Luke Skywalker and Jaime Lannister are both one-handed dudes who’ve made out with their twin sisters.

Patrick Redford, writing for Deadspin, outlines a report and the result of a racist fan using the OK gesture behind Doug Glanville, an African-American sports reporter. The Cubs have permanently banned the individual from Wrigley Field.

I’m glad they didn’t ignore the act. I’m glad they banned him. Still, I prefer Jake and Elwood’s way of dealing with Illinois Nazis.

Steve Greenberg, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, has full-color, cover feature on Illinois basketball soon-to-be-a-sophomore star, Ayo Dosunmu. It’s a great read and, hopefully, a harbinger of things to come.

Philip Ellis, writing for Man Repeller, has some thoughts regarding having an opinion about the political news of the day.

The urgency to be informed about politics and have a vocal position on everything was palpable. I would rage and rant about injustice and inequality, and half the time my anger would be directed not at those who were behind it, but the people in my life who hadn’t read up on a particular topic and formulated a stance on it. “Ignorance isn’t innocence,” I would say, a hint of superiority in my voice.

But at an indistinct point along the way, I confused saying something — anything — with actually having something to say. Responding to world events began to feel like a race to have the most insightful takeaway. The impulse to formulate a hot take become more informed by a rush of endorphins than inspired by genuine activism.

Twitter, for example, is filled with “hot takes.” The feeling of writing something smart and smug can be intoxicating and addicting. Personally, I wrote hot takes regarding this administration up until I couldn’t take it anymore and I had to stop. Now, I’m engaged, but not at the “everything, all the time” level. Ellis goes on about finding the right balance.

Disengaging in this manner isn’t about abstaining from discourse altogether, it’s about eschewing your knee-jerk reactions in favor of something slower and more thoughtful. Of actually taking the time to figure out how you really feel about a certain issue or a series of connected issues. This deliberateness is more difficult to parlay into glib dunks on Twitter or Instagram, especially in a frantic 24-hour news cycle where the headline which piques your interest or stokes your outrage is replaced by an even wilder one before you have figured out where you stand. And that’s a good thing, because snap judgments are a trap. The situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

It’s understandable to feel numb or just downright exhausted in the face of everything that’s happening. And there’s merit, I think, to stepping back from the rapid-fire arguing to see the forest for the trees. Doing so will not halt progress or make us apathetic — but rather make us thoughtful, and even give us the space to examine our own role in where we are today, instead of always assuming we’re categorically righteous. It’s okay to conserve energy, to pursue deeper reflection and to pick our battles — there are plenty in front of us.

The best thing about beating yourself up is that you never fight back.

Jack Healy and Liam Stack, writing for The New York Times, report on another school shooting that left one student dead and eight injured. The money quote is this:

“I heard a gunshot,” said Makai Dixon, 8, a second grader who had been training for this moment, with active shooter drills and lockdowns, since he was in kindergarten. “I’d never heard it before.”

He’s had to undergo active shooter drills since he was in kindergarten. Is that a way for our children to learn?

These types of shootings are now a normal way of life in the United States of America. The “Grief — Outrage” cycle is now background noise. The killing has been normalized, and no amount of political will can change it. It is a deep-rooted cultural, social, economic, and political dead albatross around this country’s neck.

In my opinion, this country will continue to have gun violence in schools, churches, movie theaters, and concerts until enough people stand up and take the guns away. I don’t want gun control. I want gun prohibition.

I’m reminded of a piece by Dave Holmes for Esquire back in the carefree days of practically a year ago.

Listen, I know the moments after a gunman opens fire in a school are hectic for you. You have to get your talking points together, you have to mentally prepare to debate a traumatized yet sensible child, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and practice saying that more guns would have made the situation less deadly. It’s a busy time! And since we are always either in the moments after or the moments before a mass shooting, you’re pretty much always busy, I have noticed!Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.All of your guns.It wasn’t always this way. I have responsible gun owners in my family. I’ve never been a fan of shooting at things myself, but guns sure do seem to have brought joy into the lives of some people I love, and as long as they were stored properly, I never had a problem with them being around. I believed that we should place a hurdle or two between a psychopath and an AR-15, but that’s about as ardent as I got. Live and let live, that was my policy. Even with death machines.

That has all changed. And you changed it.

All along, as American life has gotten deadlier, as our kids have gotten less safe in their schools, you have had the opportunity to work with the vast majority of Americans who support the sensible reform of our gun laws. You have had the chance to preserve your own rights as we work together to keep our gun regulations in step with gun technology. You haven’t.All along, there have been opportunities for sensible, incremental changes. This year alone, we could have banned the manufacture of bump stocks, which turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones. We could have raised the minimum age for gun ownership from 18 to 21, or instate a national minimum age for long-gun ownership. We haven’t, largely because you have bought our government.

What you have done is double down. What you’ve done is convince your members that the occasional school shooting, the odd literal slaughter of innocents, is an unfortunate but inevitable quirk of American life, a thing that is necessary to preserve freedom. You have taken to our television screens to tell us that the world is an apocalyptic hellscape, and that the only way to be safe from gun violence is to stock our homes with guns.

Who will fight for gun prohibition?

Christopher Clements has recreated the lightsaber duel from Star Wars IV: A New Hope making it longer, more action-oriented and smartly incorporated call-backs from the prequel trilogy.

It reminds me a lot of Star Wars Revisited.

