I’ve been on a bit of an AI kick lately, even more than my normally grumpy attitude toward it, for no particular reason other than stuff just keeps popping up.
This bonkers trailer for the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film, Megalopolis holds the championship belt right now for biggest WTF when it comes to using AI.
Think of Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Here’s the add in case you haven’t seen it (hopefully it will continue to work):
"True genius is often misunderstood..." - the new official trailer for #Megalopolis highlights negative reviews from throughout Francis Ford Coppola's career pic.twitter.com/uPvado0VHd
When I first saw it, I thought it was a cool approach: highlight big-name naysayers from the past thumbs-downing some of the biggest and most beloved films in the history of cinema.
But, for whatever reason (laziness or just letting my guard down), I didn’t wonder “I wonder if these are actually true.” Guess what, dear reader? They weren’t.
Here’s Bilge Ebiri in Vulture doing the basic level of journalism and simply fact-checking the quotes from these supposedly famous negative reviews:
This is the key paragraph of his brief story on it:
What’s the intention here? Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes, since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw? Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be? If so, then it worked, in my case. I’ve read a lot of Pauline Kael reviews in my life, but I’d never read her review of The Godfather. I encourage you to do so as well.
Like, what was the point? At what level could this have seemed like a good idea? Is someone getting fired today (or yesterday, more likely)? Did a lowly researcher say “I’ll just ask ChatGPT for negative reviews from famous critics, and the bot just did its thing? Or could this have been a more calculated and purposeful screwup? Just why and how, how and why, a million times over.
Ted Gioia, in his newsletter, The Honest Broker, said that if we listen closely (but without too much strain), we can hear the death rattle of the once-mighty magazine.
He uses National Geographic as a case study, and the picture he paints is bleak.
He talked about how popular the magazine had been in its heyday.
Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.
This rings true to me. I remember the years as a kid when the magazine showed up at my parents’ house. I remember the largely unused front office of my grandfather’s sign shop help decades worth of issues, lined up like encyclopedias, in precise order.
If I’d known where my life would take me back then, it might have occurred to me for National Geographic to be my dream job. But it was already a shadow of its former self by the time I went back to journalism school, and now it’s fallen even further.
He highlights the dilution of the brand and the running away from what had made the magazine great: longform journalism, science writing, and travel writing.
I can’t even imagine the magazine without those key elements. I can’t imagine the disappointment of those who were laid off thinking they’d landed a dream job.
Gioia points to a pretty simply (yet devastating) cause:
Legacy media’s unwillingness to pay for good writing is the single biggest warning sign that its decline is irreversible. You might think that National Geographic or Sports Illustrated would try to hire the best talent it could find—that’s the obvious way to turnaround a journalism business. But they don’t see it that way. They lost confidence in writing years ago.
Gioia also points to a future that contains his newsletter and many like it:
So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media. I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.
I work with words. Pretty much always have. I love them, and I love the craft of putting them together to make arguments or essays or articles or novels.
I help college students work with their writing. It’s the third year of ChatGPT on campus, and it’s hard to describe the suspicion and distrust the technology has bred.
I don’t think about it so much in the realm of “cheating,” but I think about all those times that my assignments piled up and my priorities out of whack and I realized something was due in less than an hour and just had to vomit up something, anything, so as not to fail the assignment.
Was that the best use of my college dollars? Most assuredly not. But was there still value in it? I think so. It wasn’t so dissimilar to times writing assignments in a class, where the work you’d done, the things you’d read, needed to be recalled and compiled quickly in a coherent piece of writing. It wasn’t going to win any prize, but its very shagginess was, in retrospect, a mark of the (admittedly imperfect) human behind the words.
ChatGPT erases that scenario entirely. Of course students will continue to forget about assignments and need to produce something in a rush, but the technology can do it in literal seconds.
That’s hardly the most concerning use of ChatGPT, but I remember talking to a professor in the Honors College at Mizzou who said the problem came into play whenever we outsource our thinking. I think that’s exactly right.
Did I watch all of the episodes in a single night?
