Link List #99: Broken communities, a tunnel of fog, and how to defend the EU through conversation - Friends of Friends / Freunde von Freunden (FvF)

Link List #99: Broken communities, a tunnel of fog, and how to defend the EU through conversation

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This week, we’ve got excited about the announcement of an upcoming exhibition by everyone’s favorite artist Olafur Eliasson, pondered about what two recently published memoirs can tell us about “Trump Country,” and visited the model whose portrait was used to engineer the world’s first JPEG.

Links

    • 1 Six years after Olafur Eliasson unveiled an artificial sun in the Tate’s Turbine Hall, the Danish-Icelandic artist is returning to the London museum for the largest-ever survey of his work, reports Dazed. While there aren’t many details yet, Eliasson has confirmed that the exhibition, which opens in July, will feature his 2010 installation, Your blind passenger; a tunnel of fog that aims to ask questions about the power of human senses.
    • 2 “Every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena,” writes Wired’s Linda Kinstler about Swedish Playboy model Lena Forsen, whose portrait was used to engineer the digital image format JPEG in 1973. Revisiting a fascinating, not uncontroversial chapter of computing history, Kinstler tracked down now 67-year-old Forsen to hear from “the First Lady of the internet” herself.
    • 3 When police showed up at John Thompson’s door, he thought it was about him selling drugs. He was later charged for murder and robbery and ended up on death row for eighteen years. In this podcast episode, New Yorker editor David Remnick interviews him to find out the real story.
    • 4 “The two great literary bookends of President Trump’s half-term of grift and chaos have come from survivors of the most broken white communities that helped put him in office,” writes Timony Egon for The New York Times. He’s talking, of course, about J.D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover’s Educated, two triumphant memoirs detailing how their authors escaped the abject poverty they were born into.
    • 5 Fueled by the dream of a “free, borderless, united Europe,” Schams El Ghoneimi quit his job at the European Parliament in Brussels and went on a debating tour of France. In this article for The Guardian, he shares what he learnt from the experience of holding over 60 of these public debates. “[What] struck me most over the course of these debates in France’s heartlands,” he writes, “is just how few people understand the workings and immense benefits of EU membership.”
    • 6 The Eurasian pole of inaccessibility is located at a point on land that is farthest removed from the ocean. It’s also a place where the largest infrastructure project in the history of the world is currently evolving. Few infrastructure projects are grander or more ambitious than China’s Belt and Road initiative – but is it an initiative to enhance regional connectivity, or is it a push for Chinese dominance in global affairs? This article by The New York Times explores the reasoning behind China’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar initiative to connect the world.

Hopefully you enjoyed the reads from this week’s Link List, but if you’ve still got an internet itch to scratch, you can find more here.

Also, be sure to check out FvF Mixtapes for some tracks selected by our friends and favorite artists, and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date with FvF stories.

Text: FvF editorial team

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