Tag: Pop Culture

Humor, Links, News, Pop Culture, Weekend

Weekend Links

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” 
― Honoré de Balzac

Darlings, it’s been a shit week on the personal front–one of those sorts of weeks where it doesn’t seem to matter how you try and approach a problem, there is no way to proceed without some kind of negative consequence, regardless of desire or intention. Meanwhile, it’s Accountancy Widow Season and Jeff has to work horrible hours to get his assignments over the line and we go days without only a few hours of overlap at times. Blech.

And so, to cope I have put together a great batch of weekend reading for you all–with absolutely no current political affairs for once! Let’s delve into the worlds of science, beauty, music, women and money, and Twitter threads that won’t make you want to burn something to the ground.

This weekend I’m catching up on the things that provide some balance and delight–books, podcasts, chats with friends–and tend to fall behind when work takes over. It’s not going to be a wildly productive weekend, but hopefully it will be restful one. Let me know your plans in the comments.

 

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I should have included this last week, but the truth is there is more mystery than news in this brand launch tease. Any guesses? What can you stateside minions report back?

No kidding.

NO KIDDING.

The only political story I am posting this week because I am too angry about too many things to list and choose to focus solely on foreign policy. What we are doing now is going to have ripple effects lasting generations, and we should care if people are unprepared or incompetent for the job.

We must stop looking to leaders of all kinds and swallowing their PR wholesale (especially when it comes to claims of moral authority of any kind). What people claim they value and promote is meaningless; what people actual value and promote is everything. As our suffragette foremothers said, “Deeds, not words.”

And on that note, why the world being built around men (even and perhaps especially as a default rather than any intended malice) is dangerous for women.

After years of ignoring or avoiding some hard accusations, we are going to have to grapple with another great artist who has caused horrible harm.

A really excellent episode of The High Low recently tackled the issue of great artists who are terrible people: what excuses are made for them, whether we should “cancel” their art, and why we need to think more about the many prospective artists who have never created because of the harm done to them which cut careers and ambitions short. Well worth the listen!

WHEW, this excellent interview with Aminatou Sow about money and work is a piece for lots of people I know, including myself, to either pin or tap to a mirror as a reminder. “There’s this idea that you’re supposed to be modest and put your head down — that work is your “family” and you’re lucky to be there. But work is not your family. The only way work shows how much they care about you is by how much they pay you.”

What a strange story.

Ugh, yeah, I’ve been saying this for a hot minute. #Lizzo4President

On the one hand, I don’t like the increasingly blurred lines between many spaces that social media is creating. But taken a face value and only by intent, I think this is lovely.

Truly, content for our times.

“Cosmological Whack-a-Mole” is such a great phrase, but the whole article on the great unknowns in physics is worth a read.

Solange knew we would need good music this week and blessed us with this album drop.

Speaking of music and queens thereof, this interview with Stevie Nicks is a joy. She has a shawl vault. She revels in cashmere. She is fearless in her devotion to her art and muse. She is literal goals.

The Museum of English Rural Life, lately of museum/duck twitter thread fame, has done it again with a heartwarming story I have been following all week. Long live Merlin.

Headline of the week.

Shameless self promotional plug, but if you haven’t checked out this year’s Oscars Red Carpet Run Down, do!

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture

Weekend Links

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
― Audrey Hepburn

Happy weekend, my poppets. It’s been another wild week of news with a lot of hard stories, but once again I’ve lovingly curated a bunch of links to take you through several of the big stories and even more of the small gems you might have missed. This week we have nature, crime, humor, in memoriam, Black Excellence, and a gem of a short film to wrap it all up. Go forth and read!

Shut up and take my money.

Shut up and take more of my money.

Tiny, jeweled, winged warriors!

Is anyone shocked at this point? Anyone?

In related news, Roger Stone is an idiot. (*shakes head)

Good. More. (And more similar organizations, because it’s abuse it not a monopoly of any one group.)

“What strikes me now as irrational about our response isn’t our ordinary parental instinct to protect our kids from scary stuff. It was our denial.”

