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Keanu
Alex Pappademas writes an incredible profile of Keanu Reeeves in GQ magazine and while I know it exists mostly to promote John Wick: Chapter 3―Parabellum, I can’t help but want to be friends with Keanu after reading the piece. The story about the emergency landing is just awesome and Reeves saying “Whoa” non-ironically made me smile.
I didn’t even know about Swedish Dicks.
Enough Money
Carl Kinsella, writing on the Irish website Joe, sees the fact that hundreds of millions were immediately pledged to help rebuild Notre Dame after the fire means there is a massive failure in will for other arguably more important things.
It would be incredibly cheap to suggest that it is in some way wrong to give money for the restoration. There is a value that transcends simple economics in restoring testaments to civilisation. Better that Notre Dame remains a symbol of European history than €300 million rests in a billionaire’s bank account.
But the immediacy and magnitude of their response tells us something very important about the society we live in.
If two men in a world of more than 7 billion people can provide €300 million to restore Notre Dame, within six hours, then there is enough money in the world to feed every mouth, shelter every family and educate every child. The failure to do so is a matter of will, and a matter of system.
In The Future 8
More from Nicholas Bate –
“Alexa, handle my e-mail and stand in for me during today’s conference calls’, will allow more time for the real things in life.
The Graphical Branding of Pete Buttigieg
I’m a sucker for brand guides. I love the breakdowns designers put together regarding fonts, colors, logo usage, and all of that stuff. How a brand is presented is incredibly important because it showcases how they want to be seen and how much thought has been put into the materials. For me, it means they care about presentation, look, and feel. A brand that has shoddy branding tends to make me feel it’s a shoddy product.
The branding guidelines and tookit for the Presidential run of Mayor Pete Buttigieg are anything but shoddy. They are downright glorious.
The branding site put together by his campaign feels incredibly modern, with the strongest presidential identity since Obama. The state graphics are the icing on the cake. Each is custom designed, and the artist is credited.
The work is unique, eye-catching, and the whole site fits what I’ve seen so far of Buttigieg’s public persona and campaign tone.
I admit I haven’t taken a deep dive into all the candidate websites, but this one certainly deserves all the praise.
OBSIDIAN NOMAD
Nick Turse and Sean D. Naylor, writing for Yahoo! News, have put together a list of all the code-names of the 36 operations happening in Africa and they all sound amazing. If you are looking for cool names for your Pacific Rim Jaeger or Star Wars spaceship, you can’t go wrong with Obsidian Nomad, Echo Casemate, Jukebox Lotus, Junction Rain, Kodiak Hunter, Oaken Steel, or Odyssey Lightning.
However, my personal favorite is Objective Voice. What a great name.
Facebook and Medium
Two articles did incredible deep dives into companies that have been at the forefront of my mind for a few years: Facebook and Medium.
Laura Hazard Owen, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab, takes a long look at the history of Medium with plenty of bumps along the timeline. Seven years of Medium is all condensed into an easy to read compilation of events good and bad. She wonders in the opening of her timeline about what the goal of Medium ultimately has been.
I (and many others) devoted what now seems like way too much mental energy to the “Is Medium a platform or a publisher?” question. Sure, Williams’ frequently shifting stated vision didn’t help, but that angst still feels ridiculously quaint in 2019.
Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.
I sometimes think I should get back on Medium and try and earn some coffee shop money and then I remember that owning your own platform is far superior than creating a sometimes blog on a site that continues to ebb and flow with its founder’s vision.
On a smaller timeline, but just as eye-opening, Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, writing in Wired, does their own deep dive into the last fifteen months of Facebook as it comes to grip with all the ways it tried to fix itself in 2018 and how it all turned out.
Read the whole article, but basically it didn’t go so good.
Personally, I’m at a loss why anyone stays on Facebook and yet I’m still on the platform. At some point, I’m going to have to do a major digital/social media clean and reevaluate everything.
As I’m reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism I’m sure I’ll find some fresh ideas on how to do just that.
Just the Beginning
Seth Abramson, writing an opinion column for Newsweek, outlines what he sees as what’s going to happen tomorrow when the redacted Mueller Report is released. It’s a good primer before the analysis of the report is everywhere by Friday. I particularly like these two paragraphs:
I’ve written two books on Trump-Russia collusion—Proof of Collusion, released at the end of 2018, and Proof of Conspiracy, forthcoming in August—and even in avoiding much discussion of Trump’s obstruction and witness tampering in these books (as these actions were already known by most, by virtue of having occurred publicly) my research swelled to nearly 1,000 pages. Because the books were written in a “government-report” style—with most sentences containing a discrete block of evidence and footnoted to one or more major-media citations—those 1,000 pages were the most condensed version of the Trump-Russia story I could tell. So the notion that Mueller was going to tell in full the tale of Trump-Russia collusion in the half of a heavily redacted 300- or 400-page summary not focused on obstruction of justice was always fanciful.
