You Might Like … a Snippet From Mau, Murphy, Gladwell, Garcia, Gould, Clare, and More

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

knowcanada.org – Know Canada – Bruce Mau – “Studio 360 is redesigning Canada. More specifically they’d like to fix the image problem Canada has in the US. As part of this process they enlisted Bruce Mau Design to rethink how Canada appears in the world, creating a new identity for the 21st century, free of the traditional clichés.” Good choice of background music, by the way.

Let Freedom Rain – Political cartoonists across Canada throng to Dan Murphy’s defence after Postmedia censorship – Jymn – This is a blog post about an online animated cartoon about Enbridge that was pulled from the Vancouver Province , according to the blogger. To ensure that cartoonist Dan Murphy’s satire is not lost, he’s put up the video in question on his blog.

The New Yorker – David and Goliath – Nicholas Thompson – An interview with Malcolm Gladwell about his new book on “the art and science of the underdog,” to be published by Little Brown some time next year. It’s not easy being on top… all those pesky kids with slingshots.

The New York Review of Books – What to Make of Finnegans Wake – Michael Chabon – Now here’s an outlier. Have you ever made it past the fist page of Finnegans Wake? No apostrophe, notice. Chabon struggles with this strange and wonderful beast.

humanae.tumblr.com – humanae – Angelica Dass – Talk about strange and wonderful beasts… A photographer places pics of us against backgrounds that exactly match the colour of our skin, labelled with the Pantone number. The reason there are relatively few brown bodies, says Dass, herself brown, is that they’re hard to come by in Madrid. You’ll never use the “skin colour” crayon again.

London Review of Books – Gandhi Centre Stage – Perry Anderson – Wonderful and a little strange, too, was Gandhi, the subject of this substantial essay. A sometime admirer of Hitler and a man who thought the Japanese would win WWII, he’s not quite the person you “remember” him to be.

UCSC Library – Grateful Dead Archive Online – Dead Heads rejoice. There’s a lot of stuff here for you. What you really want, I’d guess, is the music. Well, there are 158 “concert line” recordings, where the voice drones on about tickets and mail order and venue — strictly for the nostalgia freaks. Okay, okay: there are also 8,540 recordings of concerts by fans.

Limelight – The 10 Greatest Pianists of All Time – Melissa Lesnie – Not quite The Dead but still and all worthwhile. And, yes, Glenn Gould made the cut along with Artur Schnabel, Alfred Brendel, Emil Gilels, et alia, each with a YouTube video letting you get some sense of why he (all men) made the list.

IEEE Spectrum – A Brief History of Money – James Surowiecki – From the sublime to the sublimated, the writer of The New Yorker’s business column talks about this most puzzling abstraction — and the tool that various economics schools want to get their hands on.

University of Toronto RPO – Summer – John Clare – “Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come”.