Friday, April 30, 2021
The anniversary
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Joe Biden's big speech
My latest at The Week:
Biden is thinking big. If the tone of the speech was quiet and personal, the ideas were big and transformative: proposals to spend billions upon billions of dollars to create jobs, support young families, and expand affordable access to both health care and education. In the first 100 days of his term, Biden and Democrats in Congress have already done much to expand the breadth and scope of the federal government, but so much of that has been done on a one-off basis, necessitated and made possible by the COVID-19 pandemic and floundering economy. After a generation of watching Democratic presidents genuflect toward the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Biden's willingness to put his credibility on the line for such proposals is still fairly astonishing.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
Sunday, April 18, 2021
Writing
Any time I finish the next day's column for THE WEEK before 10 pm, I feel pretty good about life. Except when I think of a better line at 1 am.
Saturday, April 17, 2021
Three thoughts about NOMADLAND
Three thoughts about NOMADLAND....
* This would be a great double bill with WILD, the Reese Witherspoon movie from a few years back. That featured a young woman moving through the wilderness, dealing with her demons and encountering similar adventurous souls. This movie features an older woman moving through America's vistas, doing much the same.
* I'm trying to think of another recent movie that deals so much with the act of work. Frances McDormand's character, Fern, holds a series of seasonal jobs -- Amazon warehouse worker, camp host, Wall Drug cook, beet harvester -- portrayed in nonjudgmental fashion. (Controversially so, in the case of Amazon.) In so much of popular entertainment, work is the setting for other adventures, not the story itself. SUPERSTORE might've been a recent exception. Fern does this because she has to -- early retirement won't provide the benefits she needs to live -- but also, it's clear, because she wants to. She literally cleans up shit, but you're never under the impression that the work is beneath her or that she's degraded by it. It says something about the cliches of storytelling that I kept expecting an evil boss moment, but never got one.
* But mostly, this movie sits with death, or the prospect of it. The people we meet in this movie are mostly "nomads," living in their vehicles and moving from job to job, place to place. They live with the cycles of life more intimately than those of us living in the suburbs and cities, receiving the Amazon packages that Fern and her friends pack up. Fern is living with the memory of her dead husband. Another character dies, but not dramatically or unexpectedly: It's just part of having lived a long life. We're here and then we aren't. In that sense, we're all nomads.
* Bonus thought: It's fitting that this movie sits alongside SOUND OF METAL during this awards season. Both flicks move through something that looks a lot more like the real world than what most big-budget cinema, neither has any real villains to speak of, and both feature affecting, naturalistic performances by supporting characters. They are movies made for adults.
Monday, April 12, 2021
'Exterminate All The Brutes'
We sat down as a family to watch the new Raoul Peck documentary about colonialism. Made it 24 minutes in before my 12-year-old son burst into tears. Deservedly.
Pumped Up Kicks
Every time I hear that song, I have flashbacks to lying in a hospital bed in an intensive care unit.
Update: I explained myself in this Twitter thread:
Saturday, April 10, 2021
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
This book feels like a companion and sequel -- an epilogue, even -- to George Packer's "The Great Unwinding," which told the stories of the Great Recession and how we got there through the stories of individuals across America. Macgillis goes just as deep, describing the evolution of America's economy from manufacturing and local retailers to the dominance of Amazon today. He focuses on the changes Amazon's hometown, Seattle, and witnesses Baltimore's evolution from a steelmaking colossus to logistics hub. It's not a happy story.
But this book is highly recommended. Masterfully reported and briskly written.
Stubborn desperation
Oh man, this describes my post-2008 journalism career: If I have stubbornly proceeded in the face of discouragement, that is not from confid...
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Just finished the annual family viewing of "White Christmas." So good. And the movie's secret weapon? John Brascia. Who'...
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Warning: This is really gross. When the doctors came to me that Saturday afternoon and told me I was probably going to need surgery, I got...
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A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again. That's maybe not the reacti...