Link Salad, the Genies and Bottles Edition
Some of what I've been reading
— Whatever Its Fate, TikTok Transformed Hollywood Forever - Steven Zeitchik, The Hollywood Reporter, Jan. 19, 2025
“For all its newness, the app was continuing a TV trend that had made video-storytelling a participatory sport dating back to the 1980s, when shows like Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks created addictive immersive experiences in a way television rarely had before. That trend intensified with series like The Sopranos and Survivor in the early 2000s, which gave way to the streaming culture of the 2010s. Each time out, providers made their stuff harder to turn off, the content and increasingly the technology combining to make watching as much a compulsion as a leisure choice.”
— The remarkable life of Andrée Blouin - Africa's overlooked independence heroine - Wedaeli Chibelushi, BBC News, Jan. 6, 2025
“In 1960, with Nkrumah's encouragement, Andrée Blouin flew alone to DR Congo. She joined prominent male liberation activists, such as Pierre Mulele and Antoine Gizenga, on the road, campaigning across the country's 2.4 million sq km (906,000 sq miles) expanse. She cut a striking figure, travelling through the bush with her coiffed hair, form-fitting dresses and chic, translucent shades.”
— Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it - Matt Duss, The Guardian, Jan. 9, 2025
“Earlier in the day, rumors had been flying around Chicago about that evening’s possible surprise speakers. Who would it be? Beyoncé? Taylor Swift? Close! It turned out to be the 86-year-old former CIA director and secretary of defense who last served in government over a decade ago. In his speech, he cited Ronald Reagan to rail against “isolationism”, telling the assembled crowd: “Our warriors need a tough, cool-headed commander-in-chief to defend our democracy from tyrants and terrorists,” and declaring that Kamala Harris would be that leader.”
— A Deadly Apathy - David Shulman, The New York Review of Books, Jan. 16, 2025
“This winter in Israel-Palestine is a dark one, and not because the days are shorter. We have war crimes, man-made famine, and ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Since early October the army has intermittently stopped humanitarian aid—namely food—from entering the northern part of Gaza, which has a population of some 200,000 or more. Much of that population has now been forcibly displaced toward the tent cities farther south, but it seems that tens of thousands of Palestinians are still hanging on in Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, where the fighting and the bombing continue. Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, who is in command in the Jabaliya arena, has claimed that there are no civilians left in the north of Gaza. Oddly, many of these nonexistent ordinary people are being killed nearly every day. Here is one egregious example. On October 29, after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya, the army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a “lookout” had been sighted on the roof. Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and we have no count of the wounded. An obscene question arises: Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?”
— The Darkroom of Propaganda - Andrew O’Hagan, The New York Review of Books, Dec. 19, 2024
“It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions of decent people who might judge better when it comes to their children, Trump’s menace is not a bar to his attraction but is rather a part of it, and so, for reasons too deep for tears, his manifold hatreds have proved more inviting than repugnant to a proportion of the electorate. It is an aspect of Trump’s cruel magic that he so readily invites the communion of people who find they can express in company what they might otherwise resist. As George Orwell showed, groupthink may be developed in a darkroom of propaganda. For us, it now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”
— After the Palisades Fire, What Can We Really Rebuild? - Tim Golden, ProPublica, Jan. 13, 2025
“Even my friends in their early 60s have been weighing whether they will have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisades, they wonder, will be rebuilt around them? For now, the only section of the town center that stands somewhat unscathed is the Palisades Village mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.”
— In LA - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books, Jan. 23, 2025
“I was on deadline for a catalogue essay. I had my notebooks and some art books and my laptop on my desk. I spent Wednesday evening writing. ‘This is how they found him,’ I could imagine them saying, ‘writing his little sentences while LA burned.’ News came of many more friends who had lost their houses in Altadena.”
Currently reading: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination - Stuart A. Reid
Currently listening: Manic - Wage War