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Shapeshifter: The Shed As Shell – Relevance TBD

Justin Davidson: “The idea of a building that could be dismantled, rearranged, and reassembled has not generally fared well in the world of building codes and construction trades. The Fire Department does not take kindly to the idea that a staircase that’s there today may vanish by tomorrow. The arts, too, have rigidities of their own. Impresarios may not care to pin down a work with a label like “theater,” but the stagehands’ union wants to know whether a show falls under its jurisdiction.” – New York Magazine

Dan Robbins, Inventor Of Paint-By-Number Kits, Dead At 93

“Mr. Robbins, whose creations adorned millions of American homes in their heyday, was a self-described ‘right guy at the right time in the right place.’ The time was the prosperous lull after World War II, when Americans had newfound time for recreation. The place was Detroit, birthplace of the assembly line, where Mr. Robbins, then in his 20s, worked for Palmer Paint.” – The Washington Post

Big Tech’s War To Dominate The World

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are waging a war of all against all—a war for all of your time, all of your money, all of your worldly interactions and desires. They want to be your one indispensable partner for navigating life, and to get there, they must destroy one another. If the government doesn’t step in, the American public will become collateral damage. – The New Republic

Do Romance Novels Have A Race Problem? That’s Been An Argument For A Long Time

“For decades, publishers had confined many black romance authors to all-black lines, marketed only to black readers. Some booksellers continued to shelve black romances separately from white romances, on special African American shelves. Accepted industry wisdom told black authors that putting black couples on their covers could hurt sales, and that they should replace them with images of jewellery, or lawn chairs, or flowers. Other authors of colour had struggled to get representation within the genre at all. – The Guardian

Contemporary Poetry Has Devolved Into Banality And Navel-Gazing

Brooke Clark: “Much of contemporary poetry has become something of an assembly line, turning out verbal representations of minor occurrences in the poet’s daily life. Most formulaic are the lyric poets, who often come across like oversensitive souls wandering the world logging every detail of every impression that strikes them … The lyric is, in a sense, the selfie of the poetry world: it provides a perfectly contrived snapshot of the poet at a moment in time.” – The Walrus