Side by Sides [#75]
Hi hi hi,
My friend Megan wrote me an email which ended this way:
Hope you’re doing well*,
M
*(as well as could possibly be expected at the moment ughhh)
That asterisk is everything! The moment is so ugggghhhh. And yet here we still are. This Maggie Smith poem is apt.
Reading
Chinese superstar Fan Bing Bing vanished. Parallel lives, a gorgeous project in which Friend Ed photographed North and South Koreans doing the same job or task, and put them side by side. Buzzfeed did a side-by-side of two exes describing the same breakup. Submit your two-sentence love story. The mega-investigation of Trump's tax dodges. Charting the instances Kavanaugh and Ford actually answered the questions asked. The dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. Myths about sexual assault. Evangelical Beth Moore stood up against problematic elements of evangelical culture, now she’s paying the price. FiveThirtyEight’s model thinks Beto actually has a chance. Crazy Rich Asians, the book. Delightful! A bit of a different ending than the movie. I think I like the movie’s ending better?
Listening/Watching
Showtime is going to debut a documentary of the bombshell investigation into Trump's taxes. A Closer Look on Kavanaugh was better than the SNL cold open. Mandopop from the early aughts! Elva Hsiao’s big hits are playing in rotation in my car. I binge-watched and laughed the whole way through Crashing, from the British creative Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who was behind Fleabag). It's just six 22-minute episodes, so it's perfect for a binge.
Recommendations
The documentary Bisby 17 is out in select theaters, about a forgotten moment in history in which 2000 immigrant miners were rounded out and shipped out to the desert to die. It’s supposed to be one of the best documentaries of the year and I hope you’ll join me in trying to catch this at a theatre! My longtime mentor/friend/life coach Stacey Woelfel has a credit on it, as he assisted the other head of the Reynolds Documentary Journalism Institute at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, in bringing this history to screen.
Recommending one more time the WTF Just Happened Today newsletter, which logs and summarizes "the daily shock and awe." It includes all that I need to know about each day's news, plus policy news I didn't want to know because it's often so horrifying, but should.
OK that's it for now.
Hope you’re doing well*,
E