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Paper and pen help you recall things better. They activate the “reticular activating system,” which allows us to filter out unnecessary information. This is in stark contrast to social platforms, which fill us with nonsense by the second.
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It is faster to write on paper and pen. Many of us just can’t type fast enough. Also, it is easier to scan a piece of paper and retrieve the information.
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Paper is highly portable. A piece of paper and a small pencil or pen don’t need much space. And it never runs out of batteries (though, there is a risk of running out of ink).
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Paper and pen allow you to focus, as there are no notifications in a notebook. When taking notes in a notebook, you are unlikely to be distracted with the latest tweet from your friend or the President.
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Google (or Facebook) can’t track it — yet.
Early Polling
Dana Blanton, writing on the Fox News website, reviews a new Fox News Poll showing Donald Trump is in a world of hurt come next November. He’s losing to every conceivably viable Democrat with registered voters.
>A Fox News poll released Thursday showed President Trump losing head-to-head matchups against four of the top Democratic presidential primary contenders. The poll found Trump with 39 percent support among registered voters in head-to-head matchups against Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The poll found Sanders beating Trump with 48 percent, Warren winning over Trump with 45 percent and Harris winning with 46 percent support. Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, beat Trump in the theoretical matchup with 50 percent support among those surveyed, compared to Trump’s 38 percent.
The poll also breaks down voter concerns in a way that probably doesn’t surprise most people who have been following politics since the last election. Basically, people are worried about mass shootings and are exhausted by political battles that don’t accomplish anything.
Remember, this is a Fox News Poll that rates high in accuracy. Plus, it’s a Fox News Poll so Republicans can’t really dismiss it (although they will). It’s also good to remember that this is a poll out in August 2019 and anything and everything will likely happen between now and Election Day.
The Decision
I spent a day with my parents driving to a birthday party. We talked about sports, family, and, of course, politics. They are in their 70s and obsessively watch… wait for it… MSNBC.
They have come to the conclusion they will vote for the person who isn’t Donald Trump. They have opinions on the field of Democrats, but ultimately they will look at the choices and will pick the person who isn’t Donald Trump.
I couldn’t agree more.
As of this moment, Joe Biden looks to be the guy who will be the choice other than Donald Trump. I’m generally okay with this. I’d rather it be Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Pete Buttigieg, but Uncle Joe will be fine. Of course, it’s stupid early, so things could change after some voting is done in Iowa, New Hampshire, and California.
The only real question is simple, “Who has the best chance of beating Trump in 2020?” You may disagree on policy specifics, but that’s wasted time. You may think Warren will make a better President, but if Biden is the nominee, it’s wasted time not to vote for him. No one cares about policies. Not really. Not at this point. Most people just want a return to normalcy where they don’t have to worry about whatever vomit comes out of Trump’s mouth that day. Most people don’t want to worry about pissing off our allies and praising dictatorships. Most people are tired of seeing misogyny, racism, bigotry, and inequality dominate the news. They want Trump gone. Biden is leading because, quite frankly, he is a reminder of a time when the general public didn’t worry about national politics all that much.
I imagine for a great deal of the country, they already know who they are going to vote for. A dude in a MAGA hat isn’t going to be persuaded to vote for a Democrat under any circumstances. A woman worried about abortion isn’t going to suddenly feel like this Trump guy is going to fight for her rights. An 18-year-old who has friends and friends of friends who’ve been caught in mass school shootings isn’t voting for the person who can’t even be bothered with legislating background checks.
As soon as we have a Republican nominee (I mean, I guess it will be Trump) and a Democrat nominee (Biden/Warren/Harris/Sanders/Insert your fav here), the election will be decided. No debates will move anyone. I’m guessing the polls won’t change much. I can’t imagine an October surprise that will change anyone’s mind. It will simply come down to turnout. Who has the more motivated base? Who has the infrastructure to get people in swing states to the polls?
Personally, I don’t care which Democrat is on the ballot. Any Democratic nominee would make a better occupant of the White House. Any one of them would be a whole lot better than what we have now. I know it. You probably know it too. Even most Republicans know it, but they would never admit to it.
So while the horserace and campaign ups and downs will make for endless hours of entertainment, both inspiring and horrifying, the bottom line is the name on the ballot that isn’t Donald Trump is the one my parents are voting for, I’m voting for, my wife is voting for, my daughter is voting for, and my step-daughter is voting for.
I bet it’s the one you’ll vote for too.
Pen and Paper
Om Malik, writing on his blog, explains why pen and paper are good for you.
