I am terrified at the potential mess they could make of House of Dragons. The Dance of the Dragons is great raw material, but it doesn't come with extensive source dialogue, and lends itself to the temptation of going full-on CGI at the expense of the (highly complex) plot.
The fact that the two main characters - Rhaenyra and Alicent - are Strong Female Leads™ also comes with the risk of repeating the mistakes of the Dornish plot, where insistence on the Girl Power stuff is just one-note and results in flat, unlikeable characters.
Another way of screwing it up could be just overimposing the Starks/Lannisters boring goodies-vs-sexy baddies dynamics on the Blacks-vs-Green civil war. No. The Blacks are not the goodies. Give us two sides of deeply flawed characters to cheer for.
There are so many ways this could go wrong, and - after the final seasons of GoT - if they get this wrong the cinematic universe is over. So give 👏🏻 us 👏🏻 complexity 👏🏻 and 👏🏻 good 👏🏻writing 👏🏻not 👏🏻 just 👏🏻 dragons 👏🏻
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On a first read of Worlds of Welfare, students often have troubles figuring out what it means that the conservative (continental European) welfare systems are hierarchical and status-differentiating. The Italian vaccination programme is set to become the new canonical example.
In Tuscany, university lecturers and admin are being vaccinated, but doctoral students are up in arms that they were excluded. pisatoday.it/cronaca/precar…
A word of caution: many aspects of the social, political and informational mess that led to extremists storming the US Capitol are present in Western Europe too. (1)
I. Political Violence
Wednesday didn’t happen in a vacuum: it happened in a context of rising right-wing terrorism, aimed at their adversaries in the elite (pipe bombs mailed to Obama, Biden, Clinton, DNC) and among the public (Charlottesville, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Charleston).
Europe has seen its share of the same violence.
Against parliamentarians: Jo Cox, Labour Party MP, and Walter Lübke (CDU politician in Hesse) have been assassinated. Plots against other politicians, in Germany and the UK, led to further convictions. (3)
There's an interesting PhD on the politics of whiteness to be written on the electoral shifts in 2016 and 2020 in (1) Scots-Irish areas in Appalachia, (2) German-Scandinavian areas in the Midwest, and (3) 20th century Irish-Polish-Italian white migration areas in the Northeast.
This is what the arrow map looked like in 2016.
Basically, Trump overperformed *again* in 2020 in the places where he did best in 2016 (Appalachia), and fell back in the places where in 2016 he overperformed only slightly (Midwest) or just barely (Northeast).
Now I obviously know nothing about this, but I'd love to read up on whether and why white voters in the three regions differ in their political attitudes - especially in terms of whether part of it comes down to distinct geographic subcultures beyond social composition.
The 'citizen forecast', the favourite model of all quacks based on asking people "who do you think is going to win?", had Trump winning 334 Electoral college votes.
Helmuth Norpoth's primary model, the favourite of all bad-faith partisan journalists with too much time on their hands, which is based on performance in early primaries, had Trump with 91% chances of winning the election.
The IFAAR-University of Neuchatel's internet search model: also wrong. Also quackery.