Writing for the New York Review (archive), Sally Rooney profiles “genius” snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan. But much of the piece is spent on the mystery of how O’Sullivan and other athletes are able to do what they do without thinking.
Take the last frame of the 2014 Welsh Open final. The footage is available online, courtesy of Eurosport Snooker: if you like, you can watch O’Sullivan, then in his late thirties, circling the table, chalking his cue without taking his eyes from the baize. He’s leading his opponent, Ding Junhui — then at number three in the world snooker rankings — by eight frames to three, needing only one more to win the match and take home the title. He pots a red, then the black, then another red, and everything lands precisely the way he wants it: immaculate, mesmerizing, miraculously controlled.
The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.
Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.
What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?
I also mention that frames of snooker are expected to continue even after competitive play has concluded. Players don’t just get to a certain number of points and then stop because they’ve won the frame; they continue until the break imposes its own conclusion. There’s something so strange and excessive about that—it seems to belong to the realm of aesthetics rather than sport.
I used to write a lot about what Rooney examines in her essay — the effortless brilliance of top performers — under the subject of relaxed concentration. Still as fascinating as ever.
Shopping for Superman, guides viewers through a 50-year journey revealing the origin story of their friendly neighborhood comic shops and the people fighting to keep their doors open.
Since it began, the retail comics industry has contracted by over 75% with more shops closing every month.
After five years of diminished sales, a global pandemic, and the digitization of retail shopping dominating most markets, Shopping for Superman asks the question, “Can our local comic shops be saved?”
Shopping for Superman, does more than explain the history of retail comic book shops. Its underlying narrative reveals how shops directly influenced comic book publishing to cultivate some of the most daring and controversial materials ever committed to print.
Through the evolution of comics, bolstered by shop owners, local communities gained access to safe spaces for individuals having a crisis of identity, a place that promoted literacy and critical thinking in areas where those things are scarce.
Audiences will see, first-hand, just how necessary their support will be in keeping these shops open and available for future generations.
In this video for Wired, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies fascism & authoritarianism, answers questions from the internet about dictators.
Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth?
In 1945, the US Department of War (the precursor to the Dept of Defense) produced this educational film on the “destructive effects of racial and religious prejudice” and the use of such prejudice to gain power.
Reel 1 shows a fake wrestling match and “crooked” gambling games. An agitator addresses a street crowd; he almost convinces one man in the audience until the man begins to talk to a Hungarian refugee from Germany. A Nazi speaker harangues a crowd in Germany denouncing Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons. Reel 2, a German unemployed worker joins Hitler’s Storm Troops. SS men attack Jewish and Catholic headquarters in Germany, and beat up a Jewish storekeeper. A German teacher explains Nazi racial theories; the teacher is dragged away by German soldiers.
It’s a good watch, but perhaps keep in mind this was produced at a time when American citizens were imprisoned for being of Japanese descent (among other things…Jim Crow, sexism, discrimination of LGBTQ+ people, etc.)
In his latest video, Mark Rober shows how easy it is to fool Tesla’s self-driving capability (they use cheaper video cameras) when compared with other self-driving cars (which use lidar). Big Wile E. Coyote energy from the Tesla here.
Oh and he also uses lidar to map out the interior at Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride, which is entirely in the dark.
Disney has uploaded the firstthreeepisodes of season one of Andor to YouTube:
No idea how long they will be up or if they’re visible outside of the US. I started an Andor rewatch last week and I am finding it more enjoyable and interesting than I did the first time around. The writers obviously did their research on how fascism, dictatorships, and rebellions work — in almost every scene, you observe characters reacting and interacting with the constraints of bureaucratic totalitarianism. Very interesting to watch in this political moment. (via @rebeccablood.bsky.social)
The nest is located in Big Bear Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. It is about 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine tree. It is the current home for Jackie & Shadow, a local bald eagle pair.
The female eagle Jackie laid three eggs in January and two of them have hatched in recent days and the third egg is hatching as I write this at Friday around noon. You can scrub back through the video to see the chicks and some feedings. Or take a look at some of the clips of important moments in this YouTube playlist; here’s one from yesterday:
A few days ago, on March 2, the first lunar lander operated by a private company landed successfully on the Moon. The video of the landing is really something — I wonder if I will ever get accustomed to or tired of watching footage of spacecraft landing on other bodies in our solar system? The answer is a resounding NO so far…this is cool as hell.
I recently rewatched Glass Onion and had a couple thoughts about it.
