Links for January 29th
The wildest story I've read in a while, John McNaughton, pickleball, Macbeth, Parallel Mothers
Hello, it’s snowed since this photo was taken. I’m fairly heads down on some work at the moment, so the links remain a little limited and strange.
Links
This story about a butterfly sanctuary on the border is truly wild. It also includes one of the ultimate bystander experiences I’ve read, which begins thusly:
Bob Axford, a Canadian man who said he is snowbirding in Texas for the winter, was standing in the parking lot as the scene played out and confirmed many of the details provided by Treviño-Wright and her son. Axford told BuzzFeed News he did not know any of the people involved in the altercation and had never been to the National Butterfly Center before Friday; he’d just dropped by to confirm its location and grab a map of the property ahead of a planned visit with a friend.
What a day for Bob!
The Deseret News profiled John McNaughton, the MAGA painter, and the second half of this piece really gets interesting, delving into exactly how ironic or not this is.
This is an interesting little interview with the non-Nike, non-Under-Armour maker of the turtlenecks that Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers were wearing last weekend, and how they built their business (a special order for Kobe Bryant!).
Max Read wrote a very sharp piece about the extreme promotions the gambling sportsbooks are running when they enter a new state (i.e. he made $3000 for free). Also features this footnote, which made me laugh:
I wanted to tell my friends (the ones who live in New York, at any rate) about what is, essentially, free money, but it's a bit hard to text people about sportsbook promotions without sounding like you'd clicked the wrong link in some unknown DM and lost control of your text messages. "I made about $3k this weekend for free," I texted one group chat. It had been bubbling with conversation a minute beforehand; suddenly, it fell silent. "If you deposit $3000 at Caesars, you get $3,300 in free money to bet," I tried, aware I sounded like a robot. "Are u spamming us," someone replied.
New York mag profiled the main pickleball evangelist, who’s trying to turn it into big business.
Light book commentary
Very light, but monthly movie report: The Tragedy of Macbeth a. features an excellent Denzel Washington performance, b. is like shockingly cool to look at and striking in black and white; the entire film looks like a 1930s modernist experiment; c. …is still Shakespeare, which means I spent a good deal of the film struggling to understand what all non-Denzel actors were saying and realizing I kind of forgot the plot of Macbeth other than the inverse trajectories of the leads (she’s into murder, he isn’t, she feels regret, he doesn’t, everyone goes crazy and dies). But you’re hearing from someone here who took the bare minimum Shakespeare requirements for my English major.
If you like Almodóvar, Parallel Mothers is another banger, in which, as ever, a sad melodrama with a strange sexual quirk turns out to really be about something else, in this case how Spain handles the memory of the Civil War. Penelope Cruz is fantastic, and the final shot of the movie really brings it all together, in a big emotional jolt — kind of like, very different movie, but the last scene of The Green Knight.
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.