Tag: links (Page 2 of 22)

As promised, I have a big batch of articles to share. I read most of these while on our trip last weekend, thus on my Kindle, which meant I couldn’t clip pull quotes as I read. With a couple exceptions, you’ll just have to trust me that these are worth your time. Most are pretty lengthy, so if you have travels planned for next week, or just need some distractions to get away from “loved ones” who rub you the wrong way, these could be ideal.

I went to Target the day before Halloween to grab the small amount of candy we need every year. The Halloween section was being cleared out and replaced with Christmas candy. Again, on the day BEFORE Halloween.

This story popped up the next day. Target isn’t alone, and there are a lot of factors that go into it. But, seriously, could you wait until November 1 to do the change-over?

‘Christmas creep’: Why holiday candy hits shelves so early

I was re-reading a post from 2013 and came across this article I linked to back then. At the time it marked the 30th anniversary of one of the most dangerous years in the Cold War, and it seemed hopelessly in the past. Add ten more years, the rise of authoritarianism around the globe, a ground war in Europe, an expansionist China, the latest conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, plus everything going on in our fair country, and it seems like we could pretty easily slip back into the dark days when global nuclear conflict is not a totally unrealistic option.

Inescapable, apocalyptic dread: The terrifying nuclear autumn of 1983

As the parent of a Swiftie, I enjoyed this quite a bit.

My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom

This is an incredible story, both in the audacity of the crime and the utter lack of recourse most victims have. If you plan on doing any major projects around your home, I recommend reading it closely. And write checks or wire money. Never, ever use a peer-to-peer payment system for anything other than childcare or reimbursing a friend for lunch.

The Great Zelle Pool Scam

There is a movie coming out about Diana Nyad’s exploits. Apparently it has pissed a lot of people off, which is something she’s been doing her whole life. I don’t really know or care what the truth of situation is, but this was an enthralling piece.

Diana Nyad’s Swimming Brought Her Glory, Fame, And An Adversary Dedicated To Exposing Her Lies

I’m always suspicious of articles like this about retiring politicians as they try to claim the moral high ground, suggesting if their colleagues just behaved like them our political process would be less dysfuncitonal. But Mitt Romney’s viewpoint here is compelling and yet another sign our country is well-down a dangerous path that will likely take decades to get off, if we’re lucky.

What Mitt Romney Saw In The Senate

Here is a piece I did go back and find a pull quote for. It is about the small group of lawyers and support staff in Germany who are still searching for surviving Nazis. Their search has expanded to include administrative staff who worked at the death camps. It raises an interesting moral discussion about whether a young woman who typed orders given and followed by others is responsible for the deaths of the names on those pieces of paper.

This passage was especially chilling and powerful, given it was a German taking his own people to task for just going along or following orders rather than standing up to genocide.

The Furchner case upturned his thinking about the Holocaust, Kleist told me, finally making sense of the number of people the Nazis were able to murder in a mere 12 years in power. “This genocide wasn’t efficient because of the crazy people at the top,” he said. “It was efficient because every day, thousands of Germans like Frau Furchner showed up at an office and did their jobs. This is why they got so far. This genocide. It was so…so ordinary.” He hoped her case would lay a new inscription on the past: that ordinary people did this too. He hoped it would send a different sort of message to the future: that ordinary people could do this too.

The Race to Catch the Last Nazis

What if someone who had a similar name and similar career to yours turned into a conspiracy-spouting nut job and you were the target some of the blowback for their behavior? Author Naomi Klein has been dealing with exactly that for the past few years.

I realize I’m on her side here, but I continue to find it baffling how the Covid pandemic has pushed so many people from various perspectives into the lunatic fringe, where government actions designed to contain the virus and prevent deaths are seen as a way of crushing the individual, implementing socialism, etc. It’s even more amazing that while the pandemic began with our former president in office, many of these people have decided our government’s entire response to the pandemic is part of a Biden-led plot. I mean, look at a calendar, people…

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality

Finally, a fun, lighthearted, and educational piece.

