On Feb 1, Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of all drugs. Instead of punishing people, the state will offer “greatly increased access” to services like treatment and recovery.
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Entries for February 2021
Last Night’s Northern Lights
The aurora borealis was amazing last night in Norway. The top photo is from Markus Varik and the bottom two are from Marianne Bergli, who runs a company that offers tours of the aurora. (via @AvatarDomy)
Out now: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain. The contributors list for this is like an all-star team.
A collection of videos of people painting. “Watching others paint is relaxing, even when the painter is not the beloved Bob Ross and his happy trees and friendly squirrels.”
Amazon watcher @tcarmody on what’s next for Bezos & Amazon. “He is not going to go away to start an apple butter farm or retire away to Xanadu like Charles Foster Kane. That’s not how this works.”
A Vintage Paper Airplane Collection
Harry Everett Smith was an artist and a collector. One of the things he collected was paper airplanes — he picked up hundreds of them from the streets and buildings of New York between 1961 and 1983.
Smith was “always, always, always looking” for new airplanes, one friend said: “He would run out in front of the cabs to get them, you know, before they got run over. I remember one time we saw one in the air and he was just running everywhere trying to figure out where it was going to be. He was just, like, out of his mind, completely. He couldn’t believe that he’d seen one. Someone, I guess, shot it from an upstairs building.”
The whereabouts of much of his collection is presently unknown, but photos of part of the collection were compiled into a book: Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I. You can see more of Smith’s collection at the New Yorker and SFO Museum. (via moss & fog)
Analysis of Jan 6 terrorists. “The overwhelming reason for action, cited again and again in court documents, was that arrestees were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner.”
How Reporters Should Cover Government Going Forward
Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin imagines a speech that new editoral leadership at large American newspapers should give to their political reporters.
It’s impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate.
It’s impossible to look out at the looming and in some cases existential challenges facing our republic and our globe — among them the pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, the rise of disinformation and ethnic nationalism — and think that it’s OK for us to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
He continues:
First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That’s an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.
Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And, because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.
Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I’m against that.
Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.
Government reporters. Yes, exactly. Worth reading in its entirety.
An Israeli human-rights organization has designated Israel an apartheid regime. “The paper argues that the Israeli regime of apartheid rests on four pillars: citizenship, land, freedom of movement, and political participation.”
Newly Released Footage of a 2007 Daft Punk Concert
As a post-Tr*mp gift to the world, YouTube user Johnny Airbag uploaded a “previously uncirculated” full-length video of a Daft Punk concert in Chicago in 2007. This was from the first night of Lollapalooza and was one of the stops on the duo’s Alive tour, which later resulted in their Alive 2007 album (recorded live in Paris a few weeks before the Chicago show). You can find bootleg recordings of several of their 2007 shows on Soundcloud.
The COVID Tracking Project will stop its work in early March because the US government is finally doing this vital task. A huge HUGE thank you to the @COVID19Tracking team for their service.
Home Movie: The Princess Bride
In June and July of 2020, Jason Reitman directed an at-home reenactment of the entirety of The Princess Bride featuring too many notable actors to list here. It ran in 10 installments on doomed streaming platform Quibi — which is why you probably haven’t heard of it — but it is fantastic. Mixed media, multiple actors playing all the roles, Fred Savage and Cary Elwes reprising their roles from the original, the star power & talent, the fact that they got permission to do it — it’s just so weird and good. You can watch the whole thing embedded above.
Ok, ok, here’s just a few of the actors who appear: Adam Sandler (as The Grandfather), Jon Hamm (Westley), Zoe Saldana (Buttercup), Penelope Cruz (Prince Humperdinck), Pedro Pascal (Inigo Montoya), Shaquille O’Neal (Fezzik), Charlize Theron (Fezzik), Andy Serkis (Count Rugen). And Carl Reiner as The Grandfather in his final onscreen role — he died just three days after recording his part.
