Hi gang. Apparently, I started doing these at the end of August last year! And what a year it’s been. I remember absolutely nothing.
I’ve spent the last few days devouring every piece of news/goss emerging about Justin Langer and the Australian cricket team, reading A Little Life (I’m 500/720 pages in - send me your thoughts and prayers), and watching random explainer videos on this youtube channel about how things like the US interstate highway system and aircraft carriers work. I finished a good kdrama (Suspicious Partner) two weeks ago and can’t commit to another show yet, so random youtube videos is it. Basically, I’m at this stage of lockdown:
Here’s a song:
And now the links:
Apologies for the second 9/11 link in a row of good chats, but I found this on how the National September 11 Memorial & Museum was developed, and the stories it has chosen to tell - and maybe more importantly, the stories it’s chosen not to tell - fascinating.
If you’re terminally online, you may have noticed over the past week or so that there’s been a lot of Discourse about Ted Lasso, specifically about whether this season has actually been good or whether everything’s been going too smoothly/there are no villains and no conflict/it feels disjointed and doesn’t really have any big story arc (pick your issue). I will say this season does feel different in a way I can’t really put my finger on, but as I’m in lockdown, each new episode is still something for me to look forward to every Friday, and I’ve been enjoying it (and the She’s a rainbow sequence from last week’s episode is a truly exquisite five minutes of TV). Anyway, this is a good look at the debate.
On the absurdity of opinion columnists:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the role of professional pundit should be viewed in similar terms to those workers who had to shovel debris at Chernobyl. No one should do it for very long, and ideally, no one would do it at all.
Here are some tweets:
That’s it! As always, @ me or email me with any thoughts, good links, etc!