Yes, Chef!
Should I? Probably not. I should have savored it, like an expensive tasting menu, but I gorged it like a bag of Doritos. The season is just as good as it’s ever been, but the forward momentum in the plot is minimal. The movement happens by way of depth: Each person is revealed to us a little more deeply. That’s why we watch. Sure, we want to know what happens to the restaurant because we’re rooting for this ragtag band of misfits. But we care about them beyond their roles in the kitchen: We want them to be happy and taken care of and to find peace and love and relief from a largely unrelenting world. The season provides more context and background for many of them, and it continues to document the growth of nearly every character. They feel real, as complicated and lovable as any family member or friend in our real lives. It’s a marvel.
You know those posts that say, “I watched all of such-and-such so you don’t have to”? Did I do that? Yes. Except 86 that last part. You absolutely have to watch this. It’s as good as it gets on TV.
Ep. 1: Felt a little disoriented between a largely plotless episode. That’s not a complaint. I could have watched an entire season in the montage-filled depiction of both the day immediately after the crazy season two finale. That much I expected, but I wasn’t expecting the time-travel bits that showed mostly how Carmy got to where he is. It was a masterful bit of table-setting for a new season, with little done to advance the ongoing storyline of this new restaurant. But it catches us up with this gang that we’ve come to love in such an elegant, graceful way, with a beautifully soft score throughout that all comes together to put you at ease, as if to say, “I’ve got you. You’re in good hands.”
Ep. 2: This is where the show’s comedy comes back. That first episode was so atmospheric; it was beautiful and quiet compared to the show we all know and love. And within seconds of this one starting, we’re back to laugh-out-loud hilarious line readings. The sheer volume of laugh lines per minute is off the charts.
The quasi-opening credits tour through various Chicago food-service locations, where many of the participants wave directly at the camera, felt a part of a different show but it was just so endearing.
As the scene in the kitchen grows from various two-shots to a full on ensemble is a masterclass of writing and staging.
Ep. 3: Here’s the chaos we’ve come to expect. It’s like someone said, “The feeling of PTSD—how do we make that a TV show?”
Uncle Jimmy steals the show, constantly worrying about where they money is.
Ep. 4: The first few minutes are a simple two-shot, just Carmy and Claire, and it’s a testament to the writing on the show. Not just on a macro level, but each individual line. Nothing happens in the scene, but you could watch it go on like that for the episode’s entire runtime. So lifelike and broken-in. It’s silly and lovebird-ish at times, but then somber and tense, and finally thematically profound. All in less than 4 minutes, without a single camera move.
Some top-notch Faks action.
Dad Richie is the best Richie.
Ep. 5: Quietly beautiful Marcus episode, which is fitting for a quietly beautiful character. From the opening scenes of clearing out his mom’s house and sitting on the steps with Syd, they bond over membership in a painful club: those who’ve lost a mother. There was such sadness in his simple statement: “I wish she’d gotten to try the food.”
Sammy Fak for the win.
Know who else loves Marcus? Nat.
Ep. 6: Great use of clocks in the early scenes. Tina’s entire world changes in just 4 hours’ time. The episode serves as an example of adding depth to a character who already feels fleshed out despite scant screen time; in just a few minutes, we understand her life more fully than any triumphs or failures in the kitchen ever showed us.
Time shift got me again. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Bernthal remains the magic fairy dust sprinkled ever so lightly throughout this show.
Heyo! Directed by Ayo. She’s got a great eye. Watch out, world. A real one here.
Ep.7: This show does memories as well as any I’ve ever seen. I think part of what makes us love these characters so much is that the chaos of their lives in the kitchen are just distractions from the stuff of real life, the hard things, the reality that the world keeps spinning and waits for no one. Carmy, Richie, Syd: Each of them is dancing on the edge of a memory constantly. Something else this show does better than any I can remember: Pairs its characters together in interesting and revealing ways. It doesn’t matter who gets together in a given scene, it always works.
What’s it like to be haunted? Uncle Fak will tell you.
