Tag: Links

After some time off for medical and personal stuff, I’m back on the blogging horse and closing my tabs again.

• Far Out: The songs Steely Dan and Eagles wrote about each other: “I think it drove him nuts”. A friend on bsky was talking about songs musicians wrote about other musicians. This isn’t exactly that, but it was my contribution to the thread.
• Catalan News: Supreme Court forces Catalan National Museum to return Medieval Romanesque paintings. They were removed from the Sixena monastery in Aragon during the Spanish Civil War.
• AP: George W. Bush’s latest paintings showcase scenes from his presidential library in Dallas. One minute video about the latest exhibit at the library in Dallas, which I have never been to. My late mother-in-law was a docent and we didn’t get to it before COVID hit. She was never able to return, unfortunately. I may go see this show before it leaves for her.
• Flytrap: The Quiet Provocation of Flying the Mexican Flag. The author is in North Carolina, so it’s a little different than it would be in Texas, even in North Texas.
• Getty: Getty Exhibition Explores the Splendors of Mycenaean Greece. This is the first exhibit at the Getty Villa Museum since the Palisades fire. I would love to go.
• Youtube: Home Free – Lose Control. A cappella Teddy Swims cover. I didn’t know the original (though I am familiar with the artist) but this is gorgeous. Although as is often the case with love songs written from the dude perspective, I side-eye the protagonist’s life choices.
• Math Equals Love: Geometric Coloring Pages. Because sometimes you just have to do things with your hands.
• Vulture: In Diego Luna’s Orbit. All about his work on Andor, which I am more and more convinced I need to stop dithering and watch.
• ABC News (Australia): Private Health insurer Bupa repays millions over incorrectly rejected claims. It’s not just here.
• Variety: ‘Sinners’ on Max Will Include a Black American Sign Language Version. That’s awesome.
• Where’s Your Ed At: Make Fun Of Them. Ed Zitron’s suggestion for how to deal with AI prophets who talk in a way they think is over your head but is actually incomprehensible babble.
• Reactor: Nautilus Premiere Is Engaging, But Can It Do Justice to Captain Nemo?. Also going on my list.
• The Guardian: ‘Lidar is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered. I sent this to my husband, who participated in an early DARPA self-driving challenge as part of a project at a former workplace.
• BBC: ‘It was the peak of the flower power era’: The story of the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970.

• Glamour UK: ‘I know I can’t live like this forever’: Meet the red-pilled men trying to quit the manosphere.
• Food & Wine: Inside the Underground Market Making Restaurant Reservations Impossible. This is something I worry about as Dallas gets to be a hotter restaurant market.
• Wired: 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere.
• AM NY: The wrong man: Bronx native left devastated after judge denies exoneration following 30-year legal battle. The DA’s office sought exoneration because the prosecution had misbehaved back in the 1990s. But the judge wouldn’t overturn the verdict because other convicts might decide to try to overturn their own verdicts. Judge Alvin Yearwood, I hope you get tossed off the bench and land hard on your ass.
• Time: Why I’m Resigning from Positions at the National Science Foundation and Library of Congress. By Alondra Nelson, who was Director of Science and Technology Policy for the White House under the Biden administration.
• New York Times: The Chef Has a Love-Hate Relationship With Your Favorite Burger.
• San Francisco Chronicle: Thomas Keller asked me to leave the French Laundry. It turned into my most extraordinary night as a critic. This is another one of those things I worry about as Dallas becomes more of a restaurant town. It sounds like an extraordinary experience. But at the same time, it’s not just the money, it’s all of the emotion and expectation and perfection expected of the chef and the patron. I like my dinners out a little less high-wire.
• The Guardian: ‘Customers are being duped’: how murky grocery sales tactics are squeezing some Kroger shoppers. This is not why we don’t shop at Kroger any more, but it’s part and parcel with the unpleasantness of the store that’s why we don’t. The baskets in this article are overcharged by more than 15%, which adds up.
• GQ: Why the Toupee Is Making a Comeback With Millennial Men. It makes sense but I’m Gen X and I prefer natural (lack of) hair.
• Hollywood Reporter: Forget Psychedelics. Everyone’s Microdosing Ozempic Now. On the one hand, let’s have enough for diabetes patients. On the other hand, if it does half the stuff it’s supposed to do, no wonder everyone wants to take it. On the third hand, I worry about the side effects down the road.
• Paste: Andor Season 2 Finale Postmortem with Writer Tom Bissell. I have to watch this show.
• And Vulture: ‘Before Anyone Else Defines It, I’m Going to Define It’ Andor creator Tony Gilroy reflects on five years inside the Star Wars universe.
• Also, Tom and Lorenzo: ANDOR Didn’t Show What STAR WARS Could Be, It Showed What It Always Was. Star Wars is what you make of it and Andor is part of the show for the kids who grew into adults.
• Splinter: That Cowardly Headline You Hate Was Probably Written by a Lawyer Taking Orders from a Capitalist. I hate late stage capitalism.
• Teen Vogue: How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. I really want to read the book this is based on.
• Harvard Law Today: Harvard Law School’s ‘copy’ of Magna Carta revealed as original. Damn.
• BBC: Archaeologists ‘confident’ destroyed monastery site found. Erenagh in County Down was destroyed by John de Courcy in 1177.
• Financial Times: Beauty entrepreneur Trinny Woodall: ‘Age is irrelevant, it’s about the energy you bring’. I follow her on social media and she’s so much fun to watch. I don’t have the energy to live her life, but I admire a lot of what she does (particularly her makeover videos).

