2023s
I’ve passed this roadside shrine dozens of times over the years. I don’t think I’ve read the plaque before.
I’ve started reading Doonesbury from the very beginning, and I plann to keep going until I catch up to the present day. Here’s the very first strip, from October, 1970.
So far I’m up to December 1970. Over that time, you can see Garry Trudeau quickly improving as a writer and slowly improving as an artist. Within three or four years he’d be doing detailed drawings and sharp satire about Watergate.
The strip was initially published in the Yale student newspaper, when Trudeau was himself an undergrad there, and it’s about as sexist as you’d expect from an Ivy League college boy of the Animal House era. Trudeau evolved quickly on that front too.
I read the strip religiously in high school, then got out of the habit, though I picked it up intermittently over the subsequent decades. I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m keeping away from he current strips for now. I want to catch up with them.
Ask a Manager: Should you list hobbies on your resume?
A long thread of stories about people bombing job interviews, on Ask a Manager:
When asked a (completely stupid question) about how I would react if I woke up suddenly in a cage with a tiger, I asked if the tiger was alive.
This wasn’t the right line of questioning as per the interviewer’s surprised expression.
When asked to elaborate, I said “If it’s dead, cry but no real panic. It’s alive, cry and panic and die.”
Response:
I started thinking of further clarifying questions I would ask in this interview scenario and realized I was just Dungeons-and-Dragonsing my way through it:
“What is the condition of the tiger? Has the tiger noticed me yet? What can I perceive outside of the cage? Can I see the door to the cage from where I’m sitting? Can I hear or see the presence of anyone else outside the cage? Does the cage appear to be locked or only shut? Is the tiger between me and the door to the cage? Okay, given that knowledge and my Strength and Dexterity (not good), I…”
The myth of rural America: “ … the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this … because many of us – urban and rural, on the left and the right – ‘don’t quite want it to be true.’”
Last night we watched the first episode of “Lessons in Chemistry,” about Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in 1951 who is forced to take a humiliating job as a lab tech because of sexism and who ends up hosting a highly successful cooking show on TV. The show stars Brie Larson (who is not, I subsequently learned, the same person as Alison Brie).
Elizabeth is determined and humorless and takes up with Calvin Evans, a male chemist, who is also determined and humorless and is the only person who sees her for who she is. Both characters are endearing.
The costumes and period designs are beautifully done. Perhaps too perfect, but that’s typical of period shows. All the cars are clean and in mint condition; clothes are neat, clean, pressed, and tucked in. In real life, in 1951, you’d see a lot of wrinkles and untucked shirts and the occasional stain, just like today. Some cars would be nice; some would be beaters. But not in the world of “Lessons of Chemistry.” That’s fine.
I liked the show but did not love it. I was not hooked, but I’ll give it another episode, and I expect to enjoy it more over time. Julie loved it from the beginning—she just read the novel it’s based on and loved that.
One unbelievable note jumped out: Calvin is presented as having moderate-to-severe allergies. He becomes dramatically ill, simply smelling a woman’s perfume. He lives on saltine crackers and vending machine peanuts. (The vending machine, by the way, is a beautiful midcentury design.) He joins Elizabeth for lunch, and she insists he try the lasagna she made for herself. He plunges in a forkful and pronounces it delicious. As a person with allergies myself, I know that nobody with allergies will try a strange food off someone else’s plate without first inquiring about the ingredients.
“Lessons in Chemistry” has echoes of another recent series, last year’s “Julia,” about the origin story of Julia Child. Also a smart show set in post-WWII America with beautiful period costumes and designs about a strong, smart woman battling sexism to host a successful cooking show.
Ezra Klein: Israel is giving Hamas what it wants
Israel’s 9/11 — that’s been the refrain. And I fear that analogy carries more truth than the people making it want it to. Because what was 9/11? It was an attack that drowned an entire country — our country, my country, America — in terror and in rage. It drove us mad with fear.
And in response, we shredded our own liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Our response to 9/11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It made us weaker. It made us poorer. It made us hated around the world. We didn’t pull our forces out of Afghanistan until 2021, 20 years later. And when we left, we did so in humiliation and catastrophe and defeat, abandoning the country to the Taliban.
Our politics still haven’t recovered from the ravages of that era. It was, in large part, the invasion of Iraq that discredited the Republican Party’s leadership class, leading directly to the rise of Donald Trump. 9/11 created a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid brutal things, and we are still paying the costs. Perhaps we always will be.