…here are my top reasons for sticking with pen and paper:
The Athletic on Illinois
Eamonn Brennan, writing in The Athletic, have a few words about this upcoming season of Illinois Basketball.
There’s a lot to like about Illinois, both in the immediate term and beyond. As for the immediate term, the 2018-19 season felt like a platform year, the throw-your-talented-kids-in-the-mix-and-let-them-figure-it-out season you often see of programs in mid-rebuild. And the kids played well. Giorgi Bezhanishvili became a star. Ayo Dosunmu was both immediately productive and full of potential. Trent Frazier had a solid sophomore season. Andres Feliz rounds out a quality core. And Illinois added some much-needed size with 6-foot-10 center Kofi Cockburn, who’ll likely play a lot right away. At worst, this team should be in the tournament mix. At best, they have serious breakout potential.
As for the long term: I remember when I heard Illinois had hired Brad Underwood. I was with to long-suffering Illinois alumnus and friend of the mailbag John Gasaway, in fact. I was surprised and impressed. John was thrilled. Underwood was really, really good at Oklahoma State, and it was a total coup for Illinois — a program that has struggled for much of the past decade — to land him. Just two years in, you can already see Underwood’s sharp, uptempo style coming through, and it’s still just the beginning.
Just the beginning.
Illinois Football: 2020 College Football Playoff Champions
Matt O’Neall, writing for The Champaign Room, has obviously drunk all the Orange Koolaid. In this piece that rivals The Song of Fire and Ice and The Lord of the Rings in its fantasy roots, he envisions how Illinois wins the 2020 College Football Playoff.
A couple of my favorite bits –
Lovie Smith’s sorcery solves the defense. Of course, how could we have been so blind! Lovie has been growing this beard to impart magic and wisdom onto this defense. Now that he has harnessed the power of his beard and gotten full control of the defense, he should have no issue turning this into a top-40 unit. Dumbledore, Gandalf, Lovie.
…
By this point the national media is both confused and furious. They discover Lovie has a beard and is still coaching football., but they still can’t get a half-way interesting quote out of him. The debate rages on ESPN for 10 straight hours every day whether Illinois is actually good or if the Big Ten West is actually bad.
…
The Aftermath
Mostly it’s confusion across the country.
Students riot all throughout campus and the university is forced to cancel classes for a week. Thirteen cars and two fraternities are burned in celebration.
KAM’s makes so much money during the week that they are able install functioning plumbing, and invest in mops.
Lovie shocks the world and retires and rides off into the sunset. Rod Smith takes over and looks to turn Illinois into a dynasty.
And most importantly, Illinois sports is back.
Love the optimism!
Illinois Football begins their 2019 Season August 31 against Akron.
The Secrets of Success
Nicholas Bate’s secrets of success in handy PDF form.
Four pages of brilliance.
The Californication of America’s Restaurants
Nick Mancall-Bitel, writing in Eater, has an interesting story on the concept of “California cuisine.”
…even without a clear definition of the food on the plate, diners then and now harbor an image of California dining. The concept conjures a place more than a flavor: a table on the patio or by the pool, surrounded by desert plants and minor celebrities, a glass of wine glinting in the ceaseless sunshine. And increasingly, restaurants, both in the state and elsewhere, design their spaces to evoke this scene.
Now I’m hungry.
That True Detective Scene with Alexandra Daddario
Luke Winkie, writing for MEL Magazine, shines a light on a highly specific subreddit on Reddit named r/TTDSWAD an acronym for That True Detective Scene with Alexandra Daddario. If you seen the first season of True Detective, there’s a pretty (in)famous full-frontal sequence with Alexandra Daddario and Woody Harrelson. That’s the whole thing.
I remember seeing it for the first time and not thinking much about it other than how it showcased Harrelson’s character as a cheating asshole. I had no idea it turned into the 21st century equivalent of Phoebe Cates in Fast Times and Ridgemont High.
The White of the Plate
Jayson Stark, writing in The Athletic, has the most recent take on the upcoming robot apocalypse i.e. computerized ball-strike calls via TrackMan.
What James Skelton sees — what everyone in the Atlantic League sees — is that TrackMan has no feelings, doesn’t care who is on the mound, does no favors for whatever hitter is in the box, isn’t interested in how the strike zone used to be called. To get a strike call from TrackMan, there is one thing that never changes:
Some portion of the baseball has to cross over the 17-inch span from one side of the plate to the other. Period.
So there’s almost no such thing as a pitch “on the black” anymore. What has messed with many pitchers’ minds in the Atlantic League, says York manager Mark Mason, is that “it’s making them throw it over the white of the plate, not the black.”
Yes.
