Mitch's Blog

Amy Schwartz / Moment

For a long time, I’ve thought that we Jews did not believe in an afterlife — that we believed we should live well and do what’s right for its own sake, not for the sake of entering heaven after we die.

Turns out that this is just one of a multitude of afterlife beliefs in Jewish tradition — many Jews believe in reincarnation, many believe in resurrection on Judgment day and some even believe our souls are transported to Jerusalem through a network of subterranean tunnels while being beaten to a pulp by demons (which sounds like no fun at all).

I’m sticking with “do right because it’s the right thing to do.” I like the sound of that. If we are rewarded in an afterlife, that’s a bonus. But I think that when our brains stop it’s lights out.

I read very few books in the late 2010s, while consuming massive quantities of articles and posts. That bothered me. A few years ago, I learned that book-reading is a skill, different from reading articles and certainly very different from reading social media posts. I retaught that skill to myself. Now I’m up to about a dozen books a year and I can live with that.

I generally read two books at once. I like to do one fiction and one non-fiction.

When I was a teen-ager, I read five books a week. I had more free time then.

Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Obama ran a grassroots political campaign but put his “organization into an induced coma between elections,” thereby losing “an important source of discipline and feedback” … “Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer.”

For me, one of the big lessons of 2024 is that political campaigns and primary fights aren’t just a means for the people to choose candidates; they are also a means for the candidates and parties to learn what the people want and adjust strategy and messaging accordingly. Harris and the Democrats deprived themselves of that opportunity and we are all paying the penalty.

Messy Nessy Chic:

Not a single ship visited Tristan da Cunha from 1909 until 1919, until the HMS Yarmouth finally stopped by to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Accessible on by sea, Tristan da Cunha is in fact an archipelago, the remotest inhabited one in the world, although only the main island was settled by man, with a permanent population of 265 residents as of September 2016.

There is no airstrip; the island is accessible only by a difficult six-day boat voyage from South Africa.

They don’t have home internet, but they do have an internet cafe. Or did in 2016.

Jonah Weiner / NYTimes

Kaufman “set up camp on ever-advancing frontiers of unpleasantness, all the better to mystify crowds about where the joke, if there was one, ended.” You were never quite sure what was a bit and what was real.

There’s a direct line from Kaufman’s recurring routines as an obnoxious lounge singer and misogynistic wrestler to Musk and Bannon throwing Nazi salutes and never clarifying whether they are really Nazis.

Inspired by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, I’m trying to Make Person-to-Person Email a Thing again. If your message does not require immediate attention, don’t send a text message, WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, or other direct-message. Just send an email. That way, the recipient reads and responds to it it at their leisure.

Things you should send in email:

• “Happy birthday!”
• “Here is a funny meme.”
• “Let’s get together in a couple of weeks.”

Things that are OK to send in text message:

• “I’m running 15 minutes late - sorry!”
• “You’re on fire. Literally. You might want to look into that.”
• “There is pie.”

Cory wrote about this on his blog recently, but I can’t find the link.

When Clinton used her email for official business, it was completely normal behavior, even at her level of government. Small professional services businesses (like the Clinton Foundation) ran their own email servers, and people used their personal email for work.

It was utterly innocent behavior that the Republicans just pretended was shady. Republicans like to do that.

We’re seeing the same strategy today with transphobia and hysteria over immigration and migrants. Trans people, immigrants and migrants threaten no one, but Republicans are just making shit up and getting their supporters worked up over nothing. Jumping at shadows — but there aren’t even any shadows. It’s jumping at nothing.

“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade, who died from an overdose of alcohol and Valium 13 years ago, is the subject of a new documentary, “Art for Everybody,” by Miranda Yousef.

Kinkade’s fans adore him, made him a ubiquitous cultural icon and built him a financial empire. But he was an alcoholic, accused of multiple instances of sexua harassment, and lost a $3 million court case for defrauding gallery owners, writes Veronica Esposito at The Guardian

“One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” Yousef told Esposito. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”

Kinkade’s story engages questions about “what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand,” Esposito writes.

Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)