• New York Times: How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? Yeah, it’s that NYT editorial everyone has been talking about.
• Guardian: ‘Inverse vaccines’: the promise of a ‘holy grail’ treatment for autoimmune diseases. I won’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of this research, most likely, but I hope it does come to fruition.
• Food & Wine: Why Your Favorite Server Quit — the Real Cost of Hospitality Burnout. The flip side of the recent article about the tip grift. Again, restaurants just need to pay their servers.
• Hollywood Reporter: ‘Andor’ Creator on That Stunner “Genocide” Speech and Its Real-Life Inspiration. Now that it’s all out I do want to watch both seasons of Andor.
• The Ringer : The Roots of ‘Andor’ Lore Run Deep. Just as a lot of things in the new Disney canon are twisted reflections of the old Extended Universe, the West End Star Wars game supplements are also being mined for Disney canon.
• Reactor: Princess Mononoke: Three Cheers for the Adversary? Princess Mononoke was the first Ghibli film I saw, and few anime films I’ve ever seen have come close to living up to it.
• Washington Post: ‘Sinners’ is a Black challenge to White Christianity. I wish I weren’t afraid to watch this movie. I’ve had trauma responses to horror movies (in particular vampire movies) in the past and I don’t want to retraumatize myself. But it sounds really fascinating.
• Wall Street Journal: Young Women Are Starting to Recession-Proof Their Lives. This is not a surprise to anyone paying any attention. Fortunately I actually like when you can see my roots.
• Eater: The Food That Makes You Gay. It’s not just quiche. There’s a whole history of gay food out there. (Also they didn’t even go into 19th century American ideas about food purity and sexuality, which I know just enough about to know they missed a bet.) Also, after I read this article, I found out it won a James Beard award.
• Huffington Post: I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened. By doing that, he became an expert.
• The Conversation: For 100 years, we have marvelled at planetariums. Here’s a brief history of how humans brought the stars indoors. As a confirmed planetarium lover, I learned a lot, and put some other things I already knew together.
• Vogue: The Astonishing Clarity of Artist Gunnel Wåhlstrand. I’m trying to read a lot of books by women this year and also to learn more about art by women. I’m now officially fascinated by this woman.
• BBC: The lost 1934 novel that gave a chilling warning about the horrors of Nazi Germany. Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. Now I want to read it.
• Fritinancy: Why did Allbirds lay an egg? This is a naming newsletter so part of the explanation is the problems with the name. (Yes, I have several pairs of Allbirds. They’re comfy and the walking shoes are mostly waterproof.)
• More to Hate (Kate Manne): The Misogyny of Mother’s Day—and How to Resist it. I have some feelings about this, as the kids say.
• The Big Smoke: Dave Brubeck: The white musician who fought a segregated America. Today I learned.
• AP: Late abortions are rare. The US just lost a clinic that offered the procedure for over 50 years. Warren Hern, who’s only a couple of years younger than my father-in-law, has finally had to retire. He’s been doing heroic work for people with doomed pregnancies. I’m glad he gets to retire, sorry his clinic has closed, and relieved that he hasn’t been murdered like other abortion providers.
• AV Club: The Black Widow movie was too little, too late. Gonna die mad about this.

A bunch of things I read while on vacation.