“There’s this idea that getting help is somehow cheating…” The communal and familial nature of building wealth is interesting to me, especially given current cultural examinations of wealth and power. There have been a lot of mini pop culture scandals and stories of late wherein individuals are lauded as self-made when they are most definitely not, or some variation thereof. Both Jeff and I had parents who paid for our educations–though we both still earned scholarships, worked jobs (two at one point in my case), and went to a ridiculously inexpensive university for our undergraduate degrees. But privilege is privilege and we have it. Here in the UK, it’s extremely common for parents to help adult children with the down payments that put them on the property ladder for the first time. There are political and policy aspects to wealth building that cannot and should not be ignored. In other words, it is a rare, rare (wo)man who is a financial island and we should probably ditch the myth of the self-made man as it’s inaccurate, unhelpful, and not a little soul-crushing.

Your headline of the week, ladies and gentlemen.

Not holding my breath…

I want this biopic and I want it NOW.

I have not spawned but I know exactly what FOMOG is.

Phryne Fischer, ladies and gentlemen!

RIP to a true fashion maestro who has defined a generation of several fashion houses. I’m curious to see how his successor will pick up the reigns at Chanel and what that will mean for the house, Lagerfeld seems so tied to it in my head that I have a hard time imaging it without him! Adieu, good sir.

Black History Month is not over, and Mr. Obama has some reading recommendations if you are inclined for some self-education. My repertoire of African and black American authors is truly shameful and I’ve been working to correct over recent years.

Oh yes, this is the queer content I want for a weekend reading.

When the history of this current administration is written, I honestly think people will be baffled at how much it got away with due to sheer brazenness. And not in a good way. (Side note, Matthew Whitaker is also an idiot.)

The only Oscars prep I am doing.

I really feel like the recent science reporting on insect biomass collapse has not gotten nearly enough airtime…

What the actual fuck is going on here?!

In better news, put Girl Scouts in charge of everything, thanks.

Let’s end on a sweet note, shall we? Reader, I wept.

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture, Weekend

Weekend Links

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.” 
― Thomas Jefferson

Happy weekend, darlings! The Amazon/New York deal is off, a national emergency has been declared over something that will not substantially affect the very thing that the US government is declaring is the root of the emergency in the first place. What a hideous mess. We are in the upside down.

Never fear, I’ve put together a list of weekend reading for you that is light on the politics and heavy on the pop culture and obscure scientific weirdness. Truly the sweet spot of the Small Dog Nation!

This weekend Jeff and I are doing a belated Valentine’s day date after basically only catching glimpses of one another for a solid week and general life admin. Very sexy and the stuff of true love. Let me know what you’re up to in the comments.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My hypothetical children are doomed.

Spoilers if you have not yet seen Russian Doll on Netflix, but this write up from Vulture is so good. Relatedly, if you have not yet watched Russian Doll, stop what you are doing and binge it immediately.

*Files away as she continues to try and learn how to do her hair, despite being in her 30s.

I had to study up on population distribution in the British Isles for my immigration test, and once again was reminded that for all London may feel like the center of the world, the nation is the size of Idaho with a very unevenly spread populace. A fact driven home by this short bit of pre-Brexit reporting.

This is accurate, do not @ me fellow 90s girls.

Racism and its ugly history is everywhere, and academia is just enjoying/enduring a moment in the spotlight as part of a much larger and overdue examination. It wasn’t until my early 20s that I actually did some hard looking at and grappling with the communities I was raised in and lived in–including my almost notoriously mostly-caucasian university, flagship education program of a religious institution which didn’t start ordaining black men to its priesthood until 1978. Correlation? I think so.

We haven’t had a great archaeology story in a while, enjoy!

After a deservedly-viral piece last month, Anne Helen Peterson is back at it with another piece, this time on the realities of student debt and what some of the long term ramifications of this debt will be. There are racial issues, gendered issues, policy issues, psychological issues all to be considered and Peterson does a great job of parsing through them.

Science is brilliant.

This Medium post on the differences, but more importantly similarities, one woman is experiencing at a 20 year distance was a thoughtful read.

My time in certain industries bears witness to this. What a sobering read…

A healthy society should constantly reassess what it finds offensive, but it is fascinating to consider what used to bar people from public life back in the day vs. what they are able to get away with now.

Farrow dropped his latest. It’s his usual brand of jaw dropping.

What could possibly

Black Panther, is that you?!

I do want better examinations of boys and men and masculinity…but this article seems like a bad misstep. The internet agreed.

This is such a specific problem that I never, ever thought about until I read this piece.

What an idiot…

Good boy, rover.

NEW LIZZO ALERT. Happy Valentines Day!

Holy crap.

