Links for February 27th

Trump's restaurant, problematic faves, the Dodgers, WandaVision, the Laughing Cow

Hope you had a smooth week. Check out that melting snow and those clear skies.

Links

Check out these interviews with the people who are vaccinating others. It’s a real joy!

If you missed this somehow, this Washingtonian piece on how servers at the Trump hotel were instructed to serve him (and others!) is A+. There was a manual!

You may or may not recall a Tumblr called Your Fave Is Problematic, which reviewed old, bad behavior from celebrities — if nothing else the concept (“problematic fave”) certainly carried beyond the initial iteration. Anyway, the formerly anonymous person behind it explains herself and some of her regrets about her approach.

Casey Newton wrote about there suddenly being competition in the social network market again and why that might be. (Personally, I think Clubhouse is just a sign that people miss social interactions where you unexpectedly overhear conversations.)

Check out pictures of this sweet music library.

Here is a video of Dodgers doing goofy tricks while catching baseballs.

And once again, I have to tell you, if you’re watching WandaVision (the only thing I really want to talk about), highly recommend Alan Sepinwall’s latest recap, which fills in all the actual comics backstory and critically looks at how they show has reworked that to the better whole. He doesn’t, however, mention that this latest (brutal, deep) episode offered the one unintentionally hilarious thing this show has done: have telekinetic Elizabeth Olsen drive to fake New Jersey in a sensible Buick sedan. This James Poniewozik piece on the TV history aspect is also a highlight.

What a weird, sad, great show. The knock on Marvel is always that the villains aren’t good, except in this case when the villain is grief!!!

Light book commentary

I finished Alex Ross’s Wagnerism, which is one of those books — it’s 650 pages — that if the synopsis sounds like your kind of book, then it probably is, and if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t. (It’s my kind of book; I really liked it.) Anyway, if nothing else, I learned this bizarre history of Laughing Cow Cheese, previously only notable to me because my father really liked that brand:

Trucks bringing fresh meat to troops at the front were stamped with an image of a laughing cow, devised by the illustrator Benjamin Rabier. The insignia was dubbed ‘La Wachkyrie’ — ‘La vache qui rit,’ or ‘The cow who laughs.’ The name ridiculed the German habit of giving Wagnerian dimensions to military actions — as in Stassen’s picture of Valkyries carrying German soldiers to Valhalla, or Wilhelm Trübner’s 1914 lithograph of the Kaiser surrounded by Valkyries on the battlefield. ‘La Wachkyrie’ inspired a fox-trot of the same title and a brand of cheese that remains popular today.

Thank you from the cow who laughs.

A note on all this

Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.