…
I think vengeance is a legitimate and even necessary goal here. It cannot be safe to murder Israeli civilians. But vengeance cannot be the only goal. Israelis, no less than Palestinians, deserve peace and security. Those need to be considerations, too. And that requires considering things.
…
The brutal facts of the occupation, the architecture of control, and humiliation, and checkpoints and work permits and blockades that Palestinians live under, it does not justify Hamas’s murders. But it helps explain Hamas’s strength, its persistent appeal to at least some of the Palestinian people. Hamas is built on Palestinian despair. And if you radically increase Palestinian fury and despair, if you create a new wave, a new generation of fathers who lost their sons, and brothers who lost their sisters, and people now dedicated to revenge, have you actually made Israel safer, or have you made Hamas or something like it stronger?
Hardliners feed on each other. Hamas’s political strength has been an excellent excuse for Netanyahu’s government to abandon even the pretense of a real peace process. If Hamas is on the other side of the table, then there can be no peace process because there is no partner for peace. Israel is right that it cannot make peace with Hamas, that Hamas’s actual aim is Israel’s eradication.
…
Hamas and its backers in Iran want this war. They fear the normalization of Israel’s relations with the rest of the Middle East. The misery of the Gazans is and always has been their strength/
…
We’ve spent decades testing the proposition of whether inflicting more punishment on the Palestinians will strengthen the moderates or the extremists in their midst. The answer is known.
…
If you loathe Hamas, and you should loathe Hamas, you should assume that the place they’re trying to lead us is not where we should be trying to go. If you don’t think Netanyahu’s rule has made Israel safer, or more united, or closer to a resolution of the fundamental threats that face it — and it hasn’t — you should not yourself be cowed into trusting his instincts in this moment. That’s a lesson Americans learned, or should have learned, from 9/11, the one we have to pass on now.
Terrorists want you to act in a haze of fury and fear. The only antidote is to open yourself to criticism and second-guessing.
…
There is no country in the world that would not hunt Hamas’s leaders to the ends of the Earth right now if their savagery had been visited upon them. And that is to say nothing of the hostages Hamas is still holding captive. But the idea that you’ll destroy Hamas this way, I doubt it, particularly if this becomes not just a generational trauma for ordinary Israelis, but also for Gazans, with thousands dead and who knows how many maimed and homeless and displaced.
…
The hardliners make each other stronger. Is it possible for the peacemakers to do the same?
The youth are not slow-dancing anymore.
Decoder Ring: The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance. Rise and fall of an awkward rite of passage.
Includes a brief history of slow dancing, starting with the waltz, which was hugely scandalous 200+ years ago.
Let me read you a quote here. It’s from a July 1816 issue of the London Times about a ball given by the Prince Regent: “We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the waltz was introduced at the English court on Friday last. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think of it deserving of notice. But now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.
Jacob Mikanowski, author of the book “Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land,” talks with Tyler Cowen about Eastern Europe, including “differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays” and “why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West.”
Could Stanisław Lem be the most underrated sage of the AI age?
I remember Lem was celebrated in literary circles in the late 70s or 80s, but we haven’t heard much about him since. I read several of Lem’s books and stories, enjoyed them and found them thoughtful.
U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force Struggle for Recruits. The Marines Have Plenty.
When asked earlier this year about whether the Marines would offer extra money to attract recruits, the commandant of the Marine Corps replied: “Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine. That’s your bonus.”
Elizabeth Spiers: I Don’t Have to Post About My Outrage. Neither Do You. I agree. Nobody’s required to post an opinion about Israel and Palestine.
Robin Sipes was feeling sad. Her doctor prescribed her a cat. Her doctor said he wrote it down “because people sometimes don’t follow your instructions.”
These five toys are regular finalists for Hall of Fame honors. Now fans can vote one in. The pogo stick, the Fisher-Price Corn Popper, My Little Pony, PEZ dispensers, and Transformers.
I was having fun with a telemarking scammer and they hung up on me and I’m disappointed.
CALLER: “I’m calling from [mumble] about an order for an Apple MacBook Pro and Apple AirPods that you placed and that is being delivered to Houston, Texas.”
ME [slowly, confused]: “It’s for a … apple?”
CALLER: “Yes, an Apple MacBook Pro—a laptop computer—and Apple AirPods. You will be charged $1,667. Did you place that order.”
ME [slowly, still confused]: “… Apples don’t have ears?”
Then they hung up. Damn, I was just getting started.