Football’s back, baby, except, depending on the continent, it also never left (happy A-league finals szn). I’ve also been fully indoctrinated into the Top Gear/Grand Tour hive and have started watching and enjoying Clarkson’s Farm, a new show on Amazon Prime about Jeremy Clarkson trying to run a farm. Reader, it’s actually quite good.
Here’s a song:
Onto the links:
This is a truly weird, wild look at @yashar, who I don’t follow myself but have seen retweeted onto my timeline so many times over the years that I may as well have been following myself:
How Ali acquired so many powerful supporters is a bit of a mystery. Even his closest allies are a bit fuzzy about how they met. “I don’t remember how we became friends,” says New York Times Washington correspondent Maggie Haberman. Zucker has a hard time recalling, too. “That’s a really good question. How do I know Yashar?” So does CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “I couldn’t tell you how we met, but suddenly he was a presence in my life—a wonderful one,” he says. “It just feels like he’s always been in my life. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met him in person.”
I don’t know why, but I’ve found myself looking forward to Euro 2020+1 more than I have any other football tournament in a really long time. Maybe because it’s the first big international tournament post-(are we post yet?)pandemic. Jonathan Liew (of course/as always) puts it so well:
And so, here we are at last. It’s been a long road to get us here: a beaten path of pain and postponement, of dashed hopes and forestalled dreams. But shortly before 9pm local time, with a little luck, perhaps the bars and cafes of Rome will swell once more. And across the continent, men, women and children will once more tether their happiness to the fate of a little white ball on a vast green pasture. It won’t solve our problems. It won’t bring back our loved ones. But for 90 blissful minutes, we may just get to feel normal again.
An interesting look at Zooey Deschanel being labelled quirky/the manic pixie dream girl and what it’s meant for her career.
What set girlbosses apart from regular bosses was pinning feminism to hustle. Women like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and former Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso — who coined the term — were finally wrangling power away from the men who had held it for so long, which was seen as a form of justice. As the concept was codified, the idea of the girlboss became about the melding of professional self and identity, capitalist aspiration, and a specific (and arguably limited) vision of empowerment.
I hate that this spends the first few paragraphs faffing about framing the point around millennials, but it eventually gets to the fact that venture capital firms pouring billions into services like Uber and Airbnb, who in turn spent that money on subsidising their services for years in order to lure customers with low prices, probably wasn’t the most sustainable business model.
Some tweets:
me longing for the Amalfi coast:
At this point I’m legally obligated to link you to new Bleachers music so here you go: the latest Bleachers single, which again is far more upbeat than the title suggests. It has a killer sax solo and it’s just so much fun.
You know the drill. @ me or email me with any thoughts, good links, etc!