Are any words the same in all languages?

I’ve been informed that our internet will disappear sometime this morning as Xfinity “works to improve the quality of the network” in our area. I think that’s code for finding a way to charge us more. Of course, they’ve said this like three times in the past week and it always ends up getting delayed. However, I saw their trucks scuttling around the neighborhood this morning so it might be legit today.

Even though it’s been just a week since my last links post, I’ll go ahead and share some more before the internet juice disappears.

I’ve written about the Oakland A’s move to Las Vegas before. In a long line of dishonest and dirty negotiations between teams and cities, it sets a new level for dishonesty and dirt. Tim Keown breaks down the process, and actually gets the A’s owner on record. I do love the Oakland mayor going off on the A’s management.

“To say we were nowhere is BS,” Mayor Thao says. “To say there was no proposal is total BS. Let’s be very clear: we did have a proposal. But maybe it wasn’t a proposal John Fisher could afford.”

Oakland vs. the A’s: The inside story of how it all went south (to Las Vegas)

A pretty cool story about the summer pickup games at UCLA where NBA and college players come together to shake off the rust before the training for their next seasons officially begins.

Why NBA players keep flocking to a hot gym at UCLA: Inside the Rico Hines runs

Joey Votto is a baseball treasure, an outlier from the stereotypical ballplayer in so many ways.[1] He likely took his last home at bats for the Reds Sunday, although he insists he wants to keep playing and there is always a chance he could wind up on the Reds next year.

Still, his career is certainly winding down. He just shared this pretty great post describing what it was like to ride buses as a minor leaguer. You genuinely have to be totally bought-into the dream of making the majors to put up with this.

I dream of standing on the field in packed stadiums, being interviewed, bright lights, signing big contracts, and accepting awards. These grand dreams were a stark contrast to my current reality. Because although I was trying my best, nothing seemed to be going right on the field. Joining the minor leagues was nothing like I expected. I thought I would perform better, move faster up the ranks, and have more fun with my teammates. Instead, it was isolating, unglamorous, and humbling. I felt like a fool.

A Bus Ride

Finally, this make me laugh super hard. Llamas are kind of awesome.

Llama Is Brought to a Wedding Dressed as a Groomsman and Steals the Show

Curb fans will enjoy this real-life origin story.

One evening, as they drank into the night, it dawned on them. ‘I looked at his face and I said, “There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.” Just saying that spooks everyone!’ It clicked. ‘“You’re Richard Lewis!” “You’re Larry David!”… I was yelling at him, he was yelling at me.’

‘I disliked him intensely’: Richard Lewis on first meeting Larry David

A great Q&A with Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC.

Our downfall came after Raising Hell when we stopped being Run-D.M.C. and became “Run-D.M.C.,” a band that had to have a hit record, get on MTV, and live up to expectations and a lifestyle that had nothing to do with why we got together in the first place.

(This may be paywalled. A good moment to remind you I’ve been using the Brave browser for over two years. It both blocks a shit-ton of ads (including on YouTube) and also gets you around a few paywalled sites like Vulture.)

The Worst and Most Captivating of Run-D.M.C., According to D.M.C.

I tend to like Sean McFate’s worldview, but am often frustrated by his writing style, which can get in the way of his points. That aside, an interesting take on how we are likely planning (and spending spectacularly) on the wrong next war.

However, American traditionalists do not see the threat here. For them, war only occurs when bullets fly. They may be patriots, but sneaky war exploits their ignorance.

Sneaky War: How to Win the World Without Fighting

Here is a great Cold War story I had never heard before. It is certainly unorthodox and has some fascinating twists to it.

How did an ordinary American become a Soviet icon? And who was the Man from Fifth Avenue, really? As I dug deeper and made new discoveries, I found a tale a whole lot wilder than I’d ever imagined—a story of foreign intrigue, forbidden romance, and a man who might just have been playing everyone all along.

The Man From Fifth Avenue

Speaking of twists, this is one of the craziest stories I’ve read recently. There are some people out there who put an insane amount of effort into being bad.