And finally, what a mess. I ask because I genuinely want to know and I genuinely need more some expert to tell me: are we at constitutional crisis yet? The whole thing is farcical…and a bit frightening. And once again I have not the smallest faith that the party who has spent the vast majority of my adult life screaming about constitutionality, balanced budgets, limited government, and so forth will do a damn thing to check him. Meanwhile, this action is almost certain to run into legal and procedural roadblocks, all for an outcome that in the “best case” scenario will net the administration less money than congress was willing to give it a year ago if it had…you know…negotiated.

 

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture, Weekend

Weekend Links

“Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
– Thomas Jefferson

Kittens, another weekend is upon us! And as usual, I have sourced a plethora of good reading to get you through the weekend, whether you are hunkered down in the cold or casually flirting with the idea of breaking our your spring clothing. (Don’t do that, crazy person!).

This week in news, we have the whole of the state of Virginia showing its ass, blackmail attempts, more government mess…look, it’s been a rough week. I’ve rounded up the best of serious and trivial reading for you to get you through the weekend without screaming.

What a shambles…

This is a headline!

How is this for sartorial goals?!

It has been really cold the past few weeks….

What a tale!

A YouTuber talks transparently about how they make money, what gendered issues some are up against, and what actually makes a business-successful influencer. I’m fascinated by “independent” media creators and think a lot (probably too much) about how bloggers and vloggers have changed the media landscape.

Virginia…are you okay?

This story is not at all surprising, but is still heartbreaking.

This seems like something we should be worrying about and working to prepare for now.

What the actual fuck is going on with Italian fashion houses right now? D&G, Prada and now Gucci have all done horrifically racist–or if you want to be extremely generous in a way I find mind bending to attempt, extremely tasteless and culturally ignorant–crap recently.

Honestly, The Financial Diet’s YouTube channel has been killing it lately.

MY HEART.

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos has written a Medium post detailing his account of attempts by American Media Inc (AMI) to extort a decision from Mr. Bezos to end an investigation into how they got hold of negative information on his private life. This is of course the same company that has been revealed to use aggressive “catch and kill” tactics in other salacious media stories (most prominently with President Trump’s alleged mistresses). The Daily Beast and other journalists have weighed in to say they have experienced similar intimidation attempts from AMI in the past. In other words, it could be argued that extortion and blackmail are part of their business model. It could also be argued that trying to blackmail the richest man in the world was a hilarious undertaking and how on earth they thought they could coerce him to bend to their will is beyond me. Mr. Bezos accuses AMI’s actions of being politically motivated because of The Washington Post’s aggressive reporting into Mr. Trump’s businesses in particular. Which makes this story all the more weird! AMI is cooperating with law enforcement elsewhere in the Michael Cohen case, so how was this sort of action considered wise if you’re trying to cozy up to investigators?! (ETA: idiots.) Anyway, I applaud Mr. Bezos for detailing this publicly–even as I acknowledge how strange it is to be “on the side” of a billionaire who has cheated on his wife…

A fascinating reveal into Twitter’s actual numbers (and therefore outsized influence?).

Fahrenthold dropped his latest. It’s a doozy.

Everybody needs a Fuck Off Fund. Everybody.

I am very excited about this.

GIRL GANG GOOD NEWS, HANNAH’S BOOK REVIEWS:

NPR review.

Vox review.

Humor, Links, News, Pop Culture

Weekend Links

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” 
― Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

London is freezing, guys. I cancelled gym classes and stayed bundled in at least three layers of clothing for most of yesterday, feeling precisely no shame about any of my life choices. It was not a day to go outside!

January was a rough month, and that was before the polar vortex hit. I’m not sorry it’s behind us! After another doozy of a week, I’m spending the weekend preparing for a work trip and buying a hoover to finish cleaning up from the repair works to our apartment. This project ended up being much more of an ordeal than I could have ever anticipated when the whole mess started back in August. It’s put me off home ownership for a long while to come–never have I been as delighted to not have enough net worth for this amount of property damage to be my permanent problem! Living on the floor of our living room for weeks while the repairs have gone on has been awkward and and stressful and I’m not sorry to have the (literal) mess behind us.

A question I have long pondered!

Here is a 100% delightful profile and feed to brighten your day.

God…no wonder we’re tired…

In case you missed the horrible and horribly important story in The Atlantic about the accusations against Ryan Singer…well, it’s hard to read, but important in the midst of the many (long overdue) conversations we are having as a society.

