1. Something to read as you start your day: The Health Insurance Plot Is the New American Happy Ending. From the article: “it is nearly impossible to produce anything when most of your bandwidth is spent trying to live,” which I’m pretty sure Virginia Woolf told us a century ago.
2. My mood after this week:
3. And a reminder that you don’t have to spin 24 karat gold all the time:
(via)
1. Holy shit, Animaniacs is coming back!
đ˛ @Hulu did it. They- they actually did it. Check out our @NY_Comic_Con exclusive clip! #Animaniacs #NYCC pic.twitter.com/U0Z9cb15Ir
â The Animaniacs (@TheAnimaniacs) October 11, 2020
2. Such a good title and worth your time: How Work Became An Inescapable Hellhole from Anne Helen Petersen .
3. I can’t stop laughing at this (seen at Kottke). The track titles!
1. Knit designer Kate Davies shared a checklist of how she manages seasonal depression–I like how she suggests getting a dog to help you get outside. (Does Toby need a cat stroller?)
2. Rage Against The Machine but on toy instruments:
3. Do-re-mi-fa-so-an-ti-fa!
1. We all woke up to the news that Trump tested positive for the rona and this really just sums it up for me:
Whatever your politics, whatever your party or candidate, wherever you stand on one issue or the next, if you care about the United States of America and want it to flourish you have to admit that all this shit is objectively hilarious and rules very much.
â David Roth (@david_j_roth) October 2, 2020
Thoughts and prayers, bro.
2. Kottke shared a post with a couple people talking about using clear language for slavery instead of antiquated euphemisms and it’s a must-read. Language matters. From the Twitter thread he linked:
Instead of “Slave families lived in plantations owned by white slaveowners who hired overseers to maintain discipline”
You have: “Black Families were held hostage in death camps by white human traffickers who employed torturers to torture and kill them”
Different, huh?
1. Some photos of protests nationwide over the lack of justice in Breonna Taylor’s murder.
2. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and powerless about the state of things, this piece by Iowa journalist Lyz Lenz might help:
Ginsberg acknowledges that the changes she ushered in were possible, not just through her capable arguments, but because of a tide of change happening in America..âWhat caused the courtâs understanding to dawn and grow?â she asked in an article published in the Hofstra Law Review in 1997.[…]
âSupreme Court justices, and lower court judges as well, were becoming aware of a sea change in United States society. Their enlightenment was advanced publicly by the briefs filed in court and privately, I suspect, by the aspirations of the women, particularly the daughters and granddaughters, in their own families and communities.â
Right now, so many of us feel as though Justice Ginsberg was one of the last people standing between us and the legal underpinning of our bodily autonomy through the courts. But thatâs not true. Not entirely. We are the change. We are the ones who create the culture through which judgeâs rule. We as a people in our public and private dissents and our re imaginations of society, we are more powerful than we think.
3. And on a lighter note, I think this joke was engineered in a lab for maximum Karen appeal:
(via)
1. Anne Helen Petersen writes about musical taste and losing yourself in an album as a youth–maybe it’s because we’re about the same age, but this made me incredibly nostalgic:
I listened to music while doing homework, while driving to school…while staring into space, while falling asleep, while waiting for the dial-up internet to work, while thinking about boys, while talking on the phone, while reading, and while, again, staring into space. This music wasnât just my background, thoughâI feel itâs essential to make that clear. It was the foreground, the thread that helped the rest of my life make sense, helped me make sense to myself.
2. If you need a new album to listen to in its entirety because you’re overcome with nostalgia, Austin Kleon featured 31 of them in August.
3. A must-watch: I Felt Beautiful, But You Made Me Feel Different
1. I have never once in my 40 years wanted to read Beowulf–it sounded too boring, too full of men making speeches about their bravery–but there is a new translation out by Maria Headley and, at least in this New Yorker review, it sounds amazing:
“Headleyâs version is more of a rewriting than a true translation, reĂŤnvisaging the poem for the modern reader rather than transmitting it line for line. It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand.”
Seriously, this is a speech about a dude’s bravery I can get behind:
Iâm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I meanâI may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me…
Now, I want to test my mettle on Grendel, best him,
a match from man into meat. Just us two,
hand to hand. Sweet.
2. From McSweeney’s: Frog and Toad Tentatively Go Outside After Months In Self-Quarantine.
Toad changed into his work pajamas.
He reached under a pillow for his laptop and opened up his email.
âI have so much work to do,â sighed Toad.
He set his Zoom background to a picture of his room when it was tidy.
âThere,â said Toad. âNow I am professional.â
1. I’m a sucker for any recreation of a historical personage so I spent a lot of time at the Photoreal Roman Emperors by Daniel Voshart.
Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors. For this project, I have transformed, or restored (cracks, noses, ears etc.) 800 images of busts to make the 54 emperors of The Principate (27 BC to 285 AD).
2. There have been a lot of jokes all year about “how could 2020 get any worse?!” but maybe we shouldn’t have been asking because the fires in California seem to have answered that. From photographer Noah Berger (who shot this astonishing picture), a series on what people who had fled Californiaâs Valley Fire took with them: What They Couldn’t Leave Behind.
3. And, because everything is terrible (but things are bad enough, 2020! no need to get worse!), maybe take some time to do this end of week check in (first seen on Rachel Cargle‘s Instagram, originally from here):
1. If you, like me, thought Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree was bullshit, this is for you: The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries
2. Ausitn Kleon pointed us to a Spotify playlist if you’re lucky enough to be by a (private) pool this weekend: Poolside ’86
3. I am Too Old to really get/get into vloggers but this young man listening to Nina Simone for the first time is all of us (music starts about a minute in).
1. If you haven’t read Patricia Lockwood’s essay about surviving the rona, do it. It’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying (she was never hospitalized but had delusions): Insane After Coronavirus.
My mind had moved a few inches to the left of its usual place, and I developed what I realised later were actual paranoid delusions. âJasonâs cough is fake,â I secretly texted a friend from the bathtub, where I couldnât be monitored. âI ⌠donât think his cough is fake,â she responded, with the gentle tact of the healthy. âOh it is very, very fake,â I countered, and then further asserted the claim that he had something called Man Corona.
2. This is accurate:
3. This is helpful:
