A cool piece of history: Hasekura Tsunenaga, a Japanese samurai, served as a diplomat in 17th century Europe.
Category: Pop Culture
Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people
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Pilot makes a smiley face
(warning, a couple f-bombs) a couple guys captured in pilot making a smile, smiley face in the air above them.
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Alexandra Petri attempts to be the government
What happens when you send a humorist to do investigative reporting? You get a story about how absolutely insane it is when the government won’t do his job. Alexandra Petri set out to perform tasks usually allocated to a government agency employee.
What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.
And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”
Amanda MullJohn F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.
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Dragonsweeper
Here’s a fun Minesweeper clone that combines dungeon-crawling elements with a Minesweeper-like grid, called Dragonsweeper. The numbers indicate the hit points of the monsters in those squares. You need to collect gold in order to level up and earn more hearts to take on larger monsters.
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The Cassandras predicted our current political reality
Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to.
Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music.
I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right, they can definitely see that a lot of things did come true.
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Rolling back the Constitution
It’s no surprise that, with recent Supreme Court rulings using questionable logic and some dramatic mental gymnastics, the entire goal is to roll the country back to an older era.
What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.
This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”
The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.
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SNL’s alternate Home Alone ending
Ariana Grande and the SNL cast provide an alternate Home Alone ending.
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Thick vs Thin desires
A new to me concept: thin and thick desires.
A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
A thin desire is one that doesn’t.
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled.
But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they’re capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.
The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
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IRS faces a lawsuit that would reclassify pets as dependents
IRS faces a lawsuit that would reclassify pets as dependents.
The IRS defines pets as property. Reynolds, though, says they tick every box for a legal dependent under IRS rules: They have no independent income (we’ll leave Lassie off this); they reside exclusively with their humans, and they have annual expenses that top $5,000. Calling them property, she argued, does not accurately reflect their role in a household.
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Swiftie Dads
There is a lot of good in the world. This includes Swiftie Dads. Paul Scheer interviewed the men, who were with their daughter(s), in the parking lot during one of the Los Angeles to stops. It could have easily been a punchline, instead it’s a sincere and earnest capture of life.