Here, then, is the reality: Mueller’s April 18 summary serves the primary purpose of passing on to the United States Congress the full archive of evidence on Trump’s fifty to a hundred acts of obstruction of justice while president, with that archive useful to Congress in determining whether impeachment proceedings are warranted. As most attorneys will tell you that just the public evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice is sufficient to support conviction for that offense, and as obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense per the Republican Party of the Clinton era, the answer to the question of whether Mueller’s archive of evidence on obstruction is sufficient to support impeachment is an obvious “yes.”
His Twitter feed is full of this type of material.
A couple of days ago he appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and basically made the same case. I love his take on Trump at 1:52.
The American public needs a smoking gun and I don’t think we are going to get one. Unless there is massive public outrage and a true momentum shift in Trump’s poll numbers post the Mueller Report release, I doubt Nancy Pelosi is going to start impeachment hearings because it will die in the Senate and the resulting public relations would be a benefit to Trump in 2020.
As it stands, there is no real appetite to force the issue―especially if the outcome is not favorable to Democrats. Senate Republicans will have to actively turn away from Trump. This means a real vote of no-confidence in Trump, a desire for Mike Pence to be President and on the ticket in 2020 with a resigned or impeached former President immediately indicted on charges stemming from the Michael Cohen case. It just isn’t going to happen because Republicans do not put the country first in their dealings.
However, I think it is likely the President will either be indicted or considered an un-indicted co-conspirator in some of the other cases Abramson knows to be still ongoing. It may be just the beginning of years of legal trouble for Trump, his family, and associates.
I believe, ultimately, Trump running for President and miraculously winning will be the worst thing that ever happened to him.
Now
Patrick Rhone reminds us the best time is always now.
When is the best time to see something? Right now.
When is the best time to say something? Right now.
The time to do anything on your list you care about? Right now.
There are no guarantees.
That place, those words, that thing? All may be gone even a moment from now. Go. Say it. Do it. Right now.
Again; this is why we make travel and culture a priority in Beatrix’s life. She saw Notre Dame. Because even then, the best time to travel to Paris and see it was “now”.
Today’s shocking event is a stark reminder of this. Even those things that have stood for hundreds or thousands of years won’t be there forever. Neither will we.
Go. Now.
Notre Dame Cathedral
I’m saddened to watch the coverage of the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Admittedly, I’m not big on organized religion and have never visited France or Europe. However, the cathedral is an incredible landmark of a building, historical and museum-like. While not necessarily important to me, certainly important to millions.
This isn’t a win for the non-religious. It’s a sad moment in history.
Game of Screens
M. G. Siegler, writing in his newsletter First Draught, presented an interesting idea on how HBO left millions, potentially billions, on the table with the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones.
Anyway, the first episode was great. I’m sure the other five will be as well. So it’s just a “what if”… But there’s an even more obvious, if tangential thought experiment here, one that has been percolating for months: what if HBO had just opted to open this latest season of Game of Thrones – the TV show, as is – in movie theaters?
Imagine if they ran the first episode in theaters only for the first week. Or even just opened it on a Thursday before the Sunday premiere on HBO itself. I know I would absolutely go to see it on the big screen. As would undoubtedly millions of others. Given the near feature-length of the episodes, I would even pay full price for a “regular” movie ticket. But even if HBO “only” charged $5-$10/ticket, how much money would they make? Tens of millions for sure. Hundreds of millions? Perhaps!
Just imagine if HBO had opted to open each of the six episodes of seasons 8 in this regard. Perhaps even promoted viewing parties for such events? We’re definitely talking hundreds of millions of dollars at that point. Then the question becomes: are we talking billions? Maybe not. Still, that is a lot of money for HBO to leave on the table, all for not doing much beyond some additional marketing.
It is an interesting thought experiment I’m not sure they would have made billions, but I can’t think of another piece of “television” that could work better.
How the SNL Portrait Became Its Own Art Form
Devon Ivie, writing at Vulture, profiled the longtime official photographer of Saturday Night Live, Mary Ellen Matthews. She’s the one who creates the portraits used as bumpers between commercial breaks.
You’d immediately recognize a bumper if you see one. Sandwiched between the end of a commercial break and the start of a sketch or performance, they create brief moments of stillness before the action picks up again and are literally impossible to miss. But more so than a definition, bumpers are feasts for the eyes, whether the final images veer toward surrealist vibrancy or black-and-white classicism. They all tell a story — you just have to figure out what it is.
“I kind of think of them as billboards. They pop off the screen,” Matthews, a self-described “one-woman circus,” told Vulture in a recent interview. “I like to make it as easy as possible for everyone. I don’t want them overthinking this part of the show. It should be super fun and super easy. It’s an open invitation to get kooky.”
I’ve always thought the bumpers were one of the most innovative and signature aspects of SNL. I didn’t know she had an Instagram account. So cool.
