GUYS, if you have a New Yorker subscription, please immediately read Seymour Hersh’s new piece on My Lai (he broke the story back in 1969, and is revisiting it), it is…incredible, I don’t really want to quote from it bc it’s pretty gut-wrenching, but it’s a reminder of how journalism can actually change the national mood.
Oh, okay, here’s a non-paywalled story about an artist who lost her hippocampus to encephalitis which is everything you’ve ever hoped for about the resilience of humans and friendship and creativity:
As abject as Johnson’s condition sounds, it is hard to pity her once you’ve met her. If her life is an endless ride on a stationary bike, she pedals away with unflagging brio. This bustling personality is a preserved trait. Before her illness, Johnson was not only an artist on constant deadline; she was also an adept violist who performed in chamber ensembles and an amateur pilot who kept a 1946 Piper Cub on an airstrip at Watercolor Farm. (Flying was connected to her visual hunger: she wanted to draw better from an aerial perspective.) With a partner, Johnson set up an organic-dairy business on the property; at least once, she landed a plane while skirting a cow on the runway. Johnson found wisdom in upbeat aphorisms, and designed covers for books like “You’re the Best!” and “Love Your Life: Making the Most of Each Day.” Her whistle-while-you-multitask disposition is intact, if not intensified; she is a very American amnesiac. This makes her an eager experimental subject. Many psychology studies, with their sterile repetitions, are capsized when their subjects become too bored to coöperate, but Johnson relishes invitations to listen for an hour to extremely similar sequences of musical tones. (Others with Johnson’s condition are much less amenable to study. Clive Wearing, an amnesiac conductor, became indignant during a tones experiment, declaring, “I am a world-famous musician!”)
Michelle Dean and a man of some kind on what Robert Durst could still be hiding:
There was nothing unusual about having a private mailbox or how Robert Durst’s packages looked from the outside, the UPS employees said. But he did have an odd habit: Durst’s iPad would travel separately from him on long journeys. He would arrive at the UPS store, put down his iPad on the counter and ask the staff to ship it to wherever in the country he was travelling.
“Always shipped overnight so it’d be there before he got there,” a staff member told the Guardian.
Bacha, the private investigator, said that shipping the iPad separately could have allowed Durst to avoid ever having to show airport security its contents. The quirk – taken together with the addresses and the aliases and the holding companies that would seem unlikely if not useless for a magnate of his stature – may instead suggest a desire to obfuscate a simple truth about Durst’s comings and goings since the reopening of the cold case into his wife’s murder.
Emily Nussbaum wrote this really thoughtful thing about Kimmy Schmidt and the depiction of rape survivors in some recent TV shows (I think the show wants to leave it deliberately ambiguous as to whether Kimmy IS a rape survivor, but I think it’s a very plausible read):
When it comes to jokes about trauma, however, the show takes more risks. Kimmy buries her P.T.S.D. attacks in a SoulCycle-like class, only to find that she has submitted to another cult. She dates a Second World War veteran, since he’s the perfect shrink: he’s too senile to remember what she tells him. In one of the show’s funniest episodes, Kimmy and Jacqueline bond over their desire to hide any sign of sadness—an “outside in” philosophy. When Kimmy is disturbed by seeing her first selfie, Jacqueline takes her to her plastic surgeon, played by a deranged Martin Short, his face perverted into gargoyle features. Dr. Grant (pronounced Franff) is fascinated by Kimmy’s appearance: “Absolutely no sun damage, but you’ve clearly experienced a tremendous amount of stress. Are you a coal miner? Submarine captain? Because you have very distinct scream lines. Where did those come from, I wonder.”
Unlocked god mode at work pic.twitter.com/fenVe6YDCg
— viney (@vineyille) March 23, 2015
I really like The Last Man on Earth.
oh guys I just typed out this whole long thing about why stairs are no longer appearing on my fitbit as an option and my elaborate troubleshooting process and then I realized it’s because I just “upgraded” to the Flex AND IT DOESN’T TRACK STAIRS MY BEST AND GREATEST ACTIVITY
