In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
The seven kingdoms of Westeros are poised for fanfare, once again. A new Game of Thrones prequel, set 16 years prior to the events of the show, will debut on Broadway in 2023; and promises to uncover morelies, mysteries, and prophecies. But there is a lot riding on this: fans are well within their rights to hope the production corrects the wrongs of an “inexcusably bad” series finale that toyed with the hopes and dreams of many GoT enthusiasts.
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Imagine a horizontal Empire State Building, which is over 400 ft tall — that was the size of the Ever Given ship stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal. The ship’s saga had the internet fascinated: there were memes, personal reflections, economic revelations. But all that’s fine: most importantly, the bottleneck was a near-perfect allegory of our times: “the boat representing the crushing weight of pandemic blues, procrastination” wedged in the canal, like “a coin stuck in a vending machine.”
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For more than 50 years, the Arecibo observatory hosted the world’s largest single-aperture telescope in the world — it was ‘accidentally’ constructed during the Cold War and ended up paving the way for radio astronomy to thrive. The telescope detected the presence of ice on Mercury, mapped the surface of Venus, had many achievements to its name. Until it collapsed and triggered an existential crisis for the local community in Puerto Rico and scientists globally, who now mourn its absence as if it is the death of a “family member.”
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In gender transitioning and trans health care, corporates are seeing untapped investment opportunities, itching to create an industry reaming with tech solutions and quick-fixes. The subscription services, apps, and other service providers seem to be quantifying the experience of transitioning — creating an ‘app-ification’ of transness. But pushing them into a surveillance capital model may further render trans people invisible.
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What was it about April Fools’ Day this year that made it inconsequential? The novelty of pranks has endured a generational and cultural gap, but wily attempts at humor just didn’t seem to fly this year. Perhaps, because the pandemic exposed how often, and how much, our lives are governed by ‘immense stupidity.’ (Covid19 denialism? using chants as a defense to the pandemic?) Really, if every day feels like a hoax, who cares about April 1.
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The sleepy village of Keeladi in Tamil Nadu conceals excitement: the archaeological explorations on the land in recent years have revealed a “mind-boggling” cultural wealth, making it one of the most stirring archaeological projects today. Accounts of its excavation say the village dates back to pre-Vedic times; some surmise that it may hold links to the Indus Valley Civilization. The exploration has died down in frequency and rigor due to waning governmental interest; but Keeladi continues to present a bewitching mystery about the origins of people and the land they once inhabited.
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How smart are computers, really? Enough to improve themselves in a never-ending cycle? That appears to be the current musing of experts who are intrigued by the potential of superhuman intelligence: by creating an artificial intelligence software that is as intelligent as a human being, fuelling an “ideological explosion” of sorts. But this presumes that a human-equivalent A.I. program, running silos for years, is a good way to produce major breakthroughs, which may not be the case.
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An unlikely love story was brewing during the social revolution in the 1910s: a British writer, who preferred Jane Austen to Marxism, fell in ‘red romance’ with a Soviet Union diplomat. Her story represents a tussle with mainstream history, which has insisted on remembering her as the ‘wife of’ someone. But select memories and old records show her married life under the name of Madame Litvinov deserved more: she was a hostess, a people’s ambassadress, a Hollywood-style celebrity, a veritable household name in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Her choice of soft diplomacy: wit, and a lot of tea.