The true story of a golf pro’s lies, fraud, threats and tales of murder

This is kind of a weird piece. I would put passing on Breaking Bad or Arrested Development’s disastrous fourth season in the same category as the networks calling Florida for Al Gore in 2000. And I’m not sure the numbers next to some of these match their significance. It is a pop culture list, though, and you all know how I love those.

The 50 Worst Decisions in TV History

Does the world need a fairly academic accounting of the making of Anchorman? Probably not. I would have rather this be a more humorous look inside one of the funniest movies ever. I still enjoyed it despite the extremely dry tone.

‘Let’s Let the Squirrel Out of the Bag’ On the Anchorman set, improv-comedy masters had the freedom to reimagine the film one line at a time.

With the US Open starting, it’s the perfect moment for this profile of the last American man to win a Grand Slam. Which still seems nuts – 20 years ago! – even having lived through the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era.

Andy Roddick’s Open Era

We’ll wrap it up with two posts about regionalism in the US.

Midwesterners love to complain about East Coast Bias. Often rightly so. But here’s an area where the East, specifically the North East, gets something 100% correct.

‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live

Fascinating stuff here. Growing up we were a solid 6:00 for Dinner family. You watched Tom Brokaw, then you ate. In our early years together, S and I usually ate around 7:00. But once we had kids that turned into 5:00. As they got older that bumped back to 6:00, which had been pretty steady until the past year, when I’ve tried to nudge it more towards 6:30. Looks like we fit right in the window for “normal” across the US.

When is Dinner, By State

Somehow in my highly organized list of future posts,[1] my latest collection of articles to share got bumped out of sight. Which is a shame because two of these are some of the best pieces I’ve read this year and I shouldn’t be sitting on them for over a month before I recommend them.

I have no interest in Robert Kennedy Jr. I think many of his views are abhorrent. But there is the very real chance that he could effect who is elected as our next president in 14 months.

This is a terrific profile of him. I think it’s fair, explores why he has drawn interest from some people with similar politics to my own, and still shows that he’s a loon.

It was hard to pick pull quotes as there were so many passages I loved. These are a couple of my favorites.

That’s not to say Kennedy’s campaign is a joke. He is both an addled conspiracy theorist and an undeniable manifestation of our post-pandemic politics. He is an aging but handsome scion of America’s most storied political family, facing off against an incumbent who many in his own party worry is too old and too unpopular to win a second term. Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

If he were your uncle, you also might try hard not to pick a fight with him at Thanksgiving, or maybe you would eagerly pick a fight with him at Thanksgiving. And maybe you would tussle lightly with your parents and siblings and cousins about whether you felt sorry for him or whether he was actually just an asshole.

But if he were your uncle, he would not be performing surprisingly well in a Democratic presidential primary and gobbling the attention of the national press with his every word. That he is tells us as much about this country’s broken systems as any of his diatribes do.

And then there is the bracing reality that, here in Trump’s America, another clearly damaged man, a man whose own close-knit family has waved red flags about his fitness for office, is getting this far in the anti-Trump party.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Inside Job

This is a wonderful piece about the nearly 50 year long friendship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Sometimes sports is the best.

Bitter rivals. Beloved friends. Survivors.

My regular reminder that often The Onion has the best take on recent events.

Back in the year 1823, I decided to become a slave so one day my descendants could steal college admissions slots. It was a tough decision, but boy, did it pay off big-time!

I Decided To Become A Slave So One Day My Descendants Could Steal College Admissions Spots

This final piece is focused on the Tech Toddler, but it could very easily apply to our former president. And lots of other people in the public eye who seem to live from the rush of spouting constant bullshit and having it broadcast to the world without anyone ever calling them on it.

The issue is that these stories are often published without the skepticism that is appropriate to someone who the Securities and Exchange Commission once forced to pay $20 million for saying something that wasn’t true.

It’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk

Good news for those of you with video game collections: you will soon be able to buy an actual new game for your Atari 2600!