• BBC: What your earwax can reveal about your health. Apparently quite a bit.
• MSSV: We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp. I’d do a Conclave LARP in a heartbeat, especially after my experiences doing a similar LARP as an undergrad in a Chinese history class.
• NY Times: Penske Shakes Up Leadership of South by Southwest. I didn’t realize Penske had bought it, but that happened after we left Austin. Sounds like this is the actual end of pre-pandemic SXSW.
• Graphic Policy: Alliance Entertainment Submits Complaint Against Diamond Claiming Fraud and Deception. Diamond, formerly the biggest comics distributor, now in bankruptcy and meant to be purchased by Alliance, apparently didn’t tell Alliance they’d been dumped by Wizards of the Coast (the D&D folks) before the purchase. This may force Diamond to move from Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7.
• Vogue: Hear Me Out: What If Gen Xers Are Actually the Cool Ones? If we are, it’s because we don’t care whether we’re cool or cringe.
• Hearing Things: How to Quit Streaming. Our streaming is Apple Music (comes with our bundle) but honestly other than “artist essentials”, we don’t use a lot of the streaming other than by-album anyway.
• Splinter: Plagiarizing Independent Journalists Is Part of Mainstream Media’s Business. With a recent example.
• Teen Vogue: “LinkedIn Catfish” Aliyah Jones Created a Fake Profile to Expose Racial Inequity in Hiring. Unsurprisingly, the white profile with the same skillsets got a lot more interest and callbacks than the Black profile.
• Smithsonian Magazine: When a Historian Saw This Haunting Photograph of a Nameless Native Girl, She Decided She Had to Identify Her. Her name is Sophie Mousseau.
• Guardian: ‘It’s out of control’: the fight against US ‘tip-creep’. I feel this on a deep and personal level every time I see a tip screen wanting 25% at a place where I picked my own baked good out and nobody even warmed it for me. Just pay people.
• Flytrap: Can the American Secular Movement Listen to Its Better Angels? I have a lot of feelings about this because my ex was one of those atheists (you know the ones, proselytizing and aggressive) and this story is all about how the Center For Inquiry and the old school skeptical movement is very white, very straight, and very cisnormative to the point of transphobia. It’s framed through the work of one queer activist attorney and their travails with secular groups that are more interested in hanging on to CFI than to working with queer and pro-queer young secular activists. I’m going to be thinking about this for a while and not just in an “I was right to be creeped by those guys” way.
• History News Network: These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War. It’s not just slaveowners & slaves vs enslavers & enslaved people. It’s also the “Appeasement of 1850” and “labor camps”. I’d refer to the places formerly known as plantations as something that tied them to prison farms, myself.
• Matthew Newstrom: The history of album art. Today I learned, and saw a lot of great album covers from the 1940s onward that illustrated the story.

• Archaeology Magazine: New Study Suggests Antikythera Mechanism Had Design Flaws. Apparently it could only simulate the movements of celestial bodies up to four months ahead because of mechanical flaws. Or maybe it worked better before the millennia of corrosion set in.
• NY Times: Were You Raised in a Church That Fears the World or Loves Its Neighbors? As a person with no religious leanings, other than away from religion, who was raised around a lot of churches that fear the world, I found this opinion piece fascinating.
• Artsy: Why Tamara de Lempicka’s Glamorous Portraits Transfix Contemporary Audiences. I’ve loved her work for years and recently got to see the big travelling exhibit of her art in context in Houston, so I’m always eager to learn more about de Lempicka.
• Troy Hunt: A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List. Fascinating dive into some email security nerdery. This is the guy who runs Have I Been Pwned, so it’s good stuff.
• Smithsonian Magazine: ‘Better Babies’ Contests Pushed for Much-Needed Infant Health but Also Played Into the Eugenics Movement. Somebody at the Smithsonian is going to get fired over how this article talks about eugenics. We’re supposed to think it’s good again.
• Upworthy: 6th grader’s science experiment answers, ‘Do cat buttholes touch every surface they sit on?’ The good news is, not if they’re hairy. Good to know science is going after the important questions.
• The Flytrap: Why the Youths Are Choosing Avocado Toast Over Marriage. If I were in my 20s or 30s, I’d be super picky about which dude I wanted to marry too. There are too many awful men in my generation and the ones behind me are worse!
• The Guardian: ‘You can let go now’: inside the hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain. A really lovely piece about hospice care in Denmark. I wish my mom had had this kind of care before her death and I hope I do, for that matter.
• Reactor: Daredevil: Born Again Offers a Much-Needed Corrective to Relentless Copaganda. I don’t watch MCU movies very often, and other than Hawkeye, have completely avoided the TV shows. But positioning superheroics as a counter to copaganda as opposed to a support to it is fascinating as a cultural turn.
• Houston Press: Houston 101: The Assassination of O.P. Dewalt, Black Leader and Lincoln Theatre Manager. Another piece of Black history from my hometown that I didn’t know about.
• The Fighting Temeraire: Why JMW Turner’s greatest painting is so misunderstood. I learned quite a bit from this analysis of the master’s work. Also his 250th birthday has just passed in the last week of April.

