Fading beauty
I love the graceful way roses fade.
Quote of the Day
”An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.” * Henry Kissinger
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | Buckets of Rain
Long Read of the Day
Wrecking Balls
For most of my time as a newspaper columnist, Tina Brown has been a ‘media star’. Coming from me, that’s normally not a compliment, but it’s true. So when she finally decided to ‘retire’ from whatever high-profile editorial job she finally had (The Daily Beast?), I felt obliged to subscribe to her Substack. This edition (from last January) which I happened upon yesterday in a search for something else, explains why. It has the kind of energy that few journalists can muster.
In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed.
The real punch, though, comes further down the piece:
Why are all these male human wrecking balls so driven by the need to be seen and heard in the first place? Social media has made everyone a star in their own mind, but I am tired of the futile inspection of their repetitive homicidal motives on cable news, their broken marriages, their financial failures, their normal if withdrawn interactions with their stunned neighbors. I am tired of the implication of guilt because none of us noticed another killer in our midst about to blow. I am angry that the military doesn’t care enough for the PTSD soldiers decommissioned with the adult equivalent of shaken baby syndrome.
But have any of these sullen, kamikaze psychos ever observed the loneliness and financial desperation of half the women on their street? Their lives of domestic abuse cohabiting with men like them? Women have been used to being ignored since time immemorial and yet, most of the time, they slog on, trying to keep it together for the sake of the kids…
Great stuff. Do read it.
My commonplace booklet
Et. Tu FT?
From Om Malik:
A month ago, I reported that Apple was in the final stages of acquiring the rights for F1 streaming following the success of its movie about the sport. Almost a month later, the Financial Times reported the news. As a matter of principle, I am not linking to the report.
As is the case with establishment media, they almost never credit independents, blogs, or newsletters. It is such a shame. As a loyal FT reader, I think a little less admirably of them.
Me too. He’s right about mainstream media. I’ve been a columnist and an academic all my working life. So I “have a foot in both graves” as Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Editor-in-Chief of the Observer when I was the paper’s TV Critic, once observed. But I’ve also had a blog for a very long time. Most of my journalistic friends were incredulous about my blogging — and about blogs generally. Their view was that anyone who writes without being paid for it was weird.
Linkblog
Weird things one finds on the Internet…
From AP
A classical drive: Road rumble strips play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in UAE emirate of Fujairah
FUJAIRAH, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The humble road rumble strip, used around the world to alert drifting drivers to potential hazards or lane departures, can play Beethoven on a mountain highway in the far reaches of the United Arab Emirates.
For nearly a kilometer (a half mile) along the E84 highway — also known as the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Road — motorists in the right-hand lane coming into the city of Fujairah can play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony where the rubber meets the road.
Wouldn’t work on the roads near me.
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