Links for March 26th
Ukraine, a man hired to do nothing, Marvel trading cards, Kirsten Dunst, Hannah Arendt, George Washington
Well, what a week.
As Cher put it:
Links
As Clinton Yates put it on Twitter, a perfect Sunday read here about a man in Japan who is hired to do nothing.
These as-told-to interviews with four women who left Ukraine will really take your breath away, and have all kinds of interesting insights beyond some of the real darkness.
Utah governor Spencer Cox vetoed a trans sports bill this week, and his letter about why is quite sincere and worth everyone’s time on a complex situation.
This is cool about the history of some ‘90s Marvel trading cards and how they got made:
Spider-Man, the everyman character of the Marvel Universe, was a good baseline. In the sets, Spidey usually had a strength level of four, superhuman; Daredevil topped out at peak human, or two, and Hulk was the strongest that there was, at seven.
Also enjoyed this quick analysis of Kirsten Dunst’s award season style, where no look really resembles another, but they’re all of her style.
Nice Story Alert: NYT talked to six people who made job changes (out of necessity or desire) during the pandemic that they’re satisfied with, and how that’s going for them.
Stuff to look at:
a. This clip from Donahue must be viewed by anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter.
b. Frank Thorp at NBC has a huge, old time, large-format camera he brings down to the Hill and with this camera, he captured a great shot of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s father. (Frank also a good Instagram follow if you’re into people doing film experiments.)
Light book commentary
First, because of the events in Russia and Ukraine, people have been talking reading The Origins of Totalitarianism again lately (my take: It’s a very dark, dense book, you can read it some other, less dark, dense time). But I was tweeting a little about this the other night, and you may also find this observation quite striking from Louis Menand’s The Free World, which devotes an entire chapter to Arendt, and puts her in conversation a bit with Orwell and Sartre:
Nazism arose in two countries, Germany and Austria, that had produced some of the preeminent achievements of Western civilization, not only in philosophy, literature, and the arts, but also in scholarship and scientific research — in Wissenschaft. Many people commented on the paradox; it was intimately real for Arendt. She had started out, in the city in which Kant spent his entire life, as a lover of poetry, philosophy, and theology; she had been a favored student of the most eminent philosophers in Europe and the author of a book on Augustine. Then, at the age of 35, she found herself living on charity in two furnished rooms in a nation whose culture she did not know or care for and whose language she could barely speak. And she was lucky. Less than 12 months before, she had been confined in a concentration camp with thousands of people who would be deported and gassed en masse. Most of those people were Germans, and it was mostly Germans who killed them. By the time she was finishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, Königsberg was no more; it had become the Soviet city Kaliningrad. When Arendt wrote that the whole of Western culture “has come topping down over our heads,” she meant it literally. Hers was one of the heads.
Second, to end on something a little lighter, a great line from a story about George Washington.
So, one of the things with Washington — whose physical presence and demeanor seems to have just blown people away, man, woman, American, European alike — is he very rarely cursed (or gambled or looked sloppy). Cut to Gen. Charles Lee retreating without engaging the British during the American Revolution. Once Washington ascertains the nature of the retreat, he just explodes and starts laying into Lee (“you damned poltroon”), who keeps repeating a bewildered “Sir? Sir?” In Chernow’s book, he goes onto describe Lafayette’s #concerned description of what took place (“so novel and unexpected from a man whose discretion, humanity, decorum,” etc.).
But first he quotes this amazing line:
Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee ‘till the leaves shook on the tree,’ recalled General Scott. ‘Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since.”
Charming! Delightful!
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.