1. Before settling in to watch, I’d remembered that Edward Norton’s mega-billionaire character Miles Bron bore some resemblance to Elon Musk, but I’d forgotten that the whole plot of the movie revolves around what a blustering dope, what a dumb charlatan, what a dim-witted con man Bron/Musk is. As we endure this political moment dominated by halfwit flimflammers, witnessing Bron’s downfall orchestrated by a gay detective and a Black woman was surprisingly cathartic.
2. I love films like this! Like Knives Out, Glass Onion is stacked with acting talent, helmed by a great writer/director, funny & dramatic, and, crucially, doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s a sense that everyone is having a good time, with a wink at the audience. And they’re just flat-out fun to watch. Is there a name for movies like this? A micro-genre? The type of movie you could imagine Muppets being a part of without too many changes?
I’d include movies like the Ocean’s series, Lucky Logan, some of Wes Anderson’s films, perhaps Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot trilogy, and maybe even Mike White’s The White Lotus series. Like, what do we call these winking prestige ensemble dramedy thrillers? (Surely we can’t call them “winking prestige ensemble dramedy thrillers”.) And what other films would you include?
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a YouTube video of Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019 that was going viral on Insta and TikTok. Well yesterday, Doechii officially released Anxiety as a single, so you can find it on YouTube (though I prefer the original video), Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere else you stream or buy music.
P.S. Here’s Doechii doing a CATFISH / DENIAL IS A RIVER medley at the Grammys last month:
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
The Million Man March in 1995.
The environmental movement (1982-2011)
“The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to watch an earnest show about an ultimately successful revolution against a fascist government. It will be interesting to see in this political climate whether Disney+ is the place to watch such a thing.
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that’s happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the “entire apparatus” of the US government was vulnerable and “exposed to our strategy”. And in this one, he talks about the president’s need to be able to ignore laws.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk’s coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it’s clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this…their plan is all laid out in Vought’s remarks and in Project 2025. They’ve crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
This is unfathomably cruel and monstrous. Vile. Evil. The stuff of sadistic dictators and terrorists. Nazis. People who killed cats for fun when they were kids. From the top down, the people serving in the Trump administration are sick, inhuman, heartless. This video absolutely gutted me. I am so very ashamed to be an American today. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through the days.
Nosferatu (2024). Not usually a fan of horror movies, but I liked this a lot. Great acting and cinematography. (A-)
Shōgun by James Clavell. This took a bit to get fully into, but I was riveted for the last 600-800 pages, even though I knew what was going to happen from having seen the TV show. So much more delicious detail in the book though. A great reading experience. (A)
September 5. Loved this. Solid journalism thriller in the vein of Spotlight, The Post, and All the President’s Men. (A)
Silo (season two). In agreement with many other viewers that the middle of the season was not all that compelling, but the final two episodes were great. (B+)
Not Like Us. For whatever reason, I ignored the Drake/Kendrick feud, so I got to this late but wow. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, run for your life…” (A)
Arca Tulum. Eating at this sort of restaurant should yield exclamations like “I’ve never tasted anything quite like this”. I thought this at least three times at Arca. But also: a pile of rocks is not the ideal plate for messy food. (A-)
Aldo’s. This is a Mexican gelato chain and they had a Biscoff-flavored gelato that was so good that I went back for it three more times. (A)
Antojitos La Chiapaneca. This is the only restaurant I ate at twice in Tulum — their al pastor tacos are so good. (A)
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A quick read but very relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. In keeping with the theme, I left the book at my hotel for someone else to read. (B+)
Janet Planet. A little too contemplative for me. (B)
Abruzzo.Mario Carbone created the menu for this Italian place at the Newark Airport. I had the penne vodka and I think it was the best thing I have ever eaten at an airport? Is it insane that I kinda want to plan a trip with an EWR connection so that I can have it again? P.S. the Tripadvisor reviewers haaaated this place. (A)
Reservation Dogs (season three). I reviewed Res Dogs in the last media diet post (“I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two”) but I’d like another crack at it. The last three episodes of the show were fantastic, especially the hospital breakout and Elora meeting her dad. (A+)
Flow. Reminded me strongly of Studio Ghibli’s films, but this wonderful animated movie is also uniquely its own thing. (A+)
The Bends. My usual Radiohead fare tends towards Kid A and In Rainbows, but I’ve been listening to The Bends a lot lately and appreciating the less polished rockiness of it. (A-)
Wool. Since the book (more or less) covers the events of the first two seasons of the TV series, I read half of it after season one and the other half after the latest season. And…I think the TV series is much better? (B-)
Thelma. A gem of a film, like Mission Impossible crossed with About Schmidt (or maybe The Bucket List). June Squibb is *fantastic* in the lead role. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2024). Overall I enjoyed this season — they recruited a selection of talented bakers and the changes they’ve made (e.g. getting away from stunt bakes). But I found the semifinal and final difficult to watch because one of the contestants forgot he was supposed to be entertaining on television and totally lost his composure. (B+)
GNX. I also reviewed this in the last media diet post but I’ve continued to listen and I think GNX may have moved past DAMN. as my favorite Kendrick album? (A+)
Hundreds of Beavers. Super fun and inventive…this is like an animated movie with video game elements made with live-action actors. If you’re the sort of person who loves movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’ll probably love this movie. (B+)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. A reviewer complained that the final third of the book took on the style of a writing exercise and I agree. (B)
The Penguin. Colin Farrell is unrecognizable (and great) as Oz, and Cristin Milioti is a chillingly fantastic Sofia Falcone. The first few episodes were really strong but I felt it slipped a bit as the season went on. (A-)
Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.
