Links for March 5th
How money and sanctions work, Ukraine, Ben McKenzie anti-NFT crusader, The Worst Person in the World, Ja Morant
Hello, hope you’ve had a smooth week here, within the continued grim period of international news.
Welcome to some new subscribers via friend of this newsletter, Olivia Nuzzi. Every Saturday, you can expect about five to eight links, and some light thoughts about books or movies at the end. Some weeks they’re better than others!
Links
My colleague Christopher Miller interviewed people leaving Kyiv, and this story has some unbelievably tragic anecdotes, one funny line from a Nigerian IT professional, and a very sad but metal quote at the end.
This ends in grim fashion, so you might not want to kick off your Saturday afternoon this way, but this Vanity Fair interview about what the media is getting right and wrong about Ukraine is compelling.
Matt Levine wrote a like…mentally engaging piece about what money is in a social compact. The central argument is this:
What I want to suggest is that society is good, that it is good for people (and countries) to exist in a web of relationships in which their counterparties can judge their actions and punish bad actions. If money is socially constructed and property is contingent then money is a continuing, dynamic, ever-at-risk reward for prosocial behavior.
Along those lines, if you don’t know anything like me, Joe Weisenthal & co. talked with an expert on their podcast about how sanctions work/don’t work.
Lastly, everything about Ukraine is grim, including the broader context of these photos, but nevertheless, in two nice photos: from Marcus Yam and Tim Mak.
Switching gears! Ben McKenzie (of The OC, that one) apparently had a lot of time on his hands during the pandemic, and is now a celebrity arguing celebrities don’t know what they’re doing with NFTs.
This story about Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy sounds absolutely nuts, like imagine being present for this.
If you’ve seen The Worst Person in the World, highly recommend this interview with Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve. And also this piece on the freeze-frame scene:
He compares the sequence to a number of influences: production numbers in classic Hollywood musicals, in which an ensemble all comes together to support a character; the boundary-breaking experimentation of the French New Wave; and, of course, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one of his favorite films growing up. “There’s the scene where Ferris is suddenly singing ‘Twist and Shout’ in the middle of a parade and all of Chicago starts dancing around him,” Trier tells Vulture. “When the sequence ends, you don’t ask whether this is real or not because you identify with Ferris’s playfulness.”
This local blog has the most informative technical information I’ve read about what’s going on with outdoor dining in New York and the surprisingly elaborate process of removing an abandoned setup.
Lastly in cool stuff, another Ja Morant dunk.
Light book commentary
Next week: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.
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.