Wonder Boy
Olivia Nuzzi, writing in New York Magazine, has one of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read describing Pete Buttigieg.
Sick of old people? He looks like Alex P. Keaton. Scared of young people? He looks like Alex P. Keaton. Religious? He’s a Christian. Atheist? He’s not weird about it. Wary of Washington? He’s from flyover country. Horrified by flyover country? He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Make the President Read Again? He learned Norwegian to read Erlend Loe. Traditional? He’s married. Woke? He’s gay. Way behind the rest of the country on that? He’s not too gay. Worried about socialism? He’s a technocratic capitalist. Worried about technocratic capitalists? He’s got a whole theory about how our system of “democratic capitalism” has to be a whole lot more “democratic.” If you squint hard enough to not see color, some people say, you can almost see Obama the inspiring professor. Oh, and he’s the son of an immigrant, a Navy vet, speaks seven foreign languages (in addition to Norwegian, Arabic, Spanish, Maltese, Dari, French, and Italian), owns two rescue dogs, and plays the goddamn piano. He’s actually terrifying. What mother wouldn’t love this guy?
This kid might be going the distance.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
And now the trailer for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
My title was so close.
Hustle Porn Narrative
Warren Ellis talking about how he works is fascinating to me.
The concern in writing about work, writing this sort of thing — and I’ve been trying to hit this note in the newsletter — is that it presents like This Is The Only Way To Do Things, Join 1000mphClub Or Die. It becomes part of the Hustle Porn narrative.
I can only do these things by cutting things off and throwing things overboard and dropping out of the world. You, reader, do not have to do it like me. There are more ways of doing art and work than there are flowers under the sun. Pick the one that works for you. Live well and make great things in the method that suits you best. You don’t have to ruin yourself trying to fit into the stated processes of idiots like me who write on the internet to break up their days.
Glad we had this talk.
I have a thing for looking at routines, set ups, applications, and more from people I admire and then wanting to imitate what they use in a vain attempt at finding a magic potion of productivity and inspiration.
It hasn’t really worked out.
For example, more than a few internet entrepreneurs have raved about the writing application Ulysses. I have a subscription. In fits and starts, I’ve attempted to start using it for my writing. Nothing has stuck.
One thing I haven’t done is basically go all in and fold all the writing I have ever done in various places and locations into Ulysses and just use it exclusively. Basically, force myself into the ecosystem so I start to see the “benefits.” I’ve been reluctant to do that.
Using the app Bear is another good example. I should want to use this incredible note keeping app, but it doesn’t spark joy (apologies Marie Kondo). The to-do app Things 3 is all the rage and I just haven’t turned the corner to start really using it.
From writing, to notes to productivity, I can’t find the right mix. I’m certainly not going to kill myself like Mr. Ellis is always on the edge of doing to himself, but I’d like to find the right set of tools and routines to make me better, more productive, more creative.
Maybe I just need to just quit looking to others as inspiration and find the methods and materials that work best and then go from there. Let the hustle come to me, so to speak. I think I’ll take the next couple of days to think on that.
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
David Brooks, writing for the New York Times, has put together an important essay of our times. You should read it.
Eye of Sauron
Dennis Overbye, writing for The New York Times, described the first photo of a supermassive black hole in quite the pop culture way.
The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.
Nicely done. Peter Jackson must be proud.
Play Golf and Screw Porn Stars
Cody Fenwick, writing in Salon, says, “Donald Trump still doesn’t really know how to be president.”
Sigh.
Are we just now figuring this out? I mean he really didn’t want to be president back when he was running. He wanted $300 million from a building project in Moscow, not having to deal with all the bullshit a President has to do. He wants to play golf and screw porn stars.
Fenwick writes:
Trump just doesn’t understand his role as president. He thinks he can bully those around him into getting his way by sheer force of will — a strategy that, along with the con man’s toolbox, may have served him well in Manhattan real estate. But as president, he actually has a constitutional duty to enforce the law whether he likes it or not.
He doesn’t care about his duties. He wants to play golf and screw porn stars.
Fenwick ends his piece thusly:
Mostly, this is a sign of weakness. The courts and Congress can stop him from going too far. But it’s also a real danger for the country as it exposes Trump’s authoritarian streak, hinted at in his admiration for dictators abroad who rule through violence. Right now, the institutional guardrails seem strong enough to contain his most unlawful acts. He’ll keep trying, though, and it’s impossible to predict where this road will take us.
Come. On. I know where we are going. We will be talking ad nauseam about how unfit, uncaring, unwell, unpopular, and unusual this presidency is until he leaves the office. Hopefully, we will have a country afterwards.
Over and Over Again
Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferriss podcast:
Part of what I discovered, particularly about being a novelist, is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again. The closer you can come to Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself.
This is incredibly difficult for me. I want to set up routines and habits and yet I don’t even find the time to attempt some organization.