It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.
Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans’ data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.
Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: “National program director of the CHUM Group”) and TikTok.
This fantastic two-minute video, from a guy named Rich, neatly explains why the anger and frustration of Trump’s supporters has been growing over time — why the pushback on things like diversity, equity, inclusion, trans rights, and LGBTQ+ issues seems to be increasing and the hate grows more overt. It has to do with an idea called an extinction burst.
Here’s a transcript of the video:
The Trump spike in racism, sexism, and hate — it’s the emotional foundation for the entire Make America Great Again movement, that nostalgia for when life in America was simpler and paler. But as soon as we began addressing it — boom! extinction burst.
This term is why I love science so much. You can take an idea from one field, like psychology for example, and apply it to another field, like political science, and the principles still apply.
Extinction burst is actually really simple. It’s when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change an undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time until ultimately the subject changes the behavior and then that behavior goes extinct.
This is like you’re at the store and you’re swiping your credit card, and it doesn’t work, and so then you swipe your credit card like 15 more times until you’re so angry you’re freaking out, and you’re about to scream an F-bomb in the middle of Toys R Us. And then you say, “I’ll just pay with cash”. Swiping is the behavior and the payment is the reward. So when the swiping doesn’t work and you don’t get the reward you need, you get madder and madder and you try it more and more until you change the behavior, which then results in the extinction of the original behavior.
Now, extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know very clearly what triggered it: it was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, the birther movement, and ultimately MAGA. It is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction.
This is why Republicans are still so angry. They know they know Trump winning can’t stop it, and they know Trump in office can’t stop it — they can feel the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.
At this point, the only thing that’ll stop it is if we let up. If you stop interfering with that undesirable behavior, it will go back to normal. So no, you’re not crazy; yes, you are doing the right thing; and yes, if you persevere, the extinction burst will end.
Note that this isn’t an explanation of where the Tea Party & MAGA movements came from; many people have written about how MAGA can be understood as a reaction to Obama’s election — subsequent events like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, the election of a Black woman as vice-president, the legalization of gay marriage, etc. have kept the indignities coming.
Rather, the extinction burst concept explains why the reaction seems to be getting more extreme, from QAnon to an increased number of book bans to anti-trans laws to anti-abortion laws to Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes in public to openly expressed racism by many Republican politicians to January 6th to the 2025 Coup. We are seeing behavior that 15-20 years ago would have been almost unthinkable — now it’s daily. They are swiping the card and getting madder and madder.
Tantrums: A child who has learned that tantrums result in attention from their parents may initially escalate their tantrum behavior when their tantrums are no longer reinforced. This escalation is an extinction burst, as the child is attempting to regain the attention they once received.
Protesting: When a person has been reinforced by being excused from a task or activity, they may initially increase their protest behaviors, such as whining or arguing, when the reinforcement is no longer provided. This increase in protest behavior is an extinction burst.
Persistence: In some cases, individuals may persistently engage in a behavior that previously led to reinforcement, even if the reinforcement is no longer present. For example, a child who used to receive a treat for asking repeatedly may continue to ask repeatedly, hoping for the treat, even when the treat is no longer given. This persistence is an extinction burst.
And in adults:
Cell Phone Addiction: If an individual is accustomed to receiving instant gratification through social media notifications on their cell phone, they may experience an extinction burst when they attempt to reduce their screen time. They may initially intensify their checking behavior, hoping to regain the previous level of reinforcement.
Gambling: In the context of gambling, an individual who has previously experienced wins and rewards may exhibit an extinction burst if they suddenly stop winning. They may increase their gambling behavior, hoping to recreate the past reinforcement.