’Mr. Run and Jump’ will be the first official cartridge for the Atari 2600 since 1990

Not sure I buy this writer’s argument, but it is an interesting counter to the conventional wisdom about season three of Ted Lasso.

Kindly allow this brief dissenting opinion: Perhaps Ted Lasso isn’t broken—we are. The show hasn’t stopped working: It’s merely changed to meet the moment.

In Defense ofTed Lasso

The Believer used to be one of those cool magazines I would pick up before a work trip. It was filled with great content plus it made me look hip and well-traveled. I did not know it had gone away for a bit and then returned.

This piece from the April edition is a bit dated, as David Eggers visited Ukraine last December. Still, his report from that war-torn country was enlightening.

I believe that in the West we have not gotten a full picture of life in Ukraine during war. It is infinitely richer and more alive and inspiring than we are led to believe.

Sketches From Ukraine

I’ve read so many pieces about season two of The Bear. I liked how this one explored how “Fishes” tapped into the many emotions of the holiday season.

That’s what makes this Christmas so tragic. The love is there, but they’ve just gotten a little too comfortable showing each other the ugliest versions of themselves.

The Christmas Episode of “The Bear” Is an Instant Classic

A busy weekend in the past and a packed day ahead of me, so we’ll get caught up tomorrow. For now, some links I’ve collected in recent weeks.

First, a rather chilling account by a Ukrainian from the front lines of the war with Russia.

I haven’t had a chance to personally kill any Russians. They say it’s good luck to kill someone in front of you. But in this war you rarely see the enemy. If you’re stationed in a trench for a long time, you’ll probably see Russians. But mostly it’s bombs and shelling and drones. I was involved in one operation to catch a Russian, and he was alive and uninjured so I had a conversation with him. I gave him tea and treated him as a human being. I saw in front of me not an enemy, just a poor guy. We are all humans. We’re not fighting against orcs. We’re fighting people who look like us, who mostly speak the same language, who were our friends or even family before. They have their own truth and we have our truth.

The Diary of a Ukrainian Filmmaker-Turned-Soldier

Somewhat in the same vein is this piece, which examines declassified documents from the Soviet archives regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the authors point out, in the lead-up to the Ukrainian war, Vladimir Putin made similar errors to those Nikita Khrushchev made in 1962. Fortunately, as the quote below shoes, Khrushchev eventually regained his sanity. I’m not sure we can be as hopeful about Russia’s current leadership.

“History tells us that in order to stop a conflict, one should begin not by exploring the reasons why it happened but by pursuing a cease-fire,” he explained to that Indian visitor on October 26. He added, “What’s important is not to cry for the dead or to avenge them, but to save those who might die if the conflict continues.”

Blundering on the Brink

Continuing with our Russian theme…A few times each year I think about going back and re-watching the entire run of The Americans. I always end up looking at my list of all the other crap I need to watch and tell myself to revisit the idea in a few months.

The fifth anniversary of the show’s wonderful finale just passed. The Ringer brought together its show runners, director, and actors to discuss one of the best finales ever filmed.

Keri Russell (Elizabeth Jennings):So emotionally devastating. It really shocked me.
Matthew Rhys (Philip Jennings):She was texting me, going, “Text me when you read it. Text me!”
Noah Emmerich (Stan Beeman):I just read it, and I didn’t skip ahead to see my stuff. I wanted to really experience the story in real time, and it just swept me up.
Holly Taylor (Paige Jennings):I was blown away. I loved it.
Keidrich Sellati (Henry Jennings):I couldn’t even comprehend it. I read it, and I sat there staring at it for 15 minutes, and then I reread it because I was like, “No way. What?” I guess I’m a crier. I started bawling.

With or Without You: The Oral History of the ‘Americans’ Finale

As has happened way too often lately, The Onion responds to the events of the day best.