Brian Beutler, writing for Crooked Media, pens an essay lambasting the Deomocrats response to the Mueller Report.

Their dithering about the Mueller report is sadly typical of the party’s general paralysis in the face of the most corrupt and dishonest administration in the country’s history, and it carries a sobering lesson for all those who might themselves in Trump’s crosshairs: Democrats won’t come to your rescue unless you make them.

He goes on to outline the fear of the leadership.

They fear that if they do the right thing, they will not do as well in the 2020 elections as they will if they do the wrong thing. This fear is highly speculative, and thus irrelevant. We can’t know if an impeachment inquiry would help or hurt Democrats next year, but we do know that the wrong thing causes real harm to people right now. Politicians should pay political penalties for hanging supporters out to dry like this—without the threat of penalty, Democrats will proceed under the impression that abdicating their obligations is costless. We should all demand that they stand and be counted while it’s still an option, and should interpret failure to do so as a profound, collective failure of character. 

This really is unacceptable. The House has an obligation.

Zachary Basu, writing for Axios, reports on an interesting development into the Mueller Report.

More than 650 former federal prosecutors have signed onto a statement asserting that if the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not prohibit a sitting president from being indicted, President Trump would be charged with obstruction of justice.

I’m waiting for the Robert Mueller testimony asserting that he would have indicted Donald Trump were it not for the OLC opinion. While I understand my bias here, I’m saddened Mueller did not just go ahead and indict him for obsctruction. It would have made headlines, but not much else would have changed I don’t think.

Microscopes show us how large we are and telescopes showed us how small we are.

Alex Pareene, writing for The Baffler, has an incredible long read about Trumpism, young boys, and race. He opens with this perfect paragraph.

A bit of symbolic generational warfare has always suffused American politics, with various cliques of self-appointed “adults in the room” dismissing challengers to the status quo as immature, idealistic, or juvenile. But when it comes to figuring out what This Whole Trump Thing really means, actual juveniles are reading at several grade levels above the sophisticated adults. While editors send reporters to do anthropological fieldwork in the Rust Belt, and Democratic senators from red states fret over precisely how many unqualified ideologues they must confirm for lifetime seats on the judiciary in order to win re-election, teenagers have had the whole deal figured out from the beginning. They present their findings regularly, if you know where to look.

The teenagers get it because Trumpism is nothing more than adolescent sulking, raging, and ranting. They not only sympathize, they understand the well-spring of bullying and misogynistic tendensies and embrace it.

When will the adults in the room take over?

Chavie Leiber, writing for Vox, has an incredible profile on Dooce.com founder Heather Armstrong. I admit, I had not heard of her prior to reading the article, but I learned a great deal.

The sun could have blown up seven minutes ago and that would really ruin the rest of your day.

A blogger named bgh, writing on his Cardinals site On The Cardinals, wrote an inspiring piece about St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright. It features one of the best uses of a movie quote I’ve ever seen.

If I would have read the following sentence as a kid, I’m sure I would have thought it was a science fiction daydream — “In the second decade of the 21^st century everyone owns a hand-held computer capable of video communication with anyone on the planet and off, access to libraries of information, a global positioning system, in-depth health information for the user, and more.”

I just fished two tennis balls from under the basement couch with an old lightsaber so I could play with the dog. So, happy Star Wars Day.

Curtis McHale, writing for The Sweet Setup, has an in-depth comparison between three of the most well-known note-taking, writing, and research apps: Ulysses, Bear, and Apple Notes.

For me I’m want to use Ulysses more, but I seem to revert back to Google Docs because I can write on different platforms easier since I use a Windows computer at work and a Mac for everything else.

I’ve been testing Bear for a few weeks now. I’m not sure it’s significantly better than Apple Notes. I like the colors and the fonts better so there’s that.

What works best for you?

I used to have a site on Tumblr.

It was kind of a commonplace book of quotes, images, and videos. It took up loads of time to no one’s benefit, so I killed it after about two years. I kind of miss it. Every now and then, I get the urge to make another Tumblr site and unload all the quotes, images, and videos I accumulate. I dunno. It probably isn’t worth my time.

I know there are some amazing Tumblr blogs still in existence, but I’m not sure the reason why people have kept them. Of course, there are likely millions of abandoned Tumblr blogs too. Apparently, there are 465.4 million blogs and 172 billion posts on the site. Those numbers still mean something, although I’m not sure what other than people still really like the service. And it’s free.

Tumblr, as a platform, is in a weird spot. It doesn’t really have a direction or a focus. There’s plenty of community there still around, but I can only imagine how jaded many of them are with all the ownership changes and the banning porn debacle. It used to be a place for digital creatives and a hub for the weird internet.

Recently, Verizon, who somehow now owns Tumblr, wants to unload the service. Not a huge surprise because they lost billions when they bought all the Yahoo! properties and squandered any goodwill the platform and its users may have had with its corporate overlords.

I have no idea who should buy it or for what reason a responsible company could have for doing so. Molly McHugh, writing for The Ringer, made a list that includes Pornhub and Giphy. I don’t know.

Who could actually reenergize the platform?

Patrick Rhone with some thoughtful insight -

Consider the value of doing nothing when there is nothing of value to be done.

Consider the value of saying nothing when there is nothing of value to say.

Consider the value of simply being present, listening, and bearing witness, as something of value to be done instead.