Relevant to my random, weird interests!

What did the President know and when did he know it, etc. etc. At this point, the “best” explanation for Mr. Trump regarding all his many minions having contact with inappropriate foreign agents, is that he’s such a bad boss and poor manager that he was totally ignorant of large amount of illegality within his personal and political organizations. And of course, this is not actually a very good legal defense at all!

GOOD.

This thread went viral and it is worth every single second of your scroll time.

What a fascinating piece on a topic that is probably beyond the majority of western society.

This Kickstarter project has a backstory!

Ugh, do not want.

Overwhelmed by stuff? Overwhelmed by the Konmari decluttering of stuff? Some help!

DID not want and here we are.

Oh this is a deeply necessary read in our household. I shed like a sheepdog!

In unsurprising news, a disinformation attempt.

Give this person all the awards.

Has anyone else seen The Favourite? I watched it last week and loved it, the performances are absolutely brilliant. Anyway, a relevant piece on Queen Anne and the fact of a royal body, a royal woman’s body, and the body of a woman deemed to be unattractive or unacceptable.

This piece on the importance of self-compassion has really resonated with me. I’ve become increasingly aware over the last couple of years of how brutal I often am to myself. If anyone talked to one of my friends the way I talk to and think about my own person, I’d light them on fire and dance on the ashes–and yet I really struggle with the notion of being kind or gentle to my own body or brain.

 

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture

Weekend Links: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
– Winston Churchill

Gillette released an ad about target masculinity and every single Mens Rights Activist on the internet lost their god damned mines over it. “Hamberders” happened. Theresa May squeaked by a vote of No Confidence in her government but Brexit is still no less shambolic. American elected leaders are in a game of oneupmanship in cancelling one another’s public duties. Approximately one million Democrats are running in 2020. New news about the investigation into the President caused him to frantically tweet that new caravans of asylum seekers are coming to impose shariah law or something…

It’s telling that we are three weeks into the new year and there is already THIS MUCH to recap. I actually forgot that the news about the FBI opening an investigation into a sitting president is less than seven days old…

But never fear, kittens! I have lovingly curated enough good and interesting things from around the internet today to help you in processing the fact that the world is on fire.

I want to live in Jeremy Irons’ house..

Were we living in normal times, this would be administration-ending in its own right. Not the outcomes, whatever they were or may yet be, but just that the FBI felt the need to even look into this.

Less than 24 hours later, this reporting also dropped. Even if the sheer amount of inappropriate contact with known-hostile actors and resources could be explained by dumb coincidence and bad luck (which is one hell of a reach at this point, but let’s allow it), at this point the amount of piss poor judgement shown should invoke some kind of major censure from Congress and others with co-equal authority under Constitutional law.

Why can’t we just say he’s not a good manager? Incidentally, this whole presidency is a great case study for those who claim they want people to run the government like a business. I have never understood this, they are in no way analogous. A business exists to make profit, a government exists to administer services, enforce laws, manage public spaces, fund agreed projects and programs that serve the good of the populace, and maintain infrastructure. These are not the same thing as maximizing profit!

K, so I’m switching careers to become a cheeseplate influencer. Thank you for coming to this important announcement.

Media bias is real, but it seldom cuts along the lines that the people complaining about it most loudly claim it is.

I really liked this short Vlogbrothers video on different types of burnout, which follows the viral Buzzfeed article on the same topic I shared last week.

I now long for a sight of Benny!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rebranded as AOC, has been making waves in the media–mostly thanks to how much attention is being flung at her by white, male, conservative media. It’s included a horrific attempt to pass off nude photos as hers, patronizing language, and attacking her comments while ignoring whole swaths of the rest of the cohort of freshman congressmen and women. Why the vitriol? This writer argues it’s more than run-of-the-mill misogyny (of which there is plenty), it’s deeper than that. (In related writing, this Op Ed about how women are changing the face of power, not least of all by refusing to play into the historical white, male narratives of what power looks like and how it should be practiced.)

This is important investigative reporting on who can access what data about you and how.

What a great piece on whether we may have had that whole slather-on-suncreen-100%-of-the-time thing wrong…

In the interest of even-handedness, Lawfare lays out a compelling case that the FBI has overstepped in troubling ways far too many times in recent years and why that’s a bad thing.

DAMN, girl!