Dueling partnerships! The drama!
Gary gets in on the memories: Triple-A ball. Such a touching scene.
Nat, you beautiful sunfish. What were you thinking?
Ep. 8: Mothers and daughters. Daughters and mothers. What more can you say?
Ep. 9: It’s not be entirely clear how the restaurant has been doing in terms of popular or critical opinion. It was a deft touch to see Syd reading profiles that all focus solely on Carmy while wearing a faded Scottie Pippen t-shirt. This episode doubles down on the excellent character pairings: Carmy and Unc, Unc and Computer, Richie and Tiff, the Fakses and Claire.
The number of gorgeous women who call Faks “my love” is unrivaled.
Ep. 10: I couldn’t help but wonder if funeral dinners like the one depicted here are a real thing when restaurants close. I’m guessing it is. Which is such a cool idea: one last meal, one last service, with friends and co-workers. It’s the perfect setting for the various deeply philosophical musings that happen throughout the course of the show: What experiences are most meaningful and most memorable, how to be good (or possibly great) at something, the value of food as a shared experience, the necessity for balance and restraint, the imperative to live.
Thomas Keller is the GOAT.
The guest stars in this episode are elite.
Looks like a mixed review where it counts. Sets up next season beautifully.
He’s got to be the show’s great white whale: He’s one of the best to ever do it and he’s never been on the show before. It’s so fitting that he would be their final episode.
Not to be too dramatic, but I treated the moment with some solemnity, not a tongue-in-cheek sort but an honest variety. I took the episode out of my earbuds and instead piped it through my big stereo, letting the voices and conversation fill the entire room instead of just being piped directly into my ear canal. That straight-to-the-dome quality of podcasts helps breed that heightened intimacy we feel from the medium; it’s why we feel like our favorite hosts are just friends. And in that spirit, I let my friends in and made drinks to settle in and enjoy each other’s company properly.
I further altered my normal podcasting mode by slowing it down to a normal speaking pace. It served nobody’s interest for me to speed it up. For once, I wasn’t trying to get through a podcast; I was intent on savoring it as long as possible. I sat with a pocket notebook, and I took notes, trying to drink in the knowledge pouring out of a master. It was quite lovely, a nice way to spend the evening and one I could always repeat from the show’s deep archive but just wouldn’t be the same.
Again, not to be overly dramatic, but when Max Linsky started wrapping up the episode, thanking the many along the way who’ve helped to make it possible, I got legitimately sad. My eyes watered. And I know that’s a silly thing. I do. I get it. But it was as natural as breathing in that moment; it could not be helped. The show meant the world to me. It was everything I loved about journalism school, everything I loved about working at a newspaper, everything I love about working with journalism school students. And I will miss it. And them. Max let me know, through the episode’s final words, that I wasn’t alone in how I felt, when he thanked the many listeners who took the time to reach out. The podcast mattered to a lot of people, and in a small way, that bucks me up. Feels less lonely in a moment of sadness. His response to the notes and thanks was perfect:
We should all be lucky enough to do work, to make things that mean something to other people. It’s the best. It is the absolute best.
Their latest, Good Together was released on June 21, and it’s quick and supremely enjoyable listen. The grooves are impeccable, and it’s a nice treat to both hear Rachel Price’s vocals soar as fully as ever but also to hear her cede some verses over. It’s not unheard of for her to sit a verse out, but it’s a definitely a different sound, and this album makes great use of it. Feels fresh and exciting but not unfamiliar.
I heard a few of these songs when I saw them live last year in Kansas City, but it’s nice to hear them in context of the rest of the album.
Early Favorites
Dance With a Stranger; Help Is On the Way; Seats At the Bar; Twenty-Five
Coates might just be one of the most-interviewed on the 12-year history of the show. He’s never not great. It’s interesting to listen to the different moments in his career, as he grew from a great writer to a household name.
Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better second-to-last episode of the show. And I was glad to see that he was working on another book, because I was prone to wondering what he was up to nowadays.
