Hello, things to continue to be bad beyond anyone’s belief.
Apologies for the lack of the newsletter last weekend; I was traveling and sort of remembered that it was Saturday around midday Saturday while at a gathering.
Links
Every detail about what happened in Texas is worse than the last, especially about this absolutely horrifying police response, and I’m sure you’ve seen many of the same as me. This one piece from Texas Monthly’s Christopher Hooks despairing at the leadership in Texas and the recent political emphasis on “protecting” children is quite well written.
And related in spirit to this terrible time but not in specifics, I highly recommend this short Saeed Jones reflection on peony season and its brevity.
I haven’t seen it yet (it sounds like it rules?), but this was a great review of Top Gun and the later stages of Tom Cruise’s career.
This breakdown of the anti-humanist impulses at the heart of “overpopulation” fears and certain kinds of conservation/climate efforts is great and worth checking out.
Baseball I:
Baseball II, and the general state of things:
Light book commentary
I have been reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August — she really knew how to write. Not to sound like Parker Posey in You’ve Got Mail talking about how old Julius and Ethel Rosenberg looked, but I can’t get over the fact she wrote this (extremely complex narrative) on a typewriter.
More on this book later, but though this idea vs. reality amid the catastrophic horror of WWI was interesting vis a vis how technologies get imagined (and often technology during this era was getting imagined in the reverse way, like something that would prevent war, not turbo charge it or compound the nightmare):
Here Schlieffen had envisaged a Commander in Chief who would be no Napoleon on a white horse watching the battle from a hill but a ‘modern Alexander’ who would direct it ‘from a house with roomy offices where telegraph, telephone, and wireless signalling apparatus are at hand, while a fleet of autos and motorcycles ready to depart, wait for orders.’ […] Reality marred this happy picture. The modern Alexander turned out to be Moltke who by his own admission never recovered from his harrowing experience with the Kaiser on the first night of the war. […] Nothing caused the Germans more trouble, where they were operating in hostile territory, than communications. Belgians cut telephone and telegraph wires; the powerful Eiffel Tower wireless station jammed the airwaves so that messages came through so garbled they had to be repeated three or four times before sense could be made of them. […] This was one of the ‘frictions’ the German General Staff, misled by the ease of communications in war games, had not planned for.
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.