So, we are fine tearing down the beautiful old Penn Station, but want to preserve the concrete tomb that was built in its stead? Worse than preserve: turn it into a greenhouse? Modern architecture is bonkers.
Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair:
Though Fenton is a FEMA superstar with ample experience responding to tornadoes and hurricanes, it would have been more logical for the top person to come from within the HHS family of agencies, though a division director from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was assigned as Fenton’s deputy. The choice “reflects the fact that CDC can’t operate its way out of a paper bag,” said the former HHS official.
Third year into the covid-19 pandemic and I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that the CDC is moribund. Institutional decay comes for all during the fat and lazy times.
Katherine Eban also wrote this brilliant account of the lab-leak hypothesis and a hair-raising book about the FDA that made the agency’s fumbles, unlike the CDC’s, not at all surprising.
Next year, the country is set to allow people to be killed exclusively for mental health reasons. It is also considering extending euthanasia to “mature” minors — children under 18 who meet the same requirements as adults.
That country is Canada. Yikes!
Ah, DC summers… (our office view right now)
Trite and predictable, with stilted animation, convoluted storytelling, and a general feeling of awkwardness that drowns the few good early scenes. We were re-watching Ratatouille for what feels like the 56th time last weekend and it is ridiculous how much better it is in every respect despite being 15 years older. Luck… will not be getting a re-watch.
🎬 Luck (2022) was a disappointment in every respect. The awkwardness started with the initial dancing video and continued through the end. My 9 y/o sort-of liked it, but she’d like anything with cats in it (and Bob is a poor copy of Jiji).
But the desperate quest for attention hasn’t been limited to YouTubers. I recently tweeted about how Twitter has become an endless stream of threads and I’ve seen others note this as well (see here, here, and here). The sad thing is that these cheap engagement tactics actually work to grow your Twitter audience.
Just start a blog, says Nick. I concur. His is a good one.
My brand image is, admittedly, diffuse and weak. My Twitter bio is “saboteur of narratives,” and few people can say for sure what I’m about, other than vague things like “thinker” or “dumb fuck.” And that’s how I like it. My vagueness makes me hard to pigeonhole, predict, and capture.
For this same reason, I’m suspicious of those with strong, sharply delineated brands. Human beings are capricious and largely formless storms of idiosyncrasies, so a human only develops a clear and distinct identity through the artifice of performance.
Try watching the transformation of Nikocado Avocado without extrapolating it to everyone on social media.
Andrew Bosworth (a.k.a. Boz):
Sarcasm “works” because it alludes to a critique without ever actually making it. It shifts the burden of substantiating the criticism as an exercise for the audience and further suggests that if they don’t already understand it then they are deficient. Making a critique implicit is an unassailable rhetorical position. The most socially acceptable response for the group is to go along with it, as you have given them nothing specific to challenge. And if someone does challenge it you can simply demur and say it was “just a joke.”
Last year I tried to explain why I didn’t care much for sarcasm. Boz makes a more cogent (and infinitely more readable!) argument.
Lily Lynch compares Serbia and the USA in a (paywalled) Patreon post:
“I’m stunned by how comparatively apolitical Americans seem, even, strangely, those who pay attention to politics. There’s still something of an extracurricular quality to them. In Serbia, politics feel much heavier and closer to everyday life. There’s something tense and suffocating about it. And with that pressure lifted here, I feel that a lot of space has been freed up for me to think about other things.”
There are many reasons why I myself left Serbia a decade ago, but this was the main one: unless you move to the countryside to keep bees and heard goats, you have no choice but be infused with (highly toxic) national politics.
But if and when I do pivot to making chèvre, going back to Serbia would not be out of the question.
So, we are fine tearing down the beautiful old Penn Station, but want to preserve the concrete tomb that was built in its stead? Worse than preserve: turn it into a greenhouse? Modern architecture is bonkers.