I am delighted to report that, much like unto Logan Paul, I had no idea who this internet person was until this story happened.

This piece from The New Yorker on the interpretations of heaven and hell is an excellent read.

Making space for discomfort.

I’ve learned the value of being read to (audiobooks) as an adult.

Late on Thursday, this piece of news dropped. A bit more granular detail which is also pretty damning. The word “bombshell” is genuinely overused these days, but this qualifies. There needs to be rigorous and impeccable investigation on this point because it does cross into potential impeachment proceedings territory if true.

ETA: The special counsel issued an extremely rare statement in response to this reporting and the news media is still dissecting it.

Of course he didn’t!

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture

Weekend Links

“But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work.” 
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Happy Friday, ducklings! I’m dropping the Links a bit early because it is a particularly scrumptious load of internet-y goodness and I refuse to let a(nother) shocking week of political news get in the way of some things worth reading.

If 2018 was anything to go by, something genuinely newsworthy will drop the moment after I schedule this thing to go live… The shutdown is still on, the Trump Show is still trumping, Brexit is still a flaming mess of malice…truthfully I needed a break from most of it.

Here’s your batch of reading, let me know what you are getting up to this weekend in the comments. I’m going to try and get some writing down, the house cleaned, and a just-because-it’s-fun-and-I-can creative project idea going. It’s been a while since I’ve had the bandwidth to sketch up a project like this so I’m enjoying the process.

This thread of museums and cultural heritage institutions sharing their “best ducks” missed the last weekly links post by sheer bad timing but was simply way too good not to post. My weird little nerdy heart could barely take the glee. Whoever runs this account is my new true love. (Here’s an easier to digest rundown if you don’t have time to scroll…but you’d REALLY be doing yourself a disservice.)

Well…I just…drat…

Something interesting happened where the creative world intersects with the business world recently.

This story is horrendous, full stop. But it is horribly telling that the term “rape” is conspicuously absent from this article.

Here’s a great round up of TED talks to start your year with some inspiration.

This longform piece from Buzzfeed hit me hard and has stuck with me. Why burnout and anxiety are the millennial condition, and how we got here.  You may start off rolling your eyes or yawning, but I hope plenty of people read this through to the end. It describes almost everyone in my general age range that I can name. “To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.” (The follow up piece is worth reading too.)

In related news…

Of course I’m not going to bypass the opportunity to share yet another piece on eschewing fast fashion.

I can’t tell if this is cute or possibly a new for the species. By which I mean humans.

The internet has always been a strange place and we’ve always struggled with how to navigate it. We’re now dealing with the aspect of how much of it is fake.

This is dedication to a goal!

What an important study project this must have been, into those who joined ISIS from the US and why.

Why I decided not to pursue freelance writing full time and as my only source of income: the increasingly grim reality. I suspect this will always be my What Might Have Been personal topic–if I had had a different life or circumstances I might have made different choices–but I found that even as a young woman who was able to land pitches, I didn’t make nearly enough until I branched into other kinds of work as well. I want this to be different, and creative and thoughtful writing to be valued more by society (I sure as hell pay for it), but for so many people it’s not a feasible career. We are missing critical voices and perspectives on every conceivable topic as a society because of it.

Seems legit…/s

Like many, I found the closing quote of this piece extremely telling, “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” In other words, this person voted for a man not on the basis of the bridges he could build or the problems he could solve, but because of the people he said or implied he would harm. President as weapon, not as servant; attack dog rather than home defender. Vox breaks this down more eloquently than I.

Women making change happen.

GUYS. Our girl Hannah Capin’s debut novel made Goodreads Best Young Adult Books of January list!

The White House announced that the President would give an address from the Oval Office regarding the “crisis” of the border (reminder, almost everything that can be termed a crisis–including moral ones–at the border has been a crisis of the President’s own policy and making). All major networks were asked to carry the message, and after some perfunctory handwringing (which is not the same thing as a vigorous debate of how to best coverage a president with record breaking false claims, especially given the precedent of not granting other presidents the same kind of airtime), they agreed. Some thought this was a good idea. Others did not. The speech happened, it moved the national mood not a whit and here we are (presumably) still fighting about it.

