“I believe I left my shoe here, thank you.”
okay but will this mean we get more places that offer delivery, bc right now I can only get Domino’s, and only if it isn’t snowing:
Weber’s office is not in Silicon Valley. It’s not even in California. Instructure, along with over 5,000 other tech companies, is located in Utah. Specifically, it’s in a corporate park in Cottonwood Heights, a northwest neighborhood of Salt Lake City — when Coates nearly lit his staff on fire with a flamethrower, he didn’t do it amid the low-lying scrubland of Santa Clara or Palo Alto, but against the backdrop of the regal Wasatch Mountains. But sitting in a massive conference room talking about open floor plans, a war for developer talent, and the benefits of offering unlimited vacation days, it’s easy to believe Weber when he looks you in the eye and says, “Utah and San Francisco are more similar than people realize.”
Indeed, Utah — once a home home for religious pioneers, perpetually the seat of a sort of conservative wholesomeness in the popular imagination — is changing fast.
I got lost for about an hour in this strange little collection of bits of information about LA bars and clubs and restaurants and hotels in the classic Hollywood era, which has been a great starting point for research for our own John Leavitt, who would be GREAT at recommending a good gay bar for you if you found yourself in 1945 suddenly.
The oral history of RENT (it is so dorky and overwrought when I listen to it now, but this reminded me how I felt about it in the late 1990s):
Leslie Odom Jr. (actor, Hamilton): I went to my local HMV — the cast recording had just come out — and I thought I’d listen to part of the album at one of the listening stations. I put it on, and I couldn’t move — I listened to the whole thing. There wasn’t a whole lot of art that looked like me and my friends.
James: There was this Rent line you could wait in to get cheap tickets each day.
McCollum: We decided, let’s make the cheap tickets the ones for the seats in the first two rows. At first it was first-come first-served, and it was a great visual — all these young people waiting on the street.
Seller: Within a year, the lines were so long that on Friday night you’d have three lines going: one for Friday night, people starting the line for the Saturday matinee, and the other people for Saturday night.
McCollum: It became a little Lord of the Flies — some people were getting robbed on the street. So we said, let’s do a lottery instead.
my dad sent me this article:
A pilot project out of the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and the Kroschel Wildlife Center aims to replace rescue dogs with rescue wolverines in the search for those buried under the snow.
Clocking in at about the size of a standard poodle, the stocky animals are known mainly for their ferocious natures and remarkable hunting abilities – deer, caribou, and lynx are standards on the wolverine menu, and there have been reported incidents of the creatures tussling with black bears over kills. All in all, it might not sound like the furry face you want to see digging you out of a snowbank, but it’s partly the tenacious predator’s hunting skill that makes it a good candidate for rescue duty.
I am really, really excited for The Handmaid’s Tale:
Hulu has made a straight-to-series order for an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale with Moss set to star as Offred, the titular handmaid. Like the novel, the series will take place in a dystopian version of the United States known as Gilead.
Hell, I’LL take the job (I am not eligible for the job), but you won’t like it:
It’s a time-honored tradition for politicians to deny any interest in the vice presidency. But this year, with the possibility of Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, they really mean it.
“Never,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who is still running against Mr. Trump. “No chance.”
“Hahahahahahahahaha,” wrote Sally Bradshaw, a senior adviser to Jeb Bush, when asked if he would consider it.
“Scott Walker has a visceral negative reaction to Trump’s character,” said Ed Goeas, a longtime adviser to the Wisconsin governor.
Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “That’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic.”
I impulse-bought tix to Beyonce’s Toronto show in late May, having realized I was ALREADY GOING TO BE IN CANADA and have literally doubled my workouts so that my body is ready for all the jumping I need to do.
I’ve linked to stuff about Canada’s willingness to accept Vietnamese refugees during this era and the benefits it brought to all concerned, but here’s an American story:
Four days before the end of the American Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, my mother and sister were swept into a military cargo aircraft leaving from Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Along with thousands of others fleeing the country, she spent weeks in refugee camps in the Philippines and Guam before arriving in Arkansas. Eventually she reached a new home in Madison, Wisconsin, where she saw snow for the first time. She would go on to work as a material analyst and systems engineer for 34 years, and have four children who would grow up to go to college, become engineers, designers, and writers, buy cars and homes, and themselves have three children.
Today the 1.3 million immigrants from Vietnam and their 300,000 or so children, along with their culture and cuisine, are just one more inextricable strand of the American fabric. But it’s worth remembering that this wasn’t always a given. Back in the 1970s, the American public’s opposition to letting in Vietnamese refugees was even higher than today’s opposition to Syrian asylum-seekers, both in the US and in much of Europe.
oh man those poor fuckers who bothered to acquire The Knowledge, I genuinely feel for them (I was the researcher-writer for Let’s Go: London a thousand years ago, and never once took a black cab bc they were SO spendy, but also they paid me like four cents an hour, so):
Since UberX came to London, it has actually been very difficult to objectively measure its impact on the black cab trade. “The one thing I can’t answer, and which I would love to be able to answer, is to what extent have they grown the market, versus to what extent have they taken work away from the traditional sectors,” said Garrett Emmerson, who is in charge of surface transport at Transport for London. Since 2013, Emmerson pointed out, the number of taxis on the road has stayed steady, as has the number of those taking the Knowledge. (There were 892 new taxi drivers last year, compared with 760 in 2010.) But the view through the windscreen is different. Judging on the evidence of his own eyes, O’Reilly, like most black cab drivers, has come to believe that the threat of Uber is mortal. In 2015, he watched the number of people coming to his weekly introductory talk on the Knowledge drop from 60 to six. (At the end of the year, the school moved to a smaller premises around the corner). A 20-minute, two-mile trip in a black cab costs £14. An Uber will get you there for £8. “I genuinely believe their aim is to wipe us out,” O’Reilly told me, “Starve black taxis into submission and then run riot with that marketplace.”
WHOA, this guy is amazing:
The students know that he lived through World War II, that he speaks several languages. And yet he has left that history a bit vague. “He has talked about his experience in the war in Paris, and how he had to flee, but he doesn’t really get into the full details,” said Vikramaditya Joshi, 19, who pressed Dr. Rosenberg to come further out of retirement and be his adviser.
The details are worth knowing. Justus (pronounced YOO-stice) Rosenberg is thought to be the last remaining member of an extralegal team assembled by the journalist Varian Fry in 1940 to provide safe passage out of Vichy France to anti-fascist intellectuals and cultural figures fleeing the Nazis. Mr. Fry was something of a Raoul Wallenberg for artists: Two thousand men and women, including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall and André Breton, were shepherded to safety by Mr. Fry’s network.
Speaking of important, fascinating lives, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan has died, and I personally believe he is probably trying to unionize heaven right now:
In 1980, he and his brother Philip were instrumental in forming the Plowshares Movement, a loose coalition of pacifists who were often arrested for acts of civil disobedience at military bases and other sites, including a nuclear-missile facility in Pennsylvania.
Among those jailed was actor Martin Sheen, who has said, “Mother Teresa drove me back to Catholicism, but Daniel Berrigan keeps me there.”
In 1965, Cardinal Francis Spellman, a supporter of the Vietnam War, told Father Berrigan’s Jesuit superiors to get the agitator out of New York City. Berrigan was sent to South America, but seeing the conditions in the slums of Peru and Brazil made him more militant, not less. He believed that the Catholic Church too often sided with the rich, and he criticized a U.S. foreign policy that included the sale of weapons to rightist military regimes.