His latest book, The Message, sounds awesome. From the publisher:
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language," but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories--our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking--expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city--a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world--and our own souls--and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
One of the good still-good things on the internet: George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club.
Today he wrote in response to a great reader question, summed up in this paragraph:
Ah, the eternal conundrum, the tug of war between imagination and reality. While the right brain strives for abstraction, metaphor, symbolism, the left brain struggles for certainty, objectivity, the material. Where's the ideal interface? How much critical analysis is necessary to enjoy a story? Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience? Are all impressions, conclusions, interpretations equally valid? Is a story whatever the reader thinks it is? Or, to paraphrase Orwell, "All interpretations are equal, but some interpretations are more equal than others"?
The question’s actually much long and better and entertaining than just that bit, but this is the heart of the matter.
His response is kind of perfect. Because we do both, don’t we? Or at least want to.
I wrote recently about wanting to recharge my reading habit, and this newsletter came at just the right time for me.
You ask, “Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience?” to which I would answer with a resounding YES. It is totally sufficient. It’s all there is. It’s also necessary, if we have any desire to understand the thing better, to first read it for pleasure. Without that first read, we’ve got nothing to work with. I always read for pleasure (reaction) first. For sure. And, for my money, it’s perfectly fine if a person wants to stop there. However, if a person doesn’t want to stop there – if they feel that there’s (even more) pleasure to be had, by way of asking what makes the thing tick (why it gave them pleasure, or didn’t), then I’m good with that too – and I belong firmly in this camp. Approaching stories technically has definitely helped my work – although, as with all things, I find I have to do it “just right” – not too much and not too little.
Of course his answer goes beyond the most basic response; he’s a creative writing instructor (in addition to being an award-winning author). Of course he values the deeper analysis of books.
But when you’re trying to get back into reading as a dedicated hobby, it can feel like there’s a right or wrong way to go about it. It’s nice to read a reminder that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Reading is enough.
I really hope you’ll read the entirety of his response. It’s great insight to his process as a writer and reader, and it can illuminate your reading and creative process.
Here’s a great piece of sports writing done at a lightning-fast clip. Shane Ryan at Golf Digest puts the reader in his head and on the grounds at Pinehurst No. 2, where Rory McIlory, one of the best (and most popular) golfers on the planet, missed two very short putts in the final holes of the U.S. Open that obliterated his chances of 1) winning and then 2) forcing a playoff.
It would be beautiful writing if he’d taken a few days to publish it, but its immediacy is what elevates it to even greater heights.
It’s not just a tick-tock of what happened, though it has that flavor, too. It’s more cerebral than that; it’s philosophical almost.
It wrestles with what Rory must have been thinking as much as it wrestles with what we, the fans, were thinking. What he, the golf writer, was thinking.
It just works on so many levels, and the writing is stunning. File immediately in: Things I Wish I’d Written.
It seems like a simple question, but I’d guess the responses to it would be quite varied. The question could be asked at any point, but it’s an interesting moment to ask it just days after Twitter (sorry, X)(nope, sorry again, still Twitter) decided to hide “likes” from public view.
Likes and retweets make up the currency of the platform. Likes are pretty much the currency on any platform. They’re how we mark engagement with our content.
It’s as simplistic as it is understandable that we might think the answer to the question is: I want likes.
I don’t create enough on social media accounts to say I’ve ever been much of a likes chaser, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it intoxicating when just a handful of(literally count them on your fingers) likes have rolled in on a particular tweet. I can see why people would chase that feeling. And once upon a time ago, it was a great place to build a following. Not so much anymore.
I’ve decidedly redirected my efforts to this website and its accompanying newsletter. So what is it that I’m chasing?
Readers? Subscribers? Engagement? Some combination of the above is probably the best answer. It’s a return to the early 2000s kind of internet, before social media, when the web was dominated by individual blogs. That moments not coming back, and to the extent that it has tried, it’s probably been seen in the newsletter explosion a few years ago, thanks to Substack.
Caroline Crampton, of The Browser and her own books and newsletters, recently talked about being “in public” as a creative and, more basically, a person.
