Two long-ish articles for the weekend before I board the plane back home:
- NYT: Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better.
- FT: Jürgen Klopp and the leading of Liverpool
Both are gift links! And if the one about Cass Elliot has whet your appetite, make sure to see this SNL skit featuring one of the best performances by a guest host ever from Emma Stone.
Dave Winer thinks newspapers need democracy and the First Amendment rights to survive. But that is only if you see e.g. The New York Times as something more than a logo and a list of paying subscribers. Правда is still running under the same banner, long after everything it stood for disappeared.
A very DC story about a DC cat in today’s Washington Post:
She dozed on sunlit stoops, scaled fences and slept in a boxy shelter on a neighbor’s lawn. She was named Kitty Snows, after her new home on Snows Court in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C., where she belonged to everyone and no one.
And then, she vanished.
What has unfolded this year around Snows Court in is an old-fashioned neighborhood melodrama — “Kittygate,” if you must — complete with wounded feelings, rampant gossip, sidewalk spies and lawsuit threats.
For what it’s worth, I side with the new owners.
(ᔥReddit)
Congratulations to Nikola Jokić on his third NBA MVP award! So, so, so well-deserved, and Rick Reilly had a good write-up of the reasons why.
Many (private) assisted living facilities have started relying on 911 for lifting residents who have fallen down — a massive waste of (public) resources. WaPo asked one of the companies to comment:
Co-president Julie Simpkins declined to answer specific questions, but said in a statement that the company works “to create a collaborative approach to the over utilization of nonemergent lift assist calls” through “cross training, resource availability discussions and collaboration.”
An LLM would do a better job of deflecting than co-president Julie Simpkins, who seems to have proposed a collaborative approach through collaboration — embarrassing even by corporate-speak standards.
Of course, the problem is that firefighters don’t take money for their services, but in this particular case they may consider starting to invoice. After all, those same assisted living facilities charge their residents up to $7,000 per month for the privilege of laying on the floor until real adults come.
As a long-time subscriber to the FT and a fan of Janan Ganesh I was glad to see that they both got head-nods from kottke.org (and before that, Robin Sloan). Yes, it is well worth the price.
Always great to see a treatment mature from the lab to clinical trials to a write-up in The Atlantic. This is about post-transplant cyclophosphamide, initially developed at Hopkins for haploidentical (“half-matched”) stem cell transplants, now used even for full matches as it works so well in preventing graft versus host disease. Cheap as chips too, if you can get it (but of course low price and short supply are closely related).
The previously mentioned Axios Local newsletters continues to be a delight to read every morning. To take a quote from today’s edition, discussing the absolute horror of someone cheating at bar trivia:
In a town filled with people trying to relive their Model UN glory days, trivia isn’t just some silly bar game — it’s the D.C. equivalent of flexing shirtless on Muscle Beach.
While this isn’t what most of DC is actually like, there are many people living here who would like it to be this way and that also tells you something.
I forgot to mark the 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, a childhood-defining event if there ever was one (I was 15 at the time and a high school freshman). Well, today marks 25 years since the modest Yugoslav Army missile defense shot down the F-117 stealth bomber. The story is as good as a wartime story can get: there were no fatalities, the two main characters became friends, and the wreckage is now in a Belgrade museum, ignored by schoolchildren for whom these events are ancient history.
Janan Ganesh’s FT column today ends with an excellent quote which can also serve as the motto of American politics:
“We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
He doesn’t cite the source because the FT readership would of course know who it was (I didn’t): Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission. I thought re-election wouldn’t be a problem in Luxembourg since there were so few politicians around you were bound to circle back to the top spot, but there you go.