• Popsugar: The Viral “Clean Girl” Aesthetic Is Really Isolating For Me. I’m glad I’m too old and too sick to really care about this aesthetic. On the other hand, I’m lucky and have “good” skin and/because I don’t wear a lot of makeup. So I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s finally on trend.
• Simone: What If We Made Advertising Illegal? A radical proposal that requires some thought.
• Fansplaining: Bridgerton and Period Drama Fandom’s Enduring Racism Problem. I haven’t seen Bridgerton (I don’t have Netflix and I bounced off the first book hard) but this sure sounds like other fandoms I know more about.
• O Caftan My Caftan: Letter of Recommendation: Victorian Visits. Stay for a few weeks, why don’t you? This is the dream.
• The Conversation: A 1930s movement wanted to merge the US, Canada and Greenland. Here’s why it has modern resonances. The “Technocracy” movement of the 1930s was all about running things by data, which of course resonates with the modern movement to destroy government data sources. Just saying.
• NY Times: Living Car-Free in Arizona, on Purpose and Happily. I’d love to live in a community like this, but maybe not in Arizona, where it would be too hot to get out during most of the summer.
• By Hand: Published Doesn’t Mean Paid. I was thinking of my friend who is a published genre fiction author and being glad her spouse has a remunerative day job.
• NPR: Why would a musician join OnlyFans? Because making a living is only getting harder. Fascinating and depressing.
• The Problematic Author. An illustrated (comic) zine about J.K. Rowling written in 2019 and updated in 2023. I was never that into Harry Potter as anything but a setting my friends wanted to roleplay in. The thing that I found most interesting about the setting was the difference between its nominal values and the actual values presented in the text. Once Rowling outed herself as a bigot, there wasn’t anything to be interested in in the text. I’m sorry for the folks whose hearts she broke, though.
• Wall Street Journal: The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers. I wanted to take a shower while I was reading this. Gross. If you don’t want to give the WSJ a click, Jezebel also has the details: Ashley St. Clair Just Spilled All of Elon Musk’s ‘Harem Drama’.
• ProPublica: An Indian Drugmaker, Investigated by ProPublica Last Year, Has Recalled Two Dozen Medications Sold to U.S. Patients. Looking to see whether my prescriptions are on the list, like you do. (They were not, or at least not from the affected lots.)
• Separated by a Common Language: Anglo-Saxon. About the political connotations of using “Anglo-Saxon” in Britain and America. Spoiler: the American usage is ethnoracial. This is a problem I knew about from having been in grad school in medieval history, though my period of greatest interest was well post-Conquest.
• Food & Wine: Scientists Just Figured Out How Food Aversions Actually Form. Useful to know because I definitely have developed some and they’re hard to get over.
• Studio Notes: The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967. One of those fascinating little niche histories that you run across on the internet.
• AP: Historic domes of Hagia Sophia being renovated to protect landmark from earthquakes. Just over one minute of video, subtitled.
• The Flytrap: #DeathTok is Actually Full of Life. About the community of people with terminal diagnoses on TikTok, particularly younger people.

What I was reading this week while I was sick:

• NY Times: How to Shop for a Home That Won’t Be Upended by Climate Change. A lot of good advice here, but also a lot of it relies on government data. Some of it isn’t updated frequently enough (I lived in Houston for many years, so I’m intimately familiar with the failures of 100-year flood plain maps) but with the Trump purges, I wonder how reliable the data for some of these sources will be in the future.
• Beautiful Public Data: WWII Japanese Mass Incarceration collections. Unfortunately relevant.
• The Guardian: ‘Financial microaggressions’: why ‘pink tariffs’ hurt women more than men. Part of the complicated answer to the question of why women’s clothes are worse-made but more expensive than men. It’s not all sexism, but sexism in law and regulations is a part of it.
• BBC: How sex with Neanderthals changed us forever. 6 minute video, subtitled. If Neanderthals are a different species from humans, how did they interbreed? 1%-3% of Eurasian humans have Neanderthal DNA. Not a lot new in the conclusions if you’re up to date on the science but I didn’t know the specifics of the research.
• TV Guide: How Daredevil: Born Again Tackles the Punisher’s Real-World Legacy. Not a subject I would have expected to see in TV Guide, but it makes sense for them to go there.
• Tatler: The scintillating histories of the Mitford sisters, as anticipation for Outrageous reaches fever pitch. Potted short biographies of the Mitford sisters, if you’re into that kind of thing (I am).
• Dallas Observer: Bigger Isn’t Always Better: What Local Tiny Desk Concerts Tell Us About Dallas Music. I listen to Tiny Desk concerts occasionally and always enjoy them. I knew nothing about the background, so this was fascinating.
• Radley Balko’s The Watch: Trump’s modest proposal. It’s prima nocta. As a medievalist by training, I laughed.
• ProPublica: How Investigative Journalists Actually Find Fraud, Waste and Abuse. Compared to what “DOGE” does.
• The Oregonian: Many Portland-area residents say they never use government services. Actually, they do. People don’t know what the government does for them.
• AP: North Carolina judge challenging outcome of race wore Confederate uniform in college photo. Of course he did. “[H]e was a member of a college fraternity that glorified the pre-Civil War South.” Of course he was. Read the whole thing: this whole fraternity needs to be burned to the ground. And I say that as someone with slaveholders and Confederate soldiers in my family history. I acknowledge that past but I don’t celebrate it.
• NPR: Rosie the Riveters honored for service in WWII. Woke DEI history that we soon won’t be able to talk about.
• Yale News: Why don’t we remember being a baby? New study provides clues. The memories may still be there; we just can’t access them.
• The Mary Sue: John Boyega is right about Star Wars fans. A bunch of them are racist and sexist. Also, tbh, the powers that be didn’t do enough to shut down toxic fans and it’s a big problem with the sequel trilogy and the future of the Star Wars universe.
• The Nation: What’s a Rebel Pundit to Do in the Age of Trump? Bari Weiss is beneath contempt, as is Glenn Greenwald, but I am super disappointed in Matt Taibbi. He used to write good stuff when he was with Rolling Stone.
• Texas Highways: Engines of Optimism. The author went to all the public libraries in Austin. Now I want to do that in Dallas.
• Dallas Morning News: Public Editor: Why doesn’t ‘The News’ use ‘Gulf of America’? It appalls me that the DMN has to explain this stuff.
• Billy Bragg’s Substack: Happy 100th Birthday Tony Benn
• Tech Crunch: WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff. I love Tumblr and obviously I find WordPress useful. But man I worry about PhotoMatt (whom I was acquainted with back in the day) and where he’s taking the company.

• Liberal Currents: Guys Win: Andrew Tate, Rape Politics, and the Authoritarian Right. The boys are not all right; they’re being lured into authoritarianism.
• Interview: Claire Tabouret Designed the New Stained-Glass Windows at Notre-Dame. She’s Ready for the Blowback. I really wish I could see her designs or the windows in full. One day.
• Vice: Wild Photos of Berlin’s Feminist Noise-Punk Scene. It did my heart good to read this and see the people.
• The Guardian: Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’. I’m not in the demographic they share, but I do love that album. What a lovely remembrance of that time and place.
• Pajiba: Carrie Coon Ditched Marvel Because of Their Insulting Offer. Good for her.
• BBC: The unexpected origins of Houston’s favourite po’ boy. I miss Antone’s. Gonna have to have one the next time I’m in town and maybe take some chow chow home.
• Reactor: Repo Man: A Brash, Indelible, Outrageous Look at 1980s America. I loved this movie from the first time I saw it.
• Status: Hanging by a Thread. Meta’s Twitter-killer mostly killed itself with early policy decisions. The interesting thing here is that since nobody is stuck with investment in Threads the way they are with Facebook, which really doesn’t have a similar-type rival, everybody just stopped posting there. And when I do log in, mostly what I see is people posting the same content as on other similar services (Bluesky).
• Rolling Stone: Remembering the George Foreman Grill, Undisputed Champ of Nineties Fads. Fad, my ass. We still use ours!
• The View from Rural Missouri by Jess Piper: You Are Going to Have to Tell Them the Truth. About public speaking (and running for office) in the red rural heartland.
• Travel & Leisure: This Badass Woman Took the World’s First Road Trip—and Stole Her Husband’s Car to Do It. Bertha Benz (of Mercedes Benz) stole her husband’s invention and drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her teenage sons sometime in the 1880s or 1890s. This is a silly article but I’m more interested in Bertha after reading it.
• Think Progress: What A 19th Century Campaign To Declare Mormons ‘Non-White’ Tells Us About Modern Islamophobia. The stories in this article sure sound like Greg Abbott talking about EPIC City!
• NY Times: Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get? Still with her.
• The Art Newspaper: ‘Mystery of a masterpiece’: how Van Gogh’s postman portrait ‘disappeared’ from London’s Tate Gallery a century ago. They didn’t like it, so it was returned and moved on, and now it’s at MOMA.
• Texas Monthly: One of the Rarest of Texas’s Rare Plants Might Be Growing in Your Neighbor’s Garden. It’s wild big red sage, which I know nothing about because I’m absolutely garden ignorant and a black thumb.