WordPress Buying Tumblr
Madison Malone Kircher, writing in Vulture, takes the Wall Street Journal story that Automaticc, the owner of WordPress, has purchased Tumblr from Verizon and, interestingly, goes straight for the smut angle.
But, Automattic … this could be your moment. Bring back the porny stuff. Bring back the nipples — “female-presenting” or otherwise — and the sexy GIFs. The erotic fan art. The content for horny teens and horny adults alike. (Tumblr traffic has been down ever since the site went G-rated.) Engineer better filters and reporting systems to create a Tumblr without child porn, obviously. Bring back the smutty Tumblr we all knew and loved.
I guess that’s an approach. Maybe just take some of the best parts of Tumblr and incorporate it into WordPress and vice versa?
The Truth About Jeffrey Epstein Is Far Uglier Than the Conspiracy Theories Surrounding Him
Eddie Kim, writing for MEL Magazine, outlines all the crazy conspiracy theories, memes, and social media posts involving the apparent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. His ending pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter until I hear something different.
But here are the facts: People kill themselves and each other in prison, often when they’re supposed to be supervised by guards. Our prison systems, whether federal, state or privately run, are a disaster. World leaders wreak death and havoc all across the world in the name of nation-states. Millions of minors around the world are subjected to sexual violence.
It’s a lot less funny than an Epstein meme, right?
Surrogate Angels of Death
Rhonda Garelick, writing at The Cut, tries to wrap her mind around the photo of Melania Trump holding a newly orphaned baby while her husband grins like a ghoul and gives the camera a thumbs up.
Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you. Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband. A photograph is taken, for posterity.
In the photo, your baby wears a bowtie and tiny jacket; someone has dressed him up for this occasion. He gazes off to the side (toward his aunt, who stands beside First Lady Melania Trump), his body stiff, his face solemn. He is not at ease in this strange lady’s arms. How could he be? Your child has just gotten out of the hospital, where he was treated for broken bones incurred when you desperately threw yourself over his little body and took the bullets that seconds later orphaned him and his two siblings.
Neither the president nor Melania so much as glances at Baby Paul. Oblivious (as ever) to the solemnity of their occasion, they smile broadly, matching veneers on full beam. Your husband came from a family of Trump supporters. Perhaps, in a different world, you might even have wanted to meet Donald Trump, or take a photo with him as he gave one of his signature thumbs-up gestures — everything is A-OK here.
It is decidedly not A-OK here and the lack of empathy and understanding is sad yet unsurprising.
Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, calls Trump small and incapable of living in any sort of reality.
Trump is really only good at one thing: being on television. Any event that can be engineered to look like a scene from The Apprentice can be fudged to his advantage. Stadium rallies, press availability from inside the Oval Office, even canned speeches read from a teleprompter can be salvaged; so long as he is essentially only producing a simulacrum of presidenting, he can shift along. But reality confounds him. Take him out from behind the oceans of fawning MAGA hats and put him next to a real survivor of sexual violence, and all the grinning and preening tricks fail him. Put him next to actual heads of state discussing actual international policy, and he sulks and mopes. Oh, he can pull off the photo-op; this is a man made of photo-ops. But time and time again, when he is called on to deal with real people—not glassy superfans but genuine human beings whom he allegedly serves as president—he fails to meet the occasion. The consummate reality-TV president is unerringly confounded by reality.
It’s not simply that an injured baby had to be returned to a hospital so that a grinning president could throw a Fonzie-style thumbs-up for the Twitter fans—that’s gross, yes, but it misses the point. The point is that this president, who understands only ratings and adulation and crowd size and “getting credit,” is seemingly incapable of subordinating all that to the moment. This was a moment in which grieving Americans wanted nothing more than for him to show up and be with them. The “catastrophe,” with all due respect to the unparalleled wisdom of Scaramucci, is not that he failed to show the requisite “compassion” or “empathy” for the cameras. Neither Donald Trump, nor his wife, nor his handlers and enablers, will ever understand that the real catastrophe isn’t how he appeared on television or Twitter. The real catastrophe is that Americans are dead and dying and their president is mass-producing a television show about his presidency, with their personal tragedy as a set choice.
Trump cannot function in reality. He lives in a hall of mirrors with his made-for-TV family, as the national security apparatus, the national intelligence apparatus, the foreign service, and foreign policy detonate all around him. And on the rare occasion on which he is called to step out from behind the glass panopticon that he has built, he fails, spectacularly, because that which really matters can’t be tweeted or reduced to a campaign video.
