Imagine living in this world and giving a shit about what names a school district gives its schools! "How dare they rename James Denman high school"
What if I told you that names are irrelevant to the almighty God, who looks straight into our soul
Why should anyone care that a decision made in 1931 by a bunch of dead randos to name a school after some other dead rando from 1845 is being overturned? They're going to rename these schools after people they find to be more appropriate to the present population, and it's fine
Ralph Waldo Emerson would approve
Also the whole thing is a hoax anyway. Schoolchildren in San Francisco? No such thing!
As Thomas Jefferson (pbuh) once declared "the tree of school districts must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of whoever the schools were named after. it is it's natural manure."
one reason that all these weird quillette-ass concern trolls are taking up the honor of Edward Hyde Earl of Clarendon is that, for obvious reasons, they haven't come up with replacement names yet, but I bet you anything the new names will be better than the old ones
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This Ezra Klein column about California has some really weird framing; "California is so progressive, yet doesn't do progressive things!" is much less of a contradiction if you just start with the fact that the state is not that progressive
Why write a whole column about how the state isn't actually very progressive and then end with "If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?"
And not to be like "everything is great!" but stuff like this is happening; if Klein were less interested in the SF school board renaming controversy, it might be worth looking at! berkeleyside.com/2021/02/11/opi…
So much cultural criticism boils down to chewing on the strange result of popular genre chum--guilty pleasure stuff--being taken more seriously than it was really designed for or capable of sustaining.
Im thinking about the furors around American Dirt, Bridgerton, and WW84, which, in different ways, are all objects meant to be consumed for pleasure without thinking too much about why and how. And then you think about them and you're like "wow, this sucks."
Scads of thrillers as bad or worse than American Dirt are published constantly, and no one but their readers notices, but THIS one got lots of "serious" attention, so it was held to real literary standards and eviscerated.
I regret to announce that I've started playing chess online. however I'm very bad at it, so that's some comfort
My opponents like to triumph over me by utilizing the fiendishly clever tactic of "me making a stupid move"
More bad news: this website makes it really easy to learn chess openings without having to set up a board and move the pieces yourself, am now learning even more chess chessstrategyonline.com/content/tutori…
In a way, Searching for Bobby Fischer has it both ways because Josh does win his last game with The Evil Chess Kid, BUT: I love how sweet and gentle and kind that movie ultimately is and the actor that plays Josh is incredible
"Can I tell you a secret? You're a much stronger player than I was at your age" is an all-time great joke
I think what makes the movie work is that Josh is mostly too young (and too sweet) to articulate what HE wants with any real clarity--allowing each adult to project their own egos onto him--but, crucially, he *does* act, and eventually clarifies his own preference for kindness
"And that’s what I can’t stop thinking about: this accident of visual storytelling, this convergence. It’s one thing to say that things like this just happen; it’s another to ask what’s really happening when they do." lareviewofbooks.org/article/dance-…
Phil, on The Crown:
"There’s an eleven-minute dance sequence in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock that made me feel the way those early film spectators must have felt when the Lumière brothers showed them leaves rustling or dancers dancing."
I'm sort of fascinated by how The Discourse on Lovers Rock doesn't exactly know what to do with [the incident sexual violence that occurs in it]; it's hard to incorporate into a celebratory story about community, which I suspect is exactly why McQueen included it
A lot of the talk about LR--in many ways following SM's lead--emphasizes the *safety* of the community formed by the blues party, but the most interesting thing about LR, I think, is that it doesn't sit comfortably in that celebration of celebration
"Safe" is such an interesting word to use about a 70 minute movie that includes an act of sexual assault!