Her foray into the attention economy was pegged to selling her most-recent book, A Body Made of Glass:
I started this year fully intending to do this. And I did, for a few months — I showed up on social media, I made videos about my life for the first time and started getting thousands of views for each one, and I said yes to every opportunity to write a promotional piece that I was offered. But as I got more and more tired, and closer to burn out, a question kept plaguing me: what did all of this even have to do with writing a book? As I edited dozens of video clips together to make a 60-second TikTok with enough jump cuts in it that viewers wouldn't instantly scroll away, my doubts grew further.
I just deeply respected her decision to opt out:
So I'm not going to. I will write about what I'm doing, as writing, in my own space, unmediated by other forces. I stopped writing a personal email newsletter several years ago when newslettering became my dream job at The Browser, but now I want to bring that practice back into my days. I want to write about my work to people who have chosen to hear from me and nobody else, with no external forces shaping what I say, how I say it or whether they are able read it. Perhaps I will be leaving potential sales on the table if I retreat from the conventional book promotion hustle like this, but with some reflection I have decided that should that be the case, it will have been a worthwhile sacrifice. That's what I learned from this intense period of publicity: I cannot take part in it while also making work that is worth publicising.
I have only moderate amounts of readers and subscribers, so it’s easy to imagine what they might feel like and assume it’s great. But in this day and age, it doesn’t take too much for that to tip into the undesirable.
This article from Slate sums up the feeling of having too many expectations on you simply because people have chosen to engage with what you’ve produced.
It describes the balance between appreciation of the attention and the exasperation.
On one hand, what newsletter creator wouldn’t want their work to resonate with their audience so much that it drives them to reach out? On the other, how does a creator navigate the responsibilities and expectations of a parasocial relationship that formed without their buy-in? Is it now their obligation to not just provide customer service, but be a “good friend”?
This is probably not normal, and I recognize that. I also realize that I do like the idea of leaving a digital footprint. I think about it when I think about this blog and what I want it to be at the end of the day. Ideally, I want it to be a catch-all for what I'm thinking and reading and doing. This is exactly what some people use their social media accounts for, but I've just never been one of them. I'm not likely to start this late in the game, either. I don't know why one seems better to me than the other, but it does.
If I’m lucky enough to bring a few readers with me along the way, all the better.
I found this list of suggested reading list of works to check out if you need a reminder that all creative work is stymied from time to time. It’s useful not just for the recommendations but for the little nuggets it pulled out of them as advertisement for their fit in the list.
I especially loved this one from the blurb on Lynda Barry’s What It Is.
The core of the arts is play, Barry argues: something children undertake with great seriousness until they learn to be aware of what others think, which can choke off creativity. But the key, when you’re blocked, isn’t simply to think harder. It’s to relinquish control, “to be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape,” Barry writes.
Every now and then, I’ll see something that makes me envious, and I’ll jokingly say “It’s tough to see someone else living out your dream.” It’s usually said with a grin and shoulder shrug, like “Whaddaya gonna do?”
I definitely felt that reading a recent New York Times Magazine story about the man who couldn’t stop going to college.
The lede alone had me hooked:
Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s. Some of Bolger’s degrees took many years to complete, such as a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Others have required rather less commitment: low-residency M.F.A.s from Ashland University and the University of Tampa, for example.
I’ve been to a lot of school compared to most people, but this is wild. But I say constantly: If money were no object, I’d just go to school forever. And here this guy is, doing it.
His backstory is a compelling one. He had severe dyslexia to the point where his mother read assignments to him into college (from which he graduated at 19 with a 4.0 GPA) and into Yale Law School, where their system simply couldn’t keep up.
