It’s been exactly 3 years since Norm Macdonald died from acute myeloid leukemia, which was itself a know. complication of treatment he received for multiple myeloma.
But none of that is important. Anwyay, here’s Norms last stand-up performance on Letterman.
A few links, to be filed in the “What a time to be alive” folder:
Journalists are reaching their nadir, even at FT. At best, they are misguided newly minted English majors who haven’t yet learned statistics and are easily fooled by randomness. But it shouldn’t take more than a year on the job to realize that most journalistic efforts are attempts to create a story out of pure noise, and at that point you either quit your job and start doing actual journalism, or you call yourself what you are: a professional troll.
CNN writes about Surgeon General’s advisory on parental health:
The advisory describes how mothers and fathers now work many more hours than in 1985 but also spend many more hours every week on primary child care — and that doesn’t count their total time spent with children. “Demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time,” the advisory says. The strain is even greater on parents caring for aging parents or other loved ones.
Can confirm. The advisory itself is a quick read, well worth checking out.
The FBI arrested a DC council member yesterday for taking bribes. The same council member who made the news in 2018 for saying that “the Rothschilds controled the climate”. Here is a good heuristic: if someone sees corruption, manipulation and conspiracies everywhere, odds are that they are themselves corrupt, manipulative and conspiratorial. Pure projection.
Janan Ganesh published another banger of a column this week, Beware the professional ghetto. He quotes Taleb, and rightfully so, and puts out this fascinating bit of trivia:
Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.
Fachidiocracy, anyone?
For the second time this week, my man at the Financial Times knocks it out of the park:
To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.
Pair with Taleb’s advice on writing.
Janan Ganesh, telling it like it is:
The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t.
He is writing about foreign policy, but applies just as well to masks, vaccine mandates, approach to tech, etc. which gets us to the package of sometimes incompatible beliefs you can expect to get from either side.
If you are an American, the country’s best decade was whenever you were a teenager, says The Washington Post. Compare and contrast to Serbia, whose best decade is more dependent on your politics and can be anything from the 1340s to the 1960s. My teenage years were, of course, not so glorious.
Breaking my “no politics until November” promise to self in order to quote today’s Stratechery update:
[The] Democrats gave up the enviable position of being the default choice for people who didn’t want to think about politics at all.
And this is exactly what has been bothering me since 2016. I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood in a country (Serbia) where you had no choice but to think about politics, and a big part of coming to the US was not having to think about it too hard. Alas, instead of the Balkans becoming westernized the West has been balkanized.