Meanwhile – because we live in a reality TV show now – Mr. Manafort’s lawyers either on-purpose-sneakily or stupidly filed some paperwork. Oops. Is this incompetence or a leak, do we think? Because we learned that Mr. Manafort shared some information with people associated with Russian intelligence. And wh

Longtime readers know that my love of collective nouns runs deep, so I was delighted to learn that collective nouns themselves have a collective noun.

And incredibly important and valid point in this piece.

Female scribes!

Who wants this?! Who asked for it?! Bring me their names!

Great, now we’ve got aliens to deal with…

Well, they are late because this is happening.

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture, Weekend

Weekend Links:

“Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.” 
― Sir Walter Scott

Hey there, kittens. I’m back and WOOF there was a lot of news whilst I was away. I shan’t attempt to recap it here, let’s just pick up fresh and lean into the fact that Lizzo has released a new song and there are tons of more women elected to representative office in the US. I can be happy all weekend off of that! It’s 2019 and there is much to do and celebrate.

Let’s kick off with one hell of a Girl Gang Good News Minute: Hannah’s book is coming out this year and you guys need to read it!

The third season of The Trump Show has premiered and right on target there is an old rival from a previous season (a certain senator-elect from the Beehive State), fresh new antagonists (in the form of dozens of new congresswomen and senators), and a disappointing and lackluster character has been written out (hand over the gavel, Ryan). I kid, I kid! I would never think of our government in terms of reality television!

A quick editorial note generally: we aren’t allowing ridiculous comments about a then-teenage woman having fun with a viral sensation or a grown woman’s “likability” distract us. Misogyny is very 2016, guys. We’re on to you and we’re not having it.

The plight of rural America and why a country that is so unevenly resourced with fair wage opportunities is a problem for everyone.

More end of year lists!

Ah yes, content that was meant for me, specifically, to consume.

This. Is. Spectacular.

The essay that made a lot of people (including me) cry recently.

“I’d come expecting to meet fierce partisans, die-hard right-wingers, guys who were truly preparing to fight the real-life battle everyone in the media seems so sure is coming and that a few lunatics are clearly trying to spark. Instead, everyone seemed kind of horrified by the idea.”

THIS is a headline.

Never mind the US government, who the hell is running its Twitter feeds?!

Speaking of, Politico makes the case that our Tweeter-in-Chief is actually getting worse at Twitter. Seeing as how it’s probably the medium most responsible for his”political” career, what does it mean that he’s no longer really a master of the medium and has been supplanted by younger native users and more adept wielders?

Demanding better of men is our mood for 2019.

My goodness, I want these jewels fiercely.

Another gorgeous piece from over the Christmas holiday to make you feel all the feels.

“For all intents and purposes, we’re only 35 years into a 75- or 80-year process of moving from analog to digital,” said Tim Bajarin, a longtime tech consultant to companies including Apple, IBM and Microsoft. “The image of Silicon Valley as Nirvana has certainly taken a hit, but the reality is that we the consumers are constantly voting for them.”

NEW LIZZO ALERT.

A little something to make you think.

God damn it…I’m not crying, you’re crying:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Holidays, Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel

Weekend Links: Festivus Edition

“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.” 
― Hamilton Wright Mabie

My ducklings! My darlings! My scrumptious Christmas puddings!

I’m officially on holiday, can you tell? By the time most of you read this I will likely be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, winging my way westward to the nation of my birth. The past week has been a frenzy of work activity to close as many tasks as possible, whilst juggling the occasions and events of the festive season. The Christmas “do” is over, I’ve dropped off presents to my London peeps, and Now I’ve got eight hours on plane to catch up on podcasts, audiobooks, and reading. How I’m looking forward to it!

We are shamefully unprepared for this holiday. I mentioned previously that November seemed to skate by at warp speed and by the time I felt I had looked up, it was halfway through December and I had managed nothing on my seasonal To Do list. Even our holiday packing is a last minute affair…I pen these words to you in a fit of desperate procrastination between outfit wrangling for two weeks and toiletries. And the sheer amount of mismatched food we need to eat in the next twelve hours to clear out the fridge is positively bonkers.

You’ll get a scattering of missives from me over the next couple of weeks, but I’m taking a proper holiday this year and mostly checking out. You can keep up with our Stateside shenanigans here if you feel so inclined. See you a bit nearer to the new year!