“I don’t even want to be a woman—I just want to win at swimming. Imagine how I’ll laugh with glee up there on the winners’ podium, knowing that all I had to do was lie about my gender identity issues through months or years of psychiatry sessions, take a shitload of androgen blockers, go to speech therapy, and recover from multiple invasive surgeries!

Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming

This lady is a badass.

Competitors sail small boats, navigate with paper charts and sextant, catch rain for water, hand-write their logs, communicate by radio, and cannot accept outside assistance.

Kirsten Neuschäfer Wins the Golden Globe Sailing Race, Dubbed a Voyage for Mad Men

Why am I not surprised that people have been upset for 12 years about a CARTOON CHARACTER not being the white guy they were used to? People know Spider-Man isn’t real, right?

Across the Spider-Verse’s greatest feat is the way it takes Spider-Man’s fandom to task

Finally, a fantastic profile of Bryan Cranston. This anecdote cracked me up. This would have been in the late ‘70s, which seems about right.

In his early 20s, Cranston took a two-year motorcycle trip with his brother, during which he had the epiphany that he wanted to be an actor and not a law enforcement official, the career that he’d been studying for. While planning their itineraries, Cranston triangulated the locations of women he and his brother had already hooked up with to create routes where they’d most likely encounter someone who’d give them a free place to stay.

The Bryan Cranston Method

The Tech Toddler has struck again. Naturally it was McSweeney’s that called him out best.

As a free speech absolutist, only death could stop me from defending the rights of Twitter users to speak without censorship. Well, either death or a request from an autocratic leader asking that I censor certain content that could be sensitive for their regime. Whichever comes first.

I WILL DEFEND FREE SPEECH TO THE DEATH. OR UNTIL AN AUTOCRAT ASKS ME TO STOP

I’ve earned a lot of credibility with my girls for openly enjoying Taylor Swift’s music. Or at least everything from the Red singles on. I think I would enjoy seeing her live, but I’m not sure I could handle everything that came with it. Especially the 20,000 screaming girls.[1]

I loved this piece by site favorite Tom Breihan about his experience taking his 14-year-old daughter to see Taylor last week. Not afraid to admit some of her songs get to me, too, although not so much that I burst into tears. Who knows how I would react if I was standing with one of my girls and watching them get floored by the moment.

The Taylor Swift Live Experience Made Me All Emotional

BTW, don’t tell M that C and I were talking about music last week and she said that while she likes the music of both Taylor and M’s fav Harry Styles, she likes Taylor a lot more because “I think she’s a good person. I think Harry is kind of a creep.” 😂

MTV shuttered its news division last week. Like many kids who grew up on MTV, my initial reaction was “MTV News was still a thing?”

I spent a lot of time laying on the couch watching MTV News during MTV’s glory years. No longer did I have to go to the school library to read Rolling Stone or Spin to get the latest music news, delayed by the natural publishing timelines. It was just entertainment news, but I think it had a profound impact on my generation’s life.

“It Was Lightning in a Bottle”: An Oral History of MTV News

I vaguely remember Skylab from the summer of 1979. When we visited Kansas City, The Jones Store had cardboard sheets for sale from which you could punch out a novelty hat that was supposed to protect you from the falling debris. And I recall sitting in my grandfather’s pickup in central Kansas, listening to the news that Skylab had crashed into remote Australia. Sometimes I remember weird shit.

Here’s the story of the Aussie who collected some of the scraps that landed near his home.

A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco

I love stories like this, that explain how things that are a deep part of our modern culture came from humble beginnings. It’s especially interesting to consider that when sushi was first brought to the US, World War II was still in the relatively near past. I remember my parents getting shitty looks because they bought Toyotas in the late 1970s. Can you imagine trying to get WWII vets to eat Japanese food?

How two friends sparked L.A.’s sushi obsession — and changed the way America eats

I’m overdue on sharing links. To be fair, I haven’t saved very many of late.

A major bummer in the photography world, as Amazon is shutting down DP Review. Anyone who has bought a camera, lens, or other equipment in the past two decades has likely used DP as a resource. It looks like Amazon has clarified their initial plans and will keep the archives up. I just used those this week while looking at film lenses.