It feels comparable to seeing a genius in a particular area, and say “I wish I could do that,” but what we’re really saying is that we want the parts of it that seem appealing. We don’t always consider the ways in which that level of genius (or just singular focus on a particular specialty) makes life difficult, makes socialization seem unnatural. Bolger’s home-schooled existence seems to have produced a great academic and intellectual environment, but a line, tossed off quickly in the piece, states that he only had one friend his age as a child. For as appealing as his intellectual development (and the outside-the-box homeschooling that produced) may seem desirable when I think about the results and his countless degrees, I think about the simple joy of childhood friendships and know that it’s not as simple as just saying “I wish that were my educational experience.” As with everything, there are trade-offs.
He’s clearly a supremely intelligent person to have gotten beyond the learning challenge and admitted into such prestigious schools in the first place. But the author struggles, on the page, with the “why” of Bolger’s pursuits. And it’s truly perplexing when the answer comes back: I love learning. The author comes back to it a few times in the piece, and this quote about what the rest of us who “love learning” do hits home:
One thing Bolger has not seemed to learn over the years is to introspect. Why has he driven himself to this extent — to place himself over and over in the kinds of impractical programs young adults enter to wait out a bad economy or delay the onset of adulthood à la National Lampoon’s Van Wilder? Many of us love learning, too, but we don’t do what Bolger has done; we listen to history podcasts on our commutes or pick our way through long books in the minutes before sleep. Despite all his degrees, Bolger has never sought a tenure-track job — only a few of his degrees would even qualify him for such a position — and he has never really specialized.
The piece goes on to highlight how he’s made a career for himself by coaching kids on how to get into the best colleges in the world. It’s one that makes total sense: If he has expertise in anything, it’s the intricate dance of putting together an application packet.
And that’s worked out well for him. Can’t begrudge him for that.
But I prefer to think about his motivation rather than what his schooling has earned him:
“I believe that people are like trees,” he said. “I hope I am a sequoia. I want to grow for as long as possible and reach toward the highest level of the sky.”
I’ve been writing in a lot of posts and all of my newsletter issues in Bear, which I’ve enjoyed a lot. But I realized there’s a good deal of friction when it comes to publishing to Ghost.
I realized that both Ulysses and iA Writer allow for direct integration with Ghost to ease publishing, so here I am, trying Ulysses because I like the features it offers a little more than iA Writer.
But stay tuned, especially if you’re in the market for a new writing app, because I’ll probably have more to say about it soon.
Spoiler: It seems to be pretty awesome publishing to Ghost with Ulysses.
In his latest entry, he shows off a great bit of close-up, an old trick called the "Chicago Opener." The first half of the illusion is so good on its own, but the finale is so confounding, so much fun to ponder, that I just had to shout it out here.
THEN, in a convergence of all my media inputs, Pablo Torre just interviewed Kwong on his podcast to learn more about how Kwong makes a living as an illusionist, on advising and explaining but also not breaking the unwritten rules of magic.
I don't normally suggest watching a video version of a podcast that I recommend (though many have video versions), but this one really benefits from the video. There are a handful of tricks described, namely the very beginning of the episode when Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers gets hit with a nasty one-two punch of a trick that is honestly deserves to be seen rather than explained, and a simple how-to trick from Kwong at the end. Just a lot of fun all the way through.
Hans Niemann was at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the history of chess, and it remains unclear if he's the real deal or a talented fraud.
I can never quite put my finger on why I find chess so fascinating. Maybe lots of people found this to be the case after watching The Queen's Gambit on Netflix: sucked in but not entirely sure if it was the subject matter or the TV show's writing, directing, and acting.
I remember loving Searching for Bobby Fischer back in the 1990s when it came on TV (I want to say ABC, but don't quote me on that; I feel like it was on one of the "clearest" stations, and at my house, that meant ABC on channel 7).
But maybe intuitively I knew this line from a recent New York magazine profile of Hans Niemann:
There are three disciplines in which scientists believe prodigies exist: math, music, and chess.
Perhaps I, too, could sense that, and I was drawn to it, not because I understood it with any personal connection, but because it's such an intoxicating idea. To be a prodigy, though its potential to exist in me is long, long gone, feels like something worth wishing for.
