Inaug Edition: He's Not A Businessman, He's a Business, Man [#37]
Um, hi.
It's January 20. I'm feeling many feelings. Also I can only half-see because my eyes have nearly swollen shut in a terrifying allergic reaction. Dunno, but I'm pretty sure everything is connected.
What I Read
How to have good party conversations, according to NPR's finest, Ari Shapiro. Why your recorded voice sounds weird to you. Useless correlations. The symbolism of an insane DC murder mystery. Maybe OJ is innocent, after all. The oral history of making "OJ: Made in America" (which is incidentally the best cultural work I consumed last year). How blackmail works in Russia. Trump could make journalism great again. "There is no music in this man." We are headed into a hellscape of lies. This is a must-read that made my soul feel heavy. The decline of American malls hits home. All that extra guacamole really cost Chipotle. A history of the Proust questionnaire, one of the most widely disseminated personality quizzes ever. On kindness. "Male bulk with distinct feminine energy," a deep-dive on Ryan Gosling. Beautiful Airbnb's in Austin made me miss home.
What I Wrote/Said
My most memorable stories to tell in 2016. Women are making some political progress in Japan, but haltingly. The Samsung scion avoided arrest, but he's not quite in the clear, ensnared in South Korea's biggest political scandal ever. Pretty sure Tech News Today host was making fun of me, but joke's on her.
Watch and/or Listen
This is gold, inside a dying mall. There's ben a lot of talk post-election about how there used to be two clear paths to the middle class, and the blue collar one is gone. Planet Money did an episode on this a few years ago, which I only remember because I went to the taping. I think it's a worthwhile listen in today's context.
Book It
I re-read Killing Yourself to Live this week, by Chuck Klosterman. It's a road-trip rumination on dead rock stars and Chuck's ex-girlfriends and it's weirdly full of wisdom. This is one of the five books on my shelf that I go back and re-read every once in awhile, mainly because of the tangents he goes on, like one about the lusty love triangle between George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd which inspired the song "Layla."
Seriously, I hope you don't ever get an allergic reaction in which your eyes swell shut.
And to the Republic,
Elise
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