No Movie Nights this week, because I was away Friday (more on this later) and some friends had a house-warming party Saturday during which Kate and I left the kids at home playing Pokemon games on the Switch. But that frees up the Sunday morning slot for rounding up my recent activity online.
Me on Substack:
— How Notable Is Science?: My annual-ish complaint that the New York Times book review doesn’t give enough respect to science books in their Notable Books list.
— Thanksgiving 2021: Brief thoughts on my favorite American holiday.
— Cored Out: Why I’m not a fan of Gen Ed curricula built around defined reading lists and “core” courses that every student has to take.
— The Wheel of Time and the Threading of Needles: People trying to bring fantasy books to the screen face a nearly impossible task trying to include enough worldbuilding for fans of the books but not too much to turn tv watchers off.
— Yeah, Well, That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man: Assigning moral weight to aesthetic preferences is an absurd activity, and it’s pushing me toward being more genial than grumpy in my old age.
— Journalism: Still a Problem: Back on my bullshit about how deeply ingrained norms of journalistic practice push the profession toward misinforming the public.
Me Elsewhere:
— Timekeeping Is a Universal Human Obsession: A brief look at how timekeeping has been important to cultures spanning a much wider geographical and temporal range than we often think of.
Links Dump:
— ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ and Our Fab Five Beatles Albums at The Big Picture: One of two podcasts about the Beatles documentary that I greatly enjoyed.
— Rodgers for MVP, Pats-Bills, and an Iconic Beatles Documentary With Peter Schrager and Chuck Klosterman at the Bill Simmons Podcast: Two disclaimers, here: 1) the first half-hour plus is stuff about football gambling that’s of no real interest to me and I don’t particularly recommend it, 2) I am well aware that both Simmons and Klosterman are Not To Every Taste, but I enjoy both of them, and thus really enjoyed them discussing Get Back.
— Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission by Philippe Lemoine: This may be outdated thanks to the new omicron variant, but I found the argument about the “wave” structure we’ve seen to this point really interesting.
— Are scientists less prone to motivated reasoning? by John Timmer: I mean, I’d like to think so…
— Our Very Unscientific Poll On When Each Season Starts at FiveThirtyEight: Glad we settled that.
— Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible by Alex Tabarrok: I’m not super interested in the issue, but this is a nice demonstration of the process of deciding what buzzy topics to take seriously.
— Public opinion was very conservative in the 1990s by Matt Yglesias: I just love hearing my grad school years discussed like it was the distant past. (Shut up.)
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
As noted up top, I was traveling Friday, making my quasi-annual trip to Brooklyn to see the Hold Steady perform one of their residency shows at the Brooklyn Bowl. I waffled a lot about this in the last week or so, what with all the scary variant news, but the venue required vaccination (finally, a use for the Excelsior Pass app…) and encouraged masks, and I really miss seeing live music.
I was a little surprised at how uneasy I remained through the whole thing. I’m among the most cavalier of the people I spend most of my time around with regard to Covid risks, but this was a lot of people. On reflection, it’s maybe not that surprising, because even pre-pandemic I was never a fan of big crowds, but I wasn’t quite as able to get lost in the music as I would’ve liked. It didn’t help that my spot near the back of the crowd was very close to the exit from the performance space, so I kept being bumped into by people making mid-show beer runs.
Anyway, it was a little nervous-making, and I’ll be doing the paranoid hypochondriac thing (“Am I tired and feverish, or just short on sleep because I went to a rock show?”) for the next week and a bit. Still, I gotta admit, the band was pretty tight…
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
This isn’t from the show I was at, but it’s awesome.
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