April 3, 2023
"I would be dead, but it would make me happy."
Daniel Wallace writes movingly about posthumously collecting the writing of his friend Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits, Let The Dead Bury Their Dead, The Fire This Time). [more inside]
The Battle of Manners St
April 3rd marked the anniversary of a 1943 riot between US and New Zealand servicemen over Māori soldiers drinking at the Allied Services Club in Wellington.
News of the brawl was suppressed at the time. And while war clearly forged solidarity between Pākeha and Māori soldiers, New Zealand was still practicing its own local form of segregation.
professional women were Type A at work and Type A at home
A typology of household cognitive labor activities: anticipating a need, identifying options for filling it, deciding among the options, and monitoring the results. Research by sociologist Allison Daminger: in heterosexual couples, husbands who were project managers and surgeons exhibited strong executive function skills at work, but when at home, deferred to their wives' superior ability to plan and think ahead. (Definitely overlapping but not identical to MeFi's emotional labor discussions (the o.g. 2015 thread)!)
El Escarabajo Azul!!
The Historical Italian Cooking Blog
Historical Italian Cooking is a bilingual (English and Italian) cooking blog focused on a wide range of historical Italian cooking, from ancient Rome to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a side-trip to ancient Greece and a couple of relatively modern dishes. Many of the recipes are accompanied by videos on YouTube. [more inside]
Back to the Moon
NASA has announced the four astronauts that will fly by the Moon on the Artemis 2 mission. It's been nearly 50 years since humans have traveled beyond low earth orbit during the Apollo 17 mission. [more inside]
UFC, WWE to Merge; Emanuel to Serve as CEO, McMahon as Executive Chair
Endeavor Group Holdings and sports entertainment powerhouse WWE made things official on Monday, unveiling a definitive agreement to form a new, publicly listed company consisting of two “iconic, complementary” global sports and entertainment brands: UFC and WWE. Endeavor will hold a 51 percent controlling interest in the new company, with existing WWE shareholders owning a 49 percent interest. [more inside]
There is Persistent Consumer Demand to Believe in Magic
We have adjectives to describe the insistence on a superior past, and they tend toward the pejorative: vestigial, atavistic, reactionary. Exaltation of lost glory necessarily discounts the present; reimposing the ancien régime requires tossing aside today's players, often with casual recklessness. Audiences embraced "Field of Dreams" because it's a sumptuously shot, well-crafted movie with compelling actors and an Oscar-nominated score, yes, but also because they worried then—and continue to worry now—that something valuable is vanishing, that the best of baseball and the country of its birth is in the rearview mirror. That the only path to redemption is believing, twice as hard this time, in a fairy tale. One that narcissistically absolves our own active role in the decline. from The Expensive, Seductive Nostalgia of Field of Dreams
Just your type
Hello, Monday, happy free thread! This week, I'm wondering ... does anyone remember typewriters? Weren't they fussy and fiddly and fun? And didn't they sound great? Well, if so, today I have another free thing (or two) in your free thing thing, that may be pertinent to your interests: 1) an online (type)writing app called Writer that offers "distraction-free focus" and saves your text, plus you can opt to have manual or electric typewriter key strike sounds accompany the composition of your deathless prose. Hemingwayesque! (don't be put off by the neon green text — you can change that; use the gear icon to adjust your preferences.) [more inside]
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