• Commentary: Bluesky: The Online Cone of Silence. I was interested to hear what the other side thinks about Bluesky. It amounts to concern trolling. I also still think it’s weird to see pro-Musk/Twitter propaganda coming from a historically Jewish magazine, but that’s where we are right now.
• Designers & Dragons: Is the OGL Era Over? (Two Years Later). This is inside baseball for folks not in the TTRPG space. A couple of years ago, the folks who make Dungeons & Dragons tried to revoke their license for third parties to make content (new rules like character classes or adventures or whatever) for D&D games. The attempt blew up in the company’s face. A lot of folks who had been working on D&D content based on their license changed their plans. This article follows up on what’s been going on since the blowup and which plans have come to fruition, and not.
• BBC: Lost manuscript of Merlin and King Arthur legend read for the first time after centuries hidden inside another book. An intersection of medievalia, Arthuriana, and technology is right up my alley.
• Reactor: What The Electric State Reveals About Marvel’s Creative Problem. The Netflix movie, which I haven’t seen, is made by the Russos, who are big Marvel wheels. Apparently it’s “what if a Marvel movie but without the characters you love”, which is why Doomsday is bringing so many big names back.
• Deadline: Inside YouTube’s Weird World Of Fake Movie Trailers — And How Studios Are Secretly Cashing In On The AI-Fueled Videos. On the one hand, this is really fascinating stuff, and unsurprising that the grubby hands of the studios are all over monetizing the “content”. On the other hand, we’re burning up our world to make these fake AI trailers, and I can’t stop thinking about that.
• Rolling Stone: Pete Townshend: ‘I’ve Got Maybe 10 Years Left as a Creative’. He’s 80 years old and wow, glad he’s still going.

• NY Times: The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck. Interactive piece on a woman in China who was probably trafficked but we’ll never know because China quashed the story. The piece is as much about the quashing as the original woman’s plight.
• The Sunday Long Read: What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? A very sad story about a very sad man. I kept thinking, though, that in a world where we didn’t have to drive all the time, maybe the child who died would still be alive.
• The Honest Broker: The World Was Flat. Now It’s Flattened. An interesting take on how culture standardizes and stagnates these days.
• Bloomberg: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist Entirely in Our Phones. I, too, miss my physical tickets to shows that I could keep in a memento box.
• Marie Claire: Meet the Millennial Women Buying Their Own Engagement Rings. This is a very sticky topic, and I say that as a feminist who picked out her own (non-diamond) ring while she was living with her fiancé in the house we bought together.
• Defector: They Should Call It The Free Piss. Defector on Bari Weiss’ Free Press. Inside baseball if you’re not terminally online, but since she’s heavily involved in the University of Austin, I’m always down to read about how awful she is.
• Liberal Currents: Roadmap to American Reconstruction. Realistic about our short-term prospects with some ideas about what people can do. I think my biggest problem with it is that the going viral/appeal to the center concept relies on people caring or being shamed, and I think that’s less possible than it was in the 60s during civil rights. Some folks have no shame.
• AP: Violent and sudden. What a firing squad execution looked like through my eyes. All the warnings in the world. If you have feelings about the death penalty, expect to feel them.
• BBC: Operation Atacama: The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler’s downfall. I had never heard of the Copiapoa cactus until I read this article, nor did I have any idea that people smuggled exotic plants, though I’m unsurprised to learn they do.
• My Goodness! From Jo Elvin: Are you unemployable if you’re not on Instagram? This is about her Gen Alpha kid but it’s kind of a frightening question. I remember when you had to keep a Facebook that was clean for jobs. Now I guess you have to have three social media accounts at a minimum. I’m glad I’m old and past job hunting.