Coming Of Age In The World Of Pay-Per-Minute Porn. A 2010 essay by Dave Pell. He’s not just talking about porn, but about the addictive quality of the whole internet, which has, of course, changed drastically since the essay was published. Still worth reading though.
“… the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager – as we now understand the species – came into being sometime in the early 1940s.” A 1944 LIFE magazine photo essay.
There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age.
Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous: Since Oct. 7, “many American Jews … understand themselves differently. There are people who have never stepped foot in a synagogue and who would never take their family vacation to Israel, who … are talking about being a part of this people in a way that even takes them by surprise. We have been changed by this moment.”
That describes how I’m thinking and feeling.
I’ve thought about this interview often and was surprised to see just now that it aired Nov. 17. So long ago? Can that be right?
… being a journalism grad student right now must feel like studying paleontology in the hopes that when you graduate you’ll find a job as a dinosaur.
— Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs, “What Are We Dune 2 Journalism?”
The This American Life podcast shares “a series of phone calls to a man in Gaza named Yousef Hammash, between early December and now. He talks about what he and his family are experiencing, sometimes as they are experiencing it.” This American Life
It’s easy to lose sight of humanity when the devastation in Gaza and suffering in Israel are related as cold numbers. But it’s heartbreaking to hear Hammash and his younger sister tell their stories matter-of-factly.
He tries to get his sisters to safety and finds himself
managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant. Every day there’s talk that Israel will launch a ground assault in Rafah. Yousef and his sister make a plan for her to give birth safely, but it doesn’t go according to plan. And all 60 people in the family are looking to Yousef to tell them where they should go next and how to stay safe.
A friend reminds me of this scene from “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (1971). Of course, Kim Hunter’s line delivery is very good, but I also love her earlier “Are you fucking kidding me?” face.
My friends and I were 10 years old when the movie came out. The ending slayed us.
And yes that is Ricardo Montalban.
“Does the other one talk?”
… instead of passing a privacy law or regulating data brokers, Americans get a sort of regulatory simulacrum designed to distract you. Most recently that popped up in the form of hysteria about TikTok privacy, as if TikTok’s privacy abuses aren’t a broader symptom of our corrupt failure to protect consumers from a vast and unaccountable network of ethics-optional surveillance and monetization.
The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. Franklin Foer at The Atlantic with an in-depth report on the resurgence of anti-semitism on the right and the left.