I know you’re perhaps over the whole quarantine production thing, but this is worth checking out. This movie was done to raise money for José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, so if you enjoyed it, join me in sending them some money to enable their essential work. (via @mathowie)
A short interview with Hayao Miyazaki conducted during his daily ritual of tidying up the street outside his house. “I rarely watch other things. I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies. I’m a retired old man picking up trash.”
Kids Talk About Gaming During the Pandemic
Concerned that recent articles like this one about screen time panic were not adequately capturing the perspective of the kids themselves, Anne Helen Petersen asked a group of parents and caregivers to conduct interviews with kids about gaming and screen time.
So I wanted to hear them talk about their own relationship to the games they play: what they like about it, when they like to play, how games make them feel, who they like to play with, and how they respond to anxiety about their gaming/screen time.
I pulled out a few quotes from the kids but the whole thing is worth a read.
When people say that screentime is bad, I want to say, hey, I want to be more social at the moment and it’s hard to do that right now and I can only do it with technology.
I feel annoyed and angry with the “too much time playing video games argument,” because people don’t really understand. They don’t play these games. They don’t have any experience themselves, and they’re judging what we do based on what they’ve heard or read. Gaming is so new that there’s no conclusive evidence yet to prove if it’s actually harmful. It feels like they’re just trying to control us and tell us what to do.
When adults say that kids play too many video games it makes me kinda angry and confused. We’re already stuck at home and it feels like they’re trying to cut us off from our friends even more. So it’s kinda annoying.
Honestly I don’t really worry about spending too much time game at all. I already spend almost all my time on there anyway and it doesn’t seem to have any negative side effects. Key word “seem.” People need to make sure they don’t get correlation and causation mixed together.
Like many other parents, we’ve been struggling mightily with games, devices, and screen time during the pandemic (although for us this is an issue that carried over from The Before Times). As Petersen says, this is a complicated challenge and I am sympathetic to both the arguments these kids make (which mirror what I’ve heard from my kids) and parental concerns about too much time on devices (the effects of which I’ve seen in my kids).
What we’ve done, imperfectly, is prioritize the social aspect of gaming time — playing with friends, gaming clubs, playing together in the living room — over manically grinding away for hours on end in a dark room. We try to meet them on their terms — ask them what they did today in Minecraft or Among Us, show real interest about their progress, etc. I empathize and commiserate when I can — I grew up playing video games and I still get a little too into them on my phone or iPad sometimes. But we also encourage them to get outside and move their bodies, find ways to connect with friends that don’t involve killing virtual people, and try to get them to recognize some of the worst effects of too much screen time (they do, if you catch them at the right moment about it). Keeping a good connection with your kids around gaming & screens is the key bit, I think. With that in hand, in theory it’s at least possible to keep kids and parents alike safe and sane during all of this.
The second volume of Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York is being published soon; preorder it here. “He estimated having drawn over 50,000 people and as he stated ‘I still have a bit to go.’”
Hypocrisy and the Filibuster
For the NY Times, Jamelle Bouie writes about the history of the filibuster in the Senate and how it (unsurprisingly) differs from Mitch McConnell’s comments about it.
The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.
Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.
In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power.
I’d like to highlight something else from the article’s title and reiterated in the text by Bouie: “I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy.” Yes, exactly. I see a lot of calling-out of the hypocrisies of “the other side”1 on social media and it just seems worthless to me at this point. This sort of thing just doesn’t work when you’re dealing with people who are cynical and without shame in a very polarized media environment. Like, if you’ve read anything about McConnell at all, you know that he cares about power and he’s going to say what he needs to say to get it or keep it, regardless of self-contradiction. Pointing out his flip-flops doesn’t accomplish anything because he’s not actually switching his position! He didn’t really believe the thing he said before and he doesn’t really believe the thing he’s saying now. He just wants what he wants. Focusing on the facts and historical context of the issue, as Bouie does here (and in his explanation of the Electoral College on You’re Wrong About), is the way to go.
Examples: “The ‘pro life’ party did nothing while 400,000 people died from the pandemic.” and “If you’re ‘pro choice’, why do you want to limit the 2nd amendment right of people to carry guns?” Etc. etc.↩
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