The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test.
Helen Lewis at The Atlantic:
Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza. The simplistic logic of pop intersectionality cannot reconcile this….
I donated to the United Jewish Appeal Israel Emergency Fund to support the people of Israel. The fund provides: “Emergency cash assistance for victims of terror. Critically needed trauma counseling. Care for children in shelters. Burial expenses. Funds to relocate people to safer areas.”
Tyler Cowen interviews the fascinating Ada Palmer, Hugo Award winning author of the “Terra Ignota” science fiction series, Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago, musical composer, consultant on anime and manga, and more.
She talks about:
- Why living in the Renaissance was worse than living in the Middle Ages in Europe.
- Why she doesn’t want to go back in time.
- How censorship worked during the Inquisition, and why Enlightenment philosophy and pornography were closely related.
- How sexism by historians gives us a warped vision of history, and why the recent involvement of women in studying history has led to breakthroughs.
and much more
This is a podcast I had to stop listening to frequently, just to think about what Palmer last said.
“I came to realize that my Woody was my impression of Tom yelling at his kids.”
On the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast: Soundalikes, or voice doubles, “are voice actors who perform as characters that were originally played by someone else.” The soundalike replaces a big superstar like Robin Williams or Julia Roberts for video games, rides, toys, TV shows, etc.
This podcast features an interview with Jim Hanks, a successful character actor and soundalike who specializes in playing Woody from “Toy Story” when brother Tom Hanks is unavailable.
- Go online to make a payment.
- Apple Pay needs me to reenter my credit card
- Go into the house to get my wallet
- See Julie, talk with her
- Remember that we were expecting a check—ask Julie about it.
- Look where Julie says the check is. No check.
- Decide not to bother Julie with it right now
- Make a note to talk with her later
- Notice my dirty lunch dishes in the sink
- Wash them
- Notice clean dishes from yesterday are still on the drying rack
- Put them away
- Pet dog
- Return to my office
- See the notification from Apple Pay on my desktop—I need to update my credit card
- Check my pocket.
- Still don’t have my wallet
Sometimes I want a nice turkey sandwich but I do not want the side order of doggy drama so I eat something else instead.
I was already losing interest in Twitter when Musk took over. The constant arguing and anger were wearing me down. Musk said he saw Twitter as an arena for combatting ideas. The signal I got from that is that he wanted more arguing and anger. So I gradually started doing Twitter less and less until now I only check it a couple of times a week and I don’t post there. I do have a list of meme and comedy accounts on Twitter that I check regularly.
Hard-Core Sleepers Obsess Over Their Snoozing Stats
… for millions, chasing winks with the latest sleep-measuring technology has become a nighttime sport, complete with sleep scores and strategies on how to best sack the competition. … “I can see that on days when I tape my mouth during sleep, I have a 7% higher recovery score…. “
For more than 70 years, filmmakers have been reusing the sound of a particular scream. Many people even know it by name—the Wilhelm Scream.
“The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion.” It first appears in the 1951 Western “Distant Drums.” It appears in the 1954 “A Star Is Born,” “Star Wars,” “Toy Story” and on and on in many, many movies, TV shows and video games.
The actor who voiced the scream was likely Sheb Wooley, who also voiced the 1958 hit novelty song “The Purple People Eater.”
I listened to this podcast episode about the Wilhelm Scream Friday morning. That night, we watched the 1993 Sylverster Stallone movie “Cliffhanger” and I’m pretty sure I heard the Wilhelm Scream in it.
The One Year podcast looks back at the 1955 Davy Crockett craze and how it saved the then-struggling Disney studio and “created the first baby-boom phenomenon,” almost by accident.
Sabrina Schnur, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, faced death threats and anti-Semitic attacks from a bridade of right-wing boneheads who think that she downplayed the hit-and-run death of retired police chief Andreas Probst, when in fact she was the person who reported that it was a hit-and-run rather than an innocent accident.
Of course, billionaire bonehead Elon Musk joined the attacks.
smh when I think I used to feel obliged to have opinions about global crises based on a few hours of reading the news and to share that opinion with the world on the Internet.
Digital Equipment Corp. (1957-98) was a titan of the computing industry for decades, aid its technology legacy is still felt today. And it was influential in my personal life.. When Julie and I met, Julie was doing PR for DEC and I was covering the company as a journalist. Shocking conflict of interest—but she had stopped doing PR for them several weeks before we started dating.
For the lonely, a blurred line between real and fictional people
In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.
Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real friends. All participants had taken a test measuring loneliness.
Who picked Petyr Baelish or Sandor Clegane as their imaginary bestie?
I Was a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester. Writer Laura Holson remembers her family regularly received mystery boxes when the product launched 60 years ago.
I did not like them,” said my sister Mary. They didn’t appeal either to my sister Gondie, but gave her bargaining power on the school playground. “You could eat one Pop-Tart and trade the other for a candy bar,” she said of the two-pack. For my part, I would eat them only if my mother cut the edges off, leaving a ravioli-size square of frosted raspberry jam.
Maybe it’s not surprising that none of us eat them now. “But it was a great memory,” said my brother Michael.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing. Digital Equipment Corp. was a computing giant that declined until it essentially disappeared in the late 1990s. But its technology legacy continues. By Andy Patrizio at Ars Technica.
How magical combat can win the next election
For the last half-century or so, the main US political parties have spent all their time and energy ranting about the bad things that the bad people in the other party are doing, and neglected to offer any positive vision of their own.
Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West.
The West has a bad case of “Stormtrooper Syndrome”—utter faith and certainty that we are the Good Guys, the Good Guys always win, the Bad Guys are incompetent buffoons and we’ll just think our way out of crises like climate change at the last possible moment.
This syndrome is exacerbated by elites who never, ever suffer consequences of their actions.
Irish people not being superstitious. I am not posting this to ridicule Irish people. I feel the same way about superstition.