Let’s start with the news. Once again the stories are still breaking fast and hot as I put this post together but what a week! The American president is officially an un-indicted co-conspirator in multiple investigations and his bagmen are being found guilty of crimes left and right. It’s been amazing to watch the propaganda machines whirl this week. In normal times a credible allegation of involvement of a foreign power in his election campaign OR a credible allegation of major breach of campaign finance law OR an allegation of significant and corrupt business practices in his private capacity with corresponding state level investigations OR multiple mistresses would derail a politician. To have all at once may genuinely overwhelm our democracy. It’s an incredible testament once more of how much of a curve this man is graded on and I’m truly baffled as to how many people decided this was the guy they were willing to overturn all the rules for.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

It speaks volumes that he can’t seem to find a competent, willing, able, and viable chief of staff, a whole week after (perhaps presumptively) announced his incumbent was leaving. Though I swear if Newt Gingrich gets it, I will set something alight…

From The New Yorker, summarizing so much of the news out of Trump world generally: “It may be only part of the full story, but what we now know is a powerful tale that combines elements that are familiar from other Trumpworld scandals. It is, at once, shockingly corrupt, blatantly unethical, probably illegal, yet, at the same time, shabby, small, and ineptly executed.”

How politics became one of the many things replacing more traditional religious practices in the west, and why.

Another hero of mine down. God damn it, Neil.

Glove and Boots is back!

Thank god.

Our bigotries cost us. Morally, without question, but also financially. I had a long and delightful conversation with a friend recently after we both saw an item online praising a woman for choosing to take a lower paying job at her husband’s request so that he wouldn’t feel intimidated or inadequate. Congratulations, was my take, you have literally put a price on that man’s pride and the whole family got to pay it. Other prejudices cost us too, and here is a much bigger and darker story about one such bill.

Why lip gloss is relevant again. Look, I’m open to being convinced on this, but lip gloss was the bane of my teenage years and I see no reason to go back down that dark road again.

Why that gene editing story in humans has so many people up in arms: the truth is we simply don’t really understand the complexity of how genes interact within us and the few times we’ve meddled with other creatures, the unintended consequences have ranged from strange to alarming.

Good. He should be anxious. I’m particularly struck by the line that states that that President wants to move away from legislation (actual outcomes) and towards politics (which I think we can safely file under showmanship). This is not a man who has ever actually been interested in governing.

Face facts, countrymen: we didn’t “miss” the rise of white supremacy and nationalism, we’ve been pointedly ignoring it or making excuses for the institutions or cultures that perpetuated it.

We must examine the notion of “adults in the room” who keep getting worn out by (in this metaphor) an adolescent-in-chief. As one writer at Vox has summarized it: “Consider the fact that Trump is now on his second secretary of state (Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo); his third national security adviser (Mike Flynn, H.R. McMaster, and John Bolton); his second secretary of health and human services (Tom Price and Alex Azar); and his second EPA administrator (Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler). He’s just nominated his second UN representative (Nikki Haley and Heather Nauert), though Nauert won’t serve as a Cabinet-level official. By Trump’s methodology of counting interim officeholders, he’s on his third VA secretary (David Shulkin, Peter O’Rourke, and Robert Wilkie) and will be on his third attorney general (after Jeff Sessions and Matt Whitaker), should William Barr be confirmed by the Senate. And then there’s the intra-White House turnover that has given him two press secretaries (Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders) and five White House communications directors (Spicer, Mike Dubke, Anthony Scaramucci, Hope Hicks, and Bill Shine). And the fact that Trump has removed both the chief of the FBI (James Comey) and the head of the Federal Reserve (Janet Yellen) for dubious reasons.”

Time Magazine named their Person(s) of the Year.

Final Vox piece this week, and it’s Ezra Klein’s take on Paul Ryan. It’s not kind (nor should it be): “To be clear, I am not particularly concerned about deficits right now, just as I wasn’t in 2010. But I took Ryan seriously when he said he was. I covered the arguments Ryan made, the policies he crafted, and I treated them as if they offered a guide to how Republicans would govern. I listened when Ryan said things like, “In Europe, generations of welfare-dependent citizens are hurling Molotov cocktails because their governments can no longer fund their entitlement programs. We can’t let that happen here.” Ryan’s office did not grant my request for an interview for this piece. But now, as Ryan prepares to leave Congress, it is clear that his critics were correct and a credulous Washington press corps — including me — that took him at his word was wrong. In the trillions of long-term debt he racked up as speaker, in the anti-poverty proposals he promised but never passed, and in the many lies he told to sell unpopular policies, Ryan proved as much a practitioner of post-truth politics as Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, in Britain… The Prime Minister survived a vote of no confidence but was subsequently humiliated with the EU and generally continues to have the political’s world’s most poisoned chalice of a job. British politics has been wild this week.