Americans will soon have to choose whether or not they want to live forever in Donald Trump’s reality—the one in which words don’t matter, and everything is a ratings game, and proximity to the famous and the beautiful is the epitome of a life well lived. If that is the only value left, Donald Trump’s is indeed the presidency perfected. For those of us who still live in reality, the photo-op with the orphaned baby is proof positive that Trump’s is not a big life, or a real life. It’s just smallness, refracted a million times over, which is nevertheless impossibly small.
I don’t have much to add here. He’s obviously a narcissistic buffoon without an ounce of empathy. History will not be kind to this man or his followers.
The Texas Blue Wave
Bob Moser, writing in The New Republic, has a story on the gradual blue-ing of Texas. The wave is starting to get some kinetic energy and it’s not just Beto O’Rourke.
Suddenly, Texas Republicans are on the defensive in their national fortress—and they’re both talking and acting like it. “The tectonic plates shifted in Texas in 2018,” Senator John Cornyn, the powerful Republican who’s facing reelection in 2020 (with just a 37 percent approval rating) said earlier this year. Cornyn has been sounding the alarms ever since November, warning national Republicans against complacency and spelling out the dire consequences for his party if they can’t stave off the Democratic surge: “If Texas turns back to a Democratic state, which it used to be, then we’ll never elect another Republican [president] in my lifetime,” said Cornyn.
This is the shift I’m most excited to see in the next few election cycles. Not sure it will actually go blue in 2020, but wouldn’t that be something?
The Plan to Save Barnes and Noble
Justin Bariso, writing for Inc., deduces the short, smart plan of new Barnes and Noble CEO James Daunt to save the retail operation. It’s painfully simple. Let stores choose which books to stock, let managers configure stores they way they want, and make the stores comfortable and inviting.
I look forward to the changes coming to my local B&N.
Peak Wellness
Brad Stulberg, writing in Outside Online, takes the whole wellness industry to task.
The problem is that so much of what’s sold in the name of modern-day wellness has little to no evidence of working. Which doesn’t mean that wellness isn’t a real thing. According to decades of research, wellness is a lifestyle or state of being that goes beyond merely the absence of disease and into the realm of maximizing human potential. Once someone’s basic needs are met (e.g., food and shelter), scientists say that wellness emerges from nourishing six dimensions of your health: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental.
The article then goes on to highlight examples and ways to help
oneself under these “interrelated dimensions.”
A Circle of Words
Om Malik, writing on his site, talks about the cycle of emails to blogs to newsletters basically created by Dave Winer.
Dave Winer, the godfather of blogging, and in my mind, the singular most influential thinker on all things Internet, media and mediums, shared a link to a Wired post about DaveNet, which in 1995 was a forum which involved Dave writing an essay and emailing it to others and then creating conversations within those who read his stuff. That eventually led to blogs which transformed the media landscape. And now we are back to doing email newsletters.
Coincidentally my blog started as an email newsletter too — Dotcomwala — but eventually transformed into a blog. It is the same wine; bottles keep changing. In the end, what matters is words, thoughts, and continuity.
It is an interesting take. I get the itch to start an email newsletter all the time.
Into the Personal-Website-Verse
Chris Bower, in his The Weekly Review newsletter, pointed to a piece by Matthias Ott about ditching social media and publishing platforms like Medium for personal websites.
Personal websites are called personal websites because they are just that: personal. Thus, the primary objective still is to have a place to express ourselves, to explore ourselves, a place that lasts while the daily storms pass by. A place of consideration, and yes, a place of proudly sharing what we do, what we think, and what we care about. A place to contribute your voice and help others. A home on the internet. A place to tell your story.
I love this philosophy. However, I still haven’t ditched all social media and I still publish on Medium occasionally. I’m going to have to think some more about this.
Words That Matter
Seth Godin makes a list of important words.
Discipline, rigor, patience, self-control, dignity, respect, knowledge, curiosity, wisdom, ethics, honor, empathy, resilience, honesty, long-term, possibility, bravery, kindness and awareness.
All of these are real skills, soft skills, learnable skills.
But if they’re skills, that means that they are decisions. A choice we get to make. Even if it’s not easy or satisfying in the short term.
These skills are in short supply sometimes, which makes them even more valuable.
Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi Scored A Return Touchdown In His NFL Debut
Four months ago, Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi was sleeping outside because he couldn't afford a hotel.
— NFL (@NFL) August 9, 2019
He talked his way into a contract with the @Browns and today he scored an 86-yard punt return TD!
What. A. Moment. @damon015 pic.twitter.com/apiNylE7Wn
The dude lied his way into a contract and then this happened. Feels like a movie waiting to happen.