Smoking Cessation: When someone tries to quit smoking, they may experience an extinction burst in the form of increased cravings and even heightened smoking behavior. This burst occurs because the expected reinforcement (nicotine) is no longer being received, leading to an initial escalation in smoking behavior.
Backed by a full band, horns and two background singers, Doechii’s performance was a masterclass in creativity. Sporting vintage academia looks, complete with matching cornrows and beads, Doechii delivers a freshly rearranged medley of cuts from ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, tailored specifically for Tiny Desk. While hip-hop remained at the core, she truly gave us everything: a jazz arrangement of “BOOM BAP,” heavy rock vibes on “CATFISH” and a Southern praise break outro on “NISSAN ALTIMA.”
She closed her set with “Black Girl Memoir” from her debut album, Oh The Places You’ll Go. Before performing, she shared, “I wrote this song specifically for Black women. As a dark-skinned woman, there’s a very unique experience I’m trying to internalize … This is dedicated to all the beautiful Black women in the room.” While her star has been steadily on the rise since her debut, 2024 is shaping up to be the year Doechii cements herself as a household name.
In 2002, Fred Rogers wrote a parenting book as a resource for caregivers of children aged two to six. One of the topics he covered was how to talk to children about tragic events in the news. Rogers begins by noting that even young children can pick up on when adults are feeling distressed:
In times of community or world-wide crisis, it’s easy to assume that young children don’t know what’s going on. But one thing’s for sure — children are very sensitive to how their parents feel. They’re keenly aware of the expressions on their parents’ faces and the tone of their voices. Children can sense when their parents are really worried, whether they’re watching the news or talking about it with others. No matter what children know about a “crisis,” it’s especially scary for children to realize that their parents are scared.
In times of crisis, kids need to feel safe:
In times of crisis, children want to know, “Who will take care of me?” They’re dependent on adults for their survival and security. They’re naturally self-centered. They need to hear very clearly that their parents are doing all they can to take care of them and to keep them safe. They also need to hear that people in the government and other grownups they don’t even know are working hard to keep them safe, too.
Parents need to step away from the news in order to be present for their kids and for their own well-being. The 2025 equivalent of limiting TV viewing would be “put down the phone”:
It’s easy to allow ourselves to get drawn into watching televised news of a crisis for hours and hours; however, exposing ourselves to so many tragedies can make us feel hopeless, insecure, and even depressed. We help our children and ourselves if we’re able to limit our own television viewing. Our children need us to spend time with them – away from the frightening images on the screen.
We need to let kids know that whatever they’re feeling is natural:
If we don’t let children know it’s okay to feel sad and scared, they may think something is wrong with them when they do feel that way. They certainly don’t need to hear all the details of what’s making us sad or scared, but if we can help them accept their own feelings as natural and normal, their feelings will be much more manageable for them.
Angry feelings are part of being human, especially when we feel powerless. One of the most important messages we can give our children is, “It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hurt ourselves or others.” Besides giving children the right to their anger, we can help them find constructive things to do with their feelings. This way, we’ll be giving them useful tools that will serve them all their life, and help them to become the worlds’ future peacemakers — the world’s future “helpers.”
And of course, we can urge kids to look for the helpers:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.
Update: On the first anniversary of 9/11, Fred Rogers recorded this brief message about tragic events in the news. Here’s the video followed by a full transcript:
Hello, I’m Fred Rogers. Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. Well, we at Family Communications have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything and that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time. I’m always glad to be your neighbor.
This was one of Rogers’ last recordings before he died in early 2003.
I did not think I was going to watch this whole video when I started but I totally did. Some absolutely incredible shots & rallies in here. (thx, dunstan)
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let’s say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you’d get the same answers but rarely. You’d get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You’d get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Season two of Severance is underway and while the first episode didn’t have an opening title sequence, the second episode debuted a new sequence. The season one intro was inducted straight into the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame and season two’s intro is just as good. Once again, the titles were done by Oliver Latta, who was found by Severance producer Ben Stiller via his Instagram account.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamed of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people who just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.
Director Denis Villeneuve steps into the Criterion Closet to choose and talk about a few of his favorite films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, and Seven Samurai. At one point, he says, “We all look like Smurfs next to Fellini.”
In June 1971, the BBC aired a segment on a “mysterious” and “niche” sports imported from America called “jogging”. It’s in black & white, which makes it feel even older than it is, and they interview (while jogging!) Tory MP Ernest Marples, who says he often jogs to Parliament from his house in a lounge suit. This is something straight out of Monty Python…more interviews with people while they are running please.
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