Either way, I loved this story. I've been close to chess storytelling before, and when done well, there's just something imminently readable about it. This piece excels in describing the chess of it all, but it's a much deeper and darker story than simply pawn-takes-rook and checkmates.
In this age of fragmented media, it's all too common (but still weird) to think that not everyone was able to just sit down and watch the news of former president Donald Trump becoming the first former president to be convicted as a felon.
I followed along on the New York Times app and CNN (via Max). Maybe it's profoundly old fashioned of me, but it just felt more real to see it reported on TV, which isn't really a take I'm likely to have about TV news more generally.
CNN's Jake Tapper literally read through all 34 counts, and he was sure to remark how remarkable the moment was in American history. With all the legal proceedings still to come for Trump and the very real possibility that he's elected president in November, I wonder if I'll remember this day, the way I remember watching TV on other huge news days? It's hard to say at this point, but I'm glad I was able to tune in.
Stars such as Homestead Grays slugger Josh Gibson now stand alongside the likes of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams in record books that long excluded them. The Negro Leagues stars generally played fewer games than White players of the same era, so the top parts of leader boards for many of the counting statistics (hits, home runs, strikeouts, etc.) are unchanged. But rate stats, which speak to how effective a player was without being subject to scheduling, reveal a much different picture.
I haven't posted recently because I, too, have been consumed with contest judging. It's hardly the Pulitzers, but that surely didn't stop those applying for a chance to be deemed the winner.
Yong captured well the overwhelming feeling that sets in when you have a stack of submissions:
When you’re searching for excellence, even books you might have enjoyed under normal circumstances start looking mediocre, and the process quickly becomes a slog that drains the joy from reading.
I surely wasn't as busy as he and his fellow judges were; he said they judged more than 400 books, which honestly feels like it ought to be a full-time job if it wasn't. I had a meager 80+ submissions to consider, but that feeling of the joy of reading the thing being sapped from you was all too real.
Yong goes on to pry back the curtains of the Pulitzer's process, which is interesting in its own right. But then he also summarizes and makes a case for the winner, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall. It sounds quite compelling:
In his book, the eponymous protagonist Abed Salama learns that the school bus carrying his five-year-old son, Milad, has crashed in the outskirts of Jerusalem. As Salama tries to find his son, he is stymied at every turn because he is Palestinian. In recounting this desperate quest, Thrall, who is a Jewish American journalist based in Jerusalem, offers an incredibly intimate portrait of life under occupation, and the challenges that Palestinians face during both the mundanities of daily life and the heightened moments of tragedy.
I respected Yong's willingness to lay bare some of his thinking after he made the recommendation that helped, in part, the book to be recognized.
While considering the book, I asked myself if I was rating it highly only because it was clearly relevant to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To an extent, no: Even if the topic wasn’t extremely topical, ADITLOAS would still be one of the most finely reported and invaluably humane books of the year. But in a way, yes: Our task was to find the greatest books, and one that deeply illuminates a generation-defining moral catastrophe surely counts. If ADITLOAS had it come out a year earlier, it would still have been a masterpiece. That it came out now makes it an indispensable one. I’m glad that the Pulitzer Board agreed. They made a bold choice and, I think, the correct one.
I found it all too easy to wonder about how I was judging various pieces, how the timeliness of their subject matter influenced my decision, if at all, and whether it should (or shouldn't). It's a weird position to be given the power to judge after it seems so easy to do so in everyday life.
Yong's description of it was characteristically thoughtful and nuanced, and I'm glad he decided to share, both his experience and the recommendation.
I came across a new Twitter account that immediately caught my attention.
This image is mind-blowing.
Can’t believe my husband & I took / processed this photo. Like it’s not nasa, it’s little old us in our back yard with a telescope. 😯 pic.twitter.com/skYnMuvxiG
— Cathrin Machin Space Art (@Cathrinmachin) May 15, 2024
Below the photo, Machin links to a Youtube video by her husband, Ian, about which telescopes to buy. It was a really helpful breakdown that felt essential after seeing this image they captured. Would love to capture photos a fraction as cool as that one.
Bilge Ebiri