Brexit explained through a metaphor. Come for the thread, stay for the follow up puns.

This week in Mormon news, a weirdly deep piece on defecation. Yes, seriously. There is some downright lyrical, scatological writing this this piece. How the hell do I find this stuff…

Reminder…

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Hm. Giulianni seems like he’s looking for his next gig.

WHO DOESN’T?!

Not great for Ivanka. I mean, not surprising, but not great.

 

Humor, Links, News, Politics, Pop Culture, Weekend

Weekend Links

“When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.” 
― Christopher Hitchens

What a week. Mueller and Manafort are playing cat and mouse, his former lawyer has plead guilty to negotiating with Kremlin officials the president is arguing with his own government over the reality of…science? Russian aggression in Ukraine has escalated, the US is lobbing tear gas at migrants at its southern border, Deutche Bank has been raided in relation to longstanding shady money (persons in our government may have the slightest personal interest in this…) and the war in Yemen is reaching new lows of atrocity. I for one am ready for the season of good tidings and comfort, universe. We need ’em.

Here are your links, tell me what you’re getting up to this weekend in the comments. I had an unexpected sick day this week where something nasty knocked me down for a bit so I’m probably going to be taking it slow this weekend. The holiday party season has kicked off and we need to pace ourselves!

NPR does the good work of fact checking: asylum seekers are not illegal and migrants are not invading forces. My two cents: it is possible to want sensible and strong border enforcement and think that teargassing people is morally indefensible. You want better immigration? Spend some of the money you applied to sending troops to the border unnecessarily over Thanksgiving to pay for the judges and clerks to help process asylum applications in the system that already exists to process these requests.

The misogyny is just a fun side bonus…

Abortions in the U.S. are down, and for reasons we should all cheer: fewer unplanned pregnancies. Still work to be done in certain demographics and communities, however, and we should not allow policy makers to prevent that work from being done.

I love the Northern Renaissance masters and the intricacy of their work, so a piece on the hidden history and cover ups in Bruegel’s work was like catnip to me.

I cannot stop thinking about this piece in The Atlantic about how “young people” are having less sex and why. It snakes through the impacts of porn, the epidemic of loneliness, and the mess of modern life…but also touches on how rates of abuse may be shrinking leading in turn to less self-destructive behaviors, and how people of all genders may be feeling less pressure to have sex too soon, or in unsafe circumstances, or be overall less informed. As with all things interesting, the reality skates past a lot of preconceived notions of morality or normality and instead leaves you a lot to think about with no immediately obvious conclusions.

Touch down on Mars!

Girl Gang Good News Minute: my girl’s book just got a delight of a review!

The Guardian’s scoop about Mr. Manafort and the accusations of a broken plea deal is….big.

Also from The Atlantic, their cover story about the private corruptions and long term influence of Mr. Manafort’s work, regardless of the outcome of the Mueller investigation, is a long read but a sobering one. “And while Manafort is alleged to have laundered cash for his own benefit, his long history of laundering reputations is what truly sets him apart. He helped persuade the American political elite to look past the atrocities and heists of kleptocrats and goons. He took figures who should have never been permitted influence in Washington and softened their image just enough to guide them past the moral barriers to entry. He weakened the capital’s ethical immune system.”

Oh thank goodness, the NPR annual Book Concierge is here to make the world a better place.

This whole report is sad and unnerving. We humans are so comfortable in the myth of our own superiority and infallibility that I don’t think most people have a grasp of how cosmically minute our patch of rock is and what fragile a thing is life as we know. There is an oddly philosophical line out of the mouth in of a scientist in this piece that has stayed with me, “‘We notice the losses,” says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. “It’s the diminishment that we don’t see.’”

This Ask Polly column at The Cut had me tearing up at my home desk.

“They simply couldn’t handle him.” This is the best, weird story I’ve read all week.

This guy is scum, but so is the system that enabled him. Power and privilege unleashed and unchecked is awful for all of us.

British journalist, podcaster, literary woman and all around babe Pandora Sykes does a better job of explaining her love of vintage than I could… and I’ve been trying for literal years! She also leaves us this uplifting thought for the weekend:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js