video for the once and always Man In Black, one which begins by taking viewers right into the maw of that cave, and ends with our exit.”

“I’m no slave to whistle, clock, or bell, not weak-eyed prisoner of Wall Street. Let me be easy on the man that’s down. Let me be square and generous with all. And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead that stretches upward toward the Great Divide.” Via Fast Company‘s Joe Berkowitz, John Hillcoat of The Proposition and The Road has fashioned an evocative posthumous video for Johnny Cash’s “She Used to Love Me a Lot.” The lines above, which begin this clip, are from Badger Clark’s “A Cowboy’s Prayer.

Not in Houston Anymore.

“The artist Scott Listfield has a fixation for astronauts, painting them over 130 times since the early 90s. You’ll typically find them gazing in blank-eyed wonder at pop icons like Optimus Prime, Mario’s coins twinkling behind a cloud, and the Queen in Aliens…Perhaps there’s a statement in this, something about the decline of the Space Age and the cult of culture. Maybe he just likes painting astronauts.”

I feel like I may have blogged this at some point in the past, but couldn’t readily find it. At any rate, and Killscreen points the way to Scott Listfield’s AstronautDinosaur, where NASA’s finest find themselves on all manner of adventures.

My God It’s Full of Stars.

“I’ve seen the Big Dipper thousands of times, perused it by eye, with binoculars, and through a telescope. And yet, even in a wide-field picture like this, there are still treasures to be found there. Just because something is familiar doesn’t necessarily mean you truly know it.”

Bad Astronomer Phil Plait offers up a very high-resolution image of the Big Dipper by astrophotographer Rogelio Bernal Andreo. (Best to see it enlarged.) “Andreo’s photo shows remarkable detail. Of course there are thousands of stars, but I was able to see dozens of galaxies as well. A few of them are quite famous, like the huge and beautiful M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy.”

Hues of History.

“/r/ColorizedHistory is dedicated to high quality colorizations of historical black and white images, and discussions of a historical nature.” Reddit’s endlessly browsable History in Color, with some choice selections collected here.

“In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.” Along related lines, and making the rounds again because of the Ukraine situation, “real” color photos of Russia from 1909 to 1912.

Dames, Drives, Doubles, Dollheads.

In the trailer bin, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jaime King, and Powers Boothe return to old haunts in the trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, now also with Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green, Dennis Haysbert, Stacy Keach, Ray Liotta and Jeremy Piven. I quite enjoyed the first one back in 2005, but it’s been awhile, and Miller’s only gotten crazier in the duration. We’ll see.

He wore a mask for all of one film — For his next trick, he (apparently) never gets out of the car: Tom Hardy goes for a portentous drive in the atmospheric trailer for Stephen Knight’s Locke, also with Tom Holland, Olivia Colman, Andrew Scott (a.k.a. Sherlock‘s Moriarty), Ruth Wilson (Luther‘s Alice), Ben Daniels, and Alice Lowe. Yeah, ok.

In another moody one-man show of sorts, Jake Gyllenhaal has a bit of a doppelganger problem in this look at Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, also with Melanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, and Isabella Rossellini. Let’s just hope it doesn’t fly off the rails in the final act like Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal’s Prisoners.

And finally, tear off your own head: it’s a doll revolution: Domnhall Gleeson tries to grok his bandmate Michael Fassbender’s penchant for papier mache in the quirky trailer for Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank, also with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Carla Aza and Francois Civil. But will Fassbender go the full Dredd?

Lithwick: “Guilt By Association.”

“Once upon a time in America this was called advocating for justice. But in today’s America, it’s deemed a miscarriage of justice…[A]s of today, you are as guilty as your guiltiest client, and your representation of that client — especially if it is both zealous and successful — is now disqualifying as well. Cop-killers deserve no lawyers and their lawyers deserve no role in government service. It’s not hard to imagine the scorching Fox News headlines, under the new standards set forth by the Judiciary Committee today: ‘John Adams Frees Vicious Patriot-Killer in Boston Massacre.’ ‘John Roberts Unsuccessfully Defends Serial Killer in Florida!‘ ‘Anarchist-Loving Felix Frankfurter Advocates for Sacco and Vanzetti!’ Clarence Darrow! Lover of Killers, Monkeys, and Commies; Disgrace to Legal Profession!.'”

Dahlia Lithwick weighs in on the Dedo Adegbile travesty in the Senate today, wherein, for patently ridiculous reasons, seven spineless Dems helped Republicans spike Adegbile’s nomination for DOJ’s civil rights division. As the NYT’s Jonathan Weisman succinctly put it, “Some have called Mr. Adegbile a ‘cop-killer advocate.’ Another word for that might be ‘lawyer.'”

At Canaan’s Edge.

“‘Eric Overmyer and I have taken on a project that was already in HBO’s development stable,’ he wrote. ‘We have agreed to go into a room with Taylor Branch and others and see what can be done for a six-hour miniseries.'”

The Baltimore Sun reports that David Simon is working on a MLK mini-series for HBO, “based on the celebrated book trilogy by Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch…But as per Blown Deadline’s development projects, this is behind another miniseries project for HBO that is closer to production and that we hope to be announcing shortly.”

Rdng is Fndmtl.



“[W]hat Spritz does differently (and brilliantly) is manipulate the format of the words to more appropriately line them up with the eye’s natural motion of reading. The ‘Optimal Recognition Point’ (ORP) is slightly left of the center of each word, and is the precise point at which our brain deciphers each jumble of letters. The unique aspect of Spritz is that it identifies the ORP of each word, makes that letter red and presents all of the ORPs at the same space on the screen. In this way, our eyes don’t move at all as we see the words, and we can therefore process information instantaneously rather than spend time decoding each word.”

Whoa…I’ve read about kung-fu. An intriguing new app aims to turn everyone into speed readers. “Spritz is about to go public with Samsung’s new line of wearable technology.”