🎵 Music lately:
- Drown by Mk.gee
- Peg by Steely Dan
- Kiss From A Rose by Seal
- Mad by Solange ft. Lil Wayne
- Chilombo Medley by Jhene Aiko
- Nasty by Janet Jackson
I’ll be real, the Seal song is silly. For a Batman movie?? It shouldn’t work, but it does, and it’s phenomenal.
🌇 I have never been to Baltimore, but being a fan of The Wire has given me an unearned confidence in my knowledge about the city. Goodwill Hunting does the same for the city of Boston, I think— or at least Southie. Does this resonate with anyone? Any other shows or movies that do this?
💬 Some GK Chesterton for today:
“This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. The second principle is this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common… In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves…it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it. It is a mystical adventure; it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves.”
🎥 Watched: You Can See Everything
A lot to say about this film. It is as smart as people are saying and deserves its flowers. Yet, like most of Nathan Fielder’s work (and I realize I am in the vast minority here), this project fails to find a home with me. He is a master of his craft. I respect it. Yet, his work uses styles of subversion (and I normally love subversion) that don’t tickle me like it seems to tickle most. It is so meta-modern, like a person explaining the mechanics of Penn and Teller explaining magic tricks. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, it just buries the possibility of magic. It is pulling back the curtains to reveal… more curtains. I prefer to find the wizard— or at least the conman. The notion that this type of discovery is impossible is demonstrably false, and a bit too nihilistic for my palate.
The more I think about it, the more I am certain that my feelings about the movie, Fielder, and Elizabeth Holmes are almost entirely summed up by one line from Kendrick Lamar:
“Why believe you? You never gave us nothin' to believe in."
🎥 Watched: The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
A sweet, sweet film. Imperfect, sure, but simple and endearing. The ending is a 10/10. I left inspired and moved, which is well worth the price of admission. But be warned, I am biased. If there is anything I love, it’s a thief and a pro-analog message.
“I’ve spent my life in other people’s pockets. Everyone thinks their time was the one. What matters is what you did with it. But who’s to know? You don’t. You gotta chalk some things up to luck."
🏃 It’s marathon day in NYC (always a positive energy).
A friend of mine is running and introduced me to Rally, an app that lets friends and family record a voice message of encouragement that plays at mile markers. So sweet— has to be the coolest, most thoughtful app I’ve seen in a long time.
My favorite photo from this month ❤️
💬 From Julia Cameron:
“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.”
✏️ New Word Learned:
Morganatic: of, relating to, or being a marriage between a member of a royal or noble family and a person of inferior rank in which the rank of the inferior partner remains unchanged and the children of the marriage do not succeed to the titles, fiefs, or entailed property of the parent of higher rank
✍️ How I Humanise My Writing To Keep From Being Flagged As AI // bradley-andrews.com
👀 Shhh! I just left the R&D dept. at Never Bored (a totally real and not fictitious company) with an early prototype of an upcoming product. The anti-phone case:
Made with the coarsest industrial-grade sandpaper, the anti-phone case is hostile design turned on the owner. Placing the phone on surfaces and next to other items of importance shows you irl what phones are already doing mentally and socially: wearing us down little by little. Repeated engagement will even sand off your fingