Sunday Morning Reading

Reading to aid recovery is sometimes recommended.

This hasn’t been much of a week for reading because I’ve been down with a bout of pneumonia. Not fun. Consequently moments of clarity have been few and far between. When awake a few pieces caught my eye, so here’s links to share for  this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Thermometer reading. Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg have put together one heckuva piece on the goings on in the Rupert Murdoch succession drama. It’s long, it’s full of gory details. It could have been a book. Of course most think it already was a streaming series. Check out ‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’’: Inside The Murdoch’s Succession Drama.  McKay Coppins has published Growing Up Murdoch, which is essentially another shot in this rich folks’ war, this time from the point of view of James Murdoch, the supposedly better son. It’s surprising how totally unsurprising this is. Lots of things are being broken at the moment yielding anger, disappointment, and dismay. No sector of life or business is immune. Dominic Patten takes a look at how Dissent Grows At Disney Over Perceived “Capitulation” To Trump As DEI Initiatives Diminished.  It’s sometimes difficult to find good information in this dangerous moment we’re living through, because you never know what marching orders reporters and analysts are operating under, or what boots they’ve been licking in anticipation of a kick or kick back. Anne Applebaum is one writer you can always count on to nail not only the frame, but the stakes. Please check out Trump and Musk Are Pushing For Regime Change.  Matt Gemmell wrote a terrific piece about going Back To Mac after spending eight years using an iPad as his primary computing platform. This isn’t your typical preference piece of this type as Matt shows the attractions and flaws of both platforms and how they align with his way of working as it and he have changed. Here’s hoping someone at Apple reads this. A pot of coffee is a good start to any morning. But did you know How A Pot of Coffee Started An Imaging Revolution? Check out Alex Cooke’s excellent piece to find out. And to wrap things up this week check out NatashaMH’s A Walk Through Changing Times. We’re all doing that walk right now one way or another, even if laying in bed. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.  You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. *images used in Sunday Morning Reading are often generated via AI.

Ubu and The Truth Commission

An often reviled 1888 play always returns to remind and haunt us when history recycles bad guys.

Alfred Jarry’s 1888 play Ubu Roi never goes out of style. It may disappear from the spotlight but always returns when ostentatious, overbearing, overeager and slobbish rulers ascend to power and use it injudiciously to cause harm and destruction. The message, like these monomaniacal megalomaniacs, recycles again proving there really isn’t much new under the sun. 

Ubu 3 800x600.

Every now and then new productions or adaptations Jarry’s work hit stages to remind us and often revolt us. The original production of Ubu Roi, and many others since, have been reviled as offensive as the grotesque behaviors and characters the story reveals. At its core, Ubu Roi is a sort of parody of Macbeth with a little Hamlet tossed in along the way. To give you an idea, the title of the play is occasionally translated as King Turd

In 2016 The Handspring Puppet Company presented their multi-media version Ubu and The Truth Commission, featuring live actors, puppetry, documentary footage, music and animation. It’s worthwhile viewing anytime, but in our current moment it’s a necessary kick in the teeth. You can see the entire thing (about an hour and a half) on YouTube at the link in the featured video below.

 Handspring makes the story, like all of their work, entirely their own and it’s not only quite a treat, but given that this production happened in 2016, seems eerily and entirely prescient for the moment we’re living in. 

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Reading List For The Moment We’re In

Good reporting and good info are getting harder to find in these dark times.

These are difficult, stressful, head spinning times. What’s happening politically is not only wrong and dangerous, it is made more so because it is increasingly difficult to know where to turn to find good information. Now that the “Main Stream Media,” previously derided by those now in power, has capitulated and chosen a different main stream to drown in, I imagine that challenge will only continue. Shutterstock 447706081. It’s challenging to keep up with the pace of events and some ask why bother trying given that those we’ve relied on in the past have either turned coats or can’t keep up themselves. My answer is simple. I’d like to know more about the disease is causing me pain. As is my habit, I follow a lot of sources. I’ve compiled and will continue to compile a list of those I find the most valuable. Some on this list cover news, some provide important context, and all are worth my while in my opinion. So, I’m sharing them here. I’ll add to this list as I discover other sources worth recommending, so you might want to check back every now and then. Mostly on a political front, Josh Marshall’s Talking Point Memo has always been an excellent source. It’s even more so now. Mark Jacob covers not only the politics but those that cover the politics in Stop The Presses.  ProPublica has been a go to source for me for a while and it should be for you as well. Their investigations provide important context, but it is not a breaking news source. Rolling Stone’s political coverage is solid reporting and solid context within this overwhelming pace of events. The Tennessee Holler certainly covers the things going on in Tennessee as it competes to be ranked below Mississippi in most category measurements for success, but also is providing some excellent coverage and commentary on the larger U.S. picture. Given that tech is now incestuously intertwined with our politics and governance, I highly recommend for recent, and I hope ongoing, coverage Wired, TechDirt and 404Media. Reporters from those publications are doing excellent work and it’s a good way to filter through some of the nonsense. Feel free to leave a comment if you have a good source you’d like me to include. Feel free to refrain from offering sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and others crossing the River Styx. You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Vietnam: The War That Changed America. A Review of Then and Now

Looking back to look forward.

The recently released Apple TV+ documentary Vietnam: The War That Changed America left me with a lot of mixed emotions. Not about the documentary itself. It’s well done and deserves attention. Both as a reflection of our past history and also how it projects forward into our present moment. Apple TV Vietnam The War That Changed America key art graphic header 4 1 show home.jpg.og. The documentary itself is excellent work. The six episodes splice together historical footage-some already famous, some new-with interviews from those who were actually there, on all sides of the conflict. We’ve seen similar story telling techniques in other historical documentaries. This time around we get to hear not just from Americans, but also from North Vietnamese and Viet Cong voices. These moments are certainly compelling, as are some of the stories of the journalists and other non-combatants involved. Add to that what I’ll call the reunion factor. Each episode features a couple of individuals who served together to tell their stories, often with completely different views on the war and its aims. In the episode’s conclusion they are then reunited. It’s effective and at times emotional and effectively reveals the folly and tragedy of division. As good as the series is at chronicling an inflection point in American and world history, what got me thinking was again witnessing scenes of anti-war protests. While I’ve seen many such scenes before, watching them through the prism of this contemporary moment of peril we’re trying to find our way through in the U.S left me curious and unsettled. There’s no doubt that those anti-war protests had an impact on America culturally and politically. That tumultuous era created new alliances and divisions over root causes that we are still fighting over today. But as I watch those surging crowds of protesters, knowing how history often repeats and/or rhymes, I remind myself that was a different age. One without the organizing tools like social media and mobile communications that we have at our disposal now. As I and many others anguish over the lack of leadership defying what is happening currently in Washington DC, I’m left wondering, given the tools we have at our disposal today, what it will take to effectively take advantage of those tools and galvanize, as was done then, to meet the challenges of today. Certainly the forces we’re now in contest with have bought and pillaged some of those services and learned how to use them more effectively than those in the reluctant opposition. Perhaps we lost this round when most of us left Twitter to avoid the cesspool of Elon Musk’s making, instead of sticking around and forcing them to toss us off. It took time in that era for anti-government pressure to come together and coalesce with enough momentum to bring change. And yes, it also took events like the murders of student protestors at Kent State, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, not to mention the too many casualties of war. Let’s hope we don’t need the time, or that type of violence, for leaders to emerge and spark enough outrage to bring a stop to the evil we now face. I’m not talking about leaders emerging from conventional political party structures. I’m talking about from the ground up. The tools are there. It should be easier to organize and get the word out with less effort than it was during the age of the War in Vietnam. Here’s also hoping we have the courage, conviction, and most importantly the desire to do what is necessary when the time comes. Because it’s coming. You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

When ‘Shock and Awe’ Turns Into ‘Aw Shit’

Put on your waders. Shit’s getting deep.

Shock and Awe! Shock and Awe! Yes, we’re all shocked but I think there’s more of an “Aw Shit” response than there is any real ‘awe.’ At least I hope so. If that’s not the reaction, then you’ve been holed up like a groundhog or in some fantasy of your own creation for far too long. 847a798f f09a 4cfe aa65 e19a439daf13_w1080_r0_s.jpg. Of course I’m referring to all of the insane stunts that are happening during these early days of the end of the American Experiment. Don’t blowback on the use of the word “stunts.” People get hurt doing stunt work all the time. Some have died. Both are going to happen at some point in our future. But make no mistake, these “shock and awe” stunts are literally intended to do real harm while overwhelming any attempt to impede them. It’s designed to create chaos. Sadly, it’s working. To say the Democrats are in disarray is to spit out a bad cliché like a rotten sunflower seed. To say whatever used to be the GOP has surrendered everything except their daughters to Trump is also old news. That last part might also be premature. To say the fourth estate is complicit misses the point completely. Ask yourself where the cameras were during all of Elon Musk’s frat boy takeovers this weekend. Perhaps if a plane had crashed into the Treasury building they would have been there. To say the oligarchs and tech bros are the real winners is watching a trailer for a comedy action thriller that leaves out the spoiler in which everybody dies in the end. Josh Marshall has two good pieces about this that are worth reading here and here. They both reveal that we’re cascading down a series of rapids, without a paddle, heading towards a waterfall without a life preserver. One line stands out “The point is that you do ‘shock and awe’ when you don’t actually have the power to pull the job off.” He’s mostly correct there, leaving out only the important part about also having the smarts. Just remember how shocked and awed we were when the bombs dropped in Baghdad. Also remember how much of a shit show we turned that into. You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Sunday Morning Reading

Bogus science, finance, politics, and tech dominate this Groundhog Day edition of Sunday Morning Reading.

Here we go again. If it feels like Groundhog Day that’s because it is. Happens every year, but the things going on in this country feel very similar to, yet even more dangerous, than they did eight years ago. It’s a movie we don’t want to revisit, but are living through. Live through it we must. Enjoy today’s Sunday Morning Reading while we try to avoid repeating the same mistakes, or at least dodging them. With trade wars now needlessly underway most of the big news ahead this week will be in the financial markets. John Lanchester has an excellent piece with excellent context about finance and what he calls “its grotesquely outsize role in the way we live now” in For Every Winner A Loser. Meanwhile as the world focuses on trade wars, Elon Musk and who knows who else is rampaging through the federal government in ways that sound more than illegal. Josh Marshall asks Who Can Stop Elon’s ‘Team’ Wilding Its Way Through The Federal Government? I don’t often link to Wall Street Journal pieces in this column unless they are about tech related topics. This one by The Editorial Board is worth a read and definitely worth the headline: The Dumbest Trade War In History. Seems like Murdoch and his scribes got what they wished for. Again. On the tech front, running parallel to our political misfortunes is a river of thought on Artificial Intelligence, most of it negative these days, but also thoughtful. Alex Kirshner interviews Ed Zitron and came away with One Of Big Tech’s Angriest Critics Explains The Problem.  Audrey Watters tackles the issue and says “In this AI future, there is no accountability. There is no privacy. There is no public education. There is no democracy. AI is the antithesis of all of this.” I fear she’s correct. Check out AI Foreclosure for her piece, but also the excellent collection of links on the subject she provides. Whether it’s the science of tech or the science of finance, there’s science. We ignore it at our peril. But what happens if some of the science is bogus? Frederick Joelving, Cyril Labbé, and Guillaume Cabanac tell us that Bogus Research Is Undermining Good Science, Slowing Lifesaving Research. In this day and age going viral is the equivalent of getting that infamous 15 minutes of fame. Both are fleeting. Joan Westenberg says Trust Me. You Don’t Want To Go Viral. NatashaMH writes about a woman finding meaning in memoirs in Drowning In Sobriety. And, as we enter Black History Month in the U.S., check out Deborah W. Parker’s piece on Belle da Costa Greene in The Black Librarian Who Rewrote The Rules Of Power, Gender and Passing As White. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.  You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on social networks under my own name.

So Much For The Price Of Eggs

Shopping on eggshells.

So about the price of eggs…

You need eggs for them to be priced. Took this shot today at the grocery store. 

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Sunday Morning Reading

Good reading and good writing is just a heartbeat away in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading

What do Aristotle, Katherine Hepburn, Garth Hudson, beautiful minds, and ugly hearts have in common? They all make an appearance in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Or at least writers doing their thing and writing about them do. Hearts can be ugly things, yet they draw our poets, songwriters, and story tellers like moths to a flame. NatashaMH flutters around the heat in The Beautiful Mind Of An Ugly Heart. Speaking of ugly hearts, quite a few of them are on appearing on shirt sleeves alongside all the chest thumping and Nazi salutes going on here in the U.S (and elsewhere). We’re only a week into the victory laps and lapses of humility, yet already writers are wearing out keyboards with words of resistance. Ian Dunt has penned How To Resist The Tech Overlords. In this new and hot category of writing, let’s hope none of this seems like fiction down the road. Another way to resist the tech overlords is to just say no when they overreach. Microsoft overstepped by raising everyone’s Office 365 subscription prices on the inclusion, wanted or not, of its Microsoft 366 Copilot AI features. There’s a way to avoid the price hike written up by Mark Hachman on PC World. You might want to check that out. For a good read on the entire Microsoft situation, Ed Bott chronicles the story of Microsoft’s latest AI unintelligent move in The Microsoft 365 Copilot Launch Was A Total Disaster. Meanwhile the Chinese might have found a way to fight the AI money grab and spend long before we reach the cash out stage. Zeyi Yang lays it out in How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made A Model That Rivals OpenAI. The sexy stories about TikTok might be taking a back seat to this one. Alex Himelfarb tells us The Politics of “Common Sense” Is Making Us Meaner. He’s right. Joan Westenberg takes it all on in Clash: Power, Greed, And The Fight For a Fair Future. If you’re concerned about what the tech side of all of these moments of madness we’re living through might mean, remember it’s not the tech and it is. Check out Nina Metz’s review of the Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy flick Desk Set. As Ms. Metz puts it, This Movie With Katherine Hepburn And Spencer Tracy Anticipated Anxieties About The Internet And AI. Oh, also check out the flick. You won’t be sorry. There really is nothing new under the sun, including cribbing and cropping from the work of others. Massimo Pugliucci takes a look at Ayn Rand’s Objectivist theories and her claims to be influenced by Aristotle. As he puts it well, “one can hardly imagine what possible points of contact the two might have.” Take a look at On Ayn Rand and Aristotle. These are indeed challenging times and often they feel quite dark. Alexander Verbeek gives us the always needed reminder that When Darkness Returns, Art Exists. And on that note, and since we lost one of the greatest musical artists of my generation, Garth Hudson, this week, Check out Amanda Petrusich’s Remembering Garth Hudson, The Man Who Transformed The Band. Remember many of Hudson’s and The Band’s creations came in another turbulent era in our history. A beautiful musician and beautiful mind. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.  You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on social networks under my own name.

Apple’s 1984 Commercial Strikes A Different Chord 41 Years Later

Who is marching in lockstep now?

The legendary Apple 1984 commercial turns 41 today.

 The commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, has become as iconic as the computer and the company it advertised. Given everything going on in the world currently as we watch Tim Cook and other so-called leaders of the tech industry fall into lockstep with the new U.S. administration, the message has a much deeper and darker resonance than it did when it was just advertising a new computer. 

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Add ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ To Your Streaming Cue

Worth a watch or a re-watch.

Last night after a rough, though totally not surprising day, I posted the following on social media:

Certainly it was how I felt and was indeed an homage to Mr. Murrow and what he stood for. I didn’t go immediately to bed after posting that “good night” message. Instead I re-watched the excellent film containing Murrow’s famous sign-off, “Good Night and Good Luck.”

As we all go through what we’re going to continue to go through (and who really knows what that is), I’d recommend watching or re-watching the film again. It’s on most streaming services so it’s easy to find.

MV5BODBkZGQ2OGEtNjU0MC00YjdlLWFmZGEtNTZjZTRiZjhlNGRmXkEyXkFqcGc@. V1 FMjpg UX1000 .

There are and will be pressures all the way around and certainly a dramatization of any kind compresses events to create that drama. Given that we may never hear about any of the recent conflicts that I can only hope happened inside corporate media headquarters before they folded up their tents to march willingly in step with the new administration, the story of taking on McCarthy, while also relevant to our current moment, is really just the stage for the one behind the scenes that impacts what we see or don’t see on our screens of so many sizes.

This isn’t some moment of nostalgia for a time gone by. It is a recognition that where we are now is a place we’ve been before. This time around those that control the media and messaging have, for the moment, much more control than they did in Murrow’s day. Make no mistake, they had some control then, but now it’s more pervasive and the Murrow’s, Friendly’s and Paley’s are fewer in number.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.