Life At The Nuclear Brink [#45]
Hi hi hi,
I take it from the messages I'm getting from y'all, which are a variation of "Glad you made it through the week alive" or "Please come home" to my little brother's classic, "Well, don't die," that the US media is really going into hyperdrive over the tension on the Korean peninsula. Nothing has really substantively changed here, so Seoul feels chill. I think the main worry is that Trump is so ... unpredictable.
What I Read
Keeping a happiness jar. The man who vacationed with strangers after his friend bailed. The man who tried Ruth Bader Ginsburg's workout. You're not mad at United Airlines, you're mad at America. The best anti-The Man rant following the United fiasco. Fight lies and generalizations with the opposite — truth and precision. How the gender gap in newsrooms affects how stories are reported. An accounting of the gross things Bill O'Reilly has said. Books to raise a feminist. The extreme anxiety of the Trump-era internet. The wildly divergent worldviews of our last president and the current one. Trump's baffling foreign policy: disengagement and engagement at the same time.
I've found that the best Trump reads are the profiles writerly writers wrote several decades ago, where it's evident he really hasn't changed or evolved since his New York gossip rag heyday. This 1990 piece is everything, followed by this 1996 New Yorker opus featuring a line I love: He "achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
What I Watched
Holy crap, so at first I was reluctant to watch Big Little Lies because it seemed like "The OC, but for adults." But then I binge-watched it in two days and it was actually a super-layered exploration of friendships and identity and power and all sorts of knotty issues. Also, Nicole Kidman should win ALL THE AWARDS for her performance.
What I Hatched

A living human! Baby Luna Lee joined us on Planet Earth early morning April 7, weighing in at 8lbs, 6oz and measuring 21 inches. She sleeps and eats like a champ and came along just in time for grownups to snuggle with and smell her in the face of all the nuclear war hype.
Recommendations
Writer Mark Singer tells an incredible, The Moth-style story on stage about the time he profiled Donald Trump (the aforementioned 1996 piece I mentioned above).
The President and the Big Boy Truck is the gift I'm getting adults and children alike
An important message from a white feminist, to white feminists.
I've been harping about this for months, I know, but honestly, William Perry is THE authority on the global nuclear threat.
Off to try the Ruth Bader Ginsburg workout,
Elise
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