Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden, she has an Amnesty International sticker on her front window and a photograph on her refrigerator of herself and hundreds of other people spelling “TAX THE 1%” on a beach.
Culture is upstream of politics; and the culture is clearly changing.
We’re now two years out from what may in retrospect be seen as peak “social justice.” In the summer of 2020, a hefty section of the elite was enthralled with the idea of the police being defunded, demobilized and demonized. Critical theory’s critique of liberal democracy as a mere mask for “white supremacy” everywhere. Countless people were required to read woke tracts — from DiAngelo to Kendi — as part of their employment. Corporate America jumped in, shedding any pretense of political neutrality; mainstream media swiftly adopted the new language and premises of critical theory. The Trump madness, and his attempted sabotage of an election, largely silenced liberals in their clash with the left. They had a more immediate threat. And rightly so.
When Jack Welch died on March 1, 2020, tributes poured in for the longtime chief executive of General Electric, whom many revered as the greatest chief executive of all time.
David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery and a Welch disciple, remembered him as an almost godlike figure. “Jack set the path. He saw the whole world. He was above the whole world,” Mr. Zaslav said. “What he created at G.E. became the way companies now operate.”
Jared Kushner knew his father-in-law and boss Donald Trump had lost to Joe Biden. But that didn’t stop Kushner from trying to help his wife’s dad cling to power.
Back on March 12th, not long after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the New York Times ran one of the first of what would become a series of gloating articles about the demise of Russia Today. The state-sponsored TV network had just been yanked off the air by government fiat in Europe, and removed in America by private carriers like Comcast, Xfinity, and DirecTV. About the channel, the Times wrote:
A role at RT America was a rare job in an industry where if you had screwed up, were washed up or were completely new to the field, there weren’t many other options…
The Times then listed a series of those “screwups” and “washouts,” including the paper’s own former star war reporter Chris Hedges (also thriving now on Substack) and the father-son tandem Jesse and Tyrel Ventura. The paper neglected to mention that none of these figures had failed at anything, but rather had been driven out of the mainstream press essentially over opposition to the Iraq war. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/
SALT LAKE CITY — If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
See that pic above? That was last summer. On planet earth. July 2021. And one month from now, it’s going to begin happening all over again.
There’s a single, simple fact that I think everyone should know right now. It should be the central focus of our culture, society, and economics. Nothing matters more than this fact. It goes like this.
On 4 November 2019, TV stations across California blasted Chelsea Becker’s photo on their news editions. The “search was on” for a “troubled” 25-year-old woman wanted for the “murder of her unborn baby”, news anchors said, warning viewers not to approach if they spotted her but to call the authorities.
The next day, Becker was asleep at the home she was staying in when officers with the Hanford police department arrived.
Amy Coney Barrett gave the commencement address to Trinity graduates at People of Praise Center in South Bend, Indiana, in 2011. Photograph: Barbara Allison/APThe founder of the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.
When critics get to assessing a classic TV show, we have a weird tendency to turn into evolutionary biologists. We pull out the old television family tree and gauge the series’s achievement by how many branches we can trace back to it — how many series modeled one or another aspect on it. “Dragnet,” “The Simpsons,” “Lost” — you shall know them by their copycats.
And sure, influence is one measure of greatness. But so is inimitability. There is the painter who leaves behind a school of disciples, but there is also the artist who sees a color that no one has envisioned before or since.
The final stop on this Emmy season’s murdery assembly line, HBO Max’s The Staircasealways knew what it was. Less interested in a simple dramatization of an infamously grisly case than in unpacking our obsession with the grisliness, the limited series felt like a fitting cap to a string of projects that revisited sensational true events through an empathic lens. (As my colleague Richard Lawson wrote in his review, it’s “the true-crime series to end them all.”) But the show, created by Antonio Campos and co-run by American Crime Storyalum Maggie Cohn, became even more fascinating when airing alongside its spring 2022 brethren—subverting a genre once notorious for its voyeuristic focus on dead girls and women, now suddenly trendy post-MeToo.
The recent travails of Netflix, and the tech sector in general, have served notice that the abundance of new series that you have gotten used to — and perhaps grown tired of — may not last forever. But if it turns out that this summer represented the beginning of the end, it will have been an impressive going-away party.
One day a man decided to retire...
He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.
He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts.
After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.
In disbelief, he asks, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?"
She replies, "I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank."
Amazing," he notes. "You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you."
"Oh, this thing?" explains the woman. " I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from an Eucalyptus tree."
"But, where did you get the tools?"
"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. " On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron and I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware."
The guy is stunned.
"Let's row over to my place," she says "and I'll give you a tour." So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat.
Before him is a long stone walk leading to a cabin and tree house.
While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Please sit down."
"Would you like a drink?"
"No! No thank you," the man blurts out, still dazed. "I can't take another drop of coconut juice."
"Oh, it's not coconut juice," winks the woman. "I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?"
Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces, " I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There's a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs."
No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.
"This woman is amazing," he muses. "What's next?"
When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias. She then beckons for him to sit down next to her.
"Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, "We've both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely. When was the last time you played around? She stares into his eyes.
He can't believe what he's hearing. "You mean..." he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes,
"You've built a Golf Course too?"
Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool. I gave him a glass of water.
If I had a dollar for every girl that found me unattractive, they would eventually find me attractive.
I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for freedom until they are flashing behind you.
When wearing a bikini, women reveal 90% of their body... men are so polite they only look at the covered parts.
A recent study has found that women who carry a little extra weight, live longer than the men who mention it.
Relationships are a lot like algebra. Have you ever looked at your X and wondered Y?
America is a country which produces citizens who will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote.
Did you know that dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the very edge of the pool and throw them fish?
My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We'll see about that.
I think my neighbor is stalking me as she's been googling my name on her computer. I saw it through my telescope last night.
Money talks ..but all mine ever says is good-bye.
You're not fat, you're just... easier to see.
If you think nobody cares whether you're alive, try missing a couple of payments.
I always wondered what the job application is like at Hooters. Do they just give you a bra and say, “Here, fill this out?”
I can’t understand why women are okay that JC Penny has an older women's clothing line named, “Sag Harbor.”
My therapist said that my narcissism causes me to misread social situations. I’m pretty sure she was hitting on me.
My 60 year kindergarten reunion is coming up soon and I’m worried about the 175 pounds I’ve gained since then.
Denny’s has a slogan, “If it’s your birthday, the meal is on us." If you’re in Denny’s and it's your birthday, your life sucks!
The pharmacist asked me my birth date again today. I'm pretty sure she's going to get me something.
On average, an American man will have sex two to three times a week. Whereas, a Japanese man will have sex only one or two times a year. This is very upsetting news to me. I had no idea I was Japanese.
The location of your mailbox shows you how far away from your house you can be in a robe before you start looking like a mental patient.
I think it's pretty cool how Chinese people made a language entirely out of tattoos.
Money can't buy happiness, but it keeps the kids in touch!
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