Links for May 9
Smoking, Ted Turner, baby names, prediction markets, Machado de Assis
Hope you had a smooth week.
Links
I saw this headline the other day and, without reading, was like now people are smoking cigarettes again? But turns out, it’s a good, vibey little piece about the long arc of technology, human interaction, and health in the background of a not great period.
Speaking of societal vibes and the arc of the country, this tribute to Ted Turner and things missing from the equation right now is very good.
(Thanks to him for TCM, Cartoon Network, and baseball being aired nationwide. In terms of peak wild Ted Turner behavior, here’s this.)
Best data set of the year every year: the Social Security baby names data. It’s endlessly interesting to me the way that people can settle on certain sounds and names collectively, and that we all kind of know there’s some different perception between the names Henry, Waylon, and Brooks (all popular, all good). How do we all settle on this kind of perception, through some mysterious, undefinable agreement? The state data is also always interesting.
In terms of people injecting themselves with stuff from the internet: pretty bracing story here about people experimenting with a drug to help them detox.
In terms of the prediction markets and some clear issues with them: a. Nobody’s winning much of anything on the markets unless they’re pretty sophisticated. And here’s some indication (albeit not on record) that people on political campaigns are betting off the internal polling.
In terms of the vibes: a great moody photo of Chicago, cool illustration of a church in Mumbai, and a beautiful house upstate.
Light book commentary
I’ll dive a little more into it closer to its release, perhaps, but I did finish Memorial de Ayres, which is out in August. Machado de Assis was a real master of pacing, like unbelievable master of pacing; this is a story about a widower just writing journal entries about an older couple he knows and a young widow, and it just strings you along inching the plot along ever so smoothly. That’s true across the other two more well-known books of his I’ve read, especially the Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which inverts the action (the affair takes place at the outset) to create a realization as time moves along. Memorial de Ayres was his last novel, written after his wife’s death, and in sort of wistful, melancholy ways returns to some themes in those other books, about time, loneliness, the benefit and pain to others of romance, and people who, looking back, wonder what the point of certain decisions and their lives really were — without being dark or grim or any of this. Even with the darker concerns, there’s a light in the writing.
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.