This piece is more about niche hobbies and how/if they can survive in the modern world. Obviously it is of interest to 50-somethings like me who are the prime forces behind those esoteric pastimes.
RIP DPReview

Snakes are endlessly fascinating to me. Although I don’t want to be anywhere near them. Some of these pictures are incredible.
Photographer Spends 10 Days Tracking Down Snakes in Namibia

I had no idea there were turf wars in LA between the many Depeche Mode cover bands. As Kevin Garnett said, anything is possible!
Just Can’t Get Enough: The Warring Depeche Mode Tribute Bands Of Los Angeles

M got admitted to three schools and less than $10K in combined scholarship offers. Slacker.
New Orleans senior shatters U.S. record with 125 college offers, $9 million in scholarships

It’s almost outdoor entertaining season. Some decent tips in here.
How to Dine Outdoors, Minus the Bugs

Finally, a moment of zen?
911 call about fight ends with Florida cop separating 2 brawling goats, sheriff says

I haven’t run across as many pieces lately that struck me as sharable. So this entry spans over a month of collection. Thus the first is a little out-of-date, and I’m guessing many of you who would be interested in it have already read it.

Wright Thompson is a modern Gary Smith: everything he writes is completely compelling. Especially when he has such an interesting subject.

This is an amazing look at Joe Montana and the person he has become. On one hand, he lives exactly the cool-ass life you would think he lives. On the other, like so many former elite athletes, there are some slights, real and perceived, that he can’t let go of.

This piece is packed with memorable anecdotes. My favorite, though, are the sections that feature Steve Young’s thoughts. Their relationship is fascinating. Not only does Young, maybe, understand Montana as well as anyone can, he clearly still idolizes the man he helped to drive out of San Francisco.

“Every player in history wants to write more in the book,” Young says. “I think about that all the time.”
His voice gets softer.
“No matter how much you write,” he says, “you want to write more.”
Young goes quiet.
Then says, “I’ve talked to you more about this than he and I would ever consider talking about it.”

Joe Montana Was Here

I was lucky enough to live here in Indy during the Greg Oden era. That was an incredible time. And this is an incredible piece covering his life and career and how he arrived at his current place: an assistant for Butler. I knew a lot of the details of his life, but a few of them in this piece were new to me. Guy has been through a lot. I really hope he can stay healthy and find success in his new path. He always seemed like such a good kid and it seemed so unfair that his body wouldn’t let him even try to reach the expectations that surrounded him.

Maybe Oden’s calling will prove to be at the end of the bench, not the paint. Maybe his potential can be reincarnated. He’s realized that it’s okay to change course, change careers. Sometimes, he thinks about former child actors and how it disheartens him when he sees that people shame them for doing something different as adults. “What did you expect them to do? Sit in the house and live off the one thing that you know them from?” Oden says.

Greg Oden’s Long Walk Home

A couple very serious pieces about the state of modern journalism.

It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

IN ORDER TO KEEP OUR EDITORIAL PAGE COMPLETELY BALANCED, WE ARE HIRING MORE DIPSHITS

Why do we hire dipshits? It’s simple. After the 2016 election, we got yelled at a lot by right-wingers. How could you report such negative stories about Trump by printing the words he says? Why don’t 100% of your stories talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails, rather than just the ones on the front page? They had a point.

Stephen Hyden went to a Bruce Springsteen concert last week. I loved his summary, in which he addressed the elephant in the room. One of my biggest music regrets is that I’ve never seen Springsteen live, and likely never will.

Watching Sunday’s concert overall felt like closing a circle. It reminded me of a genre movie where a gang decides to team up for one caper, in the hopes that they can eventually walk off forever into the sunset.

On His Latest Tour, Bruce Springsteen Contemplates His Own Ending

I enjoyed scrolling through this. As with any music list, there were a number of “What they hell are they thinking?” entries. Their choice for number one, while fun, seems like a reach to me.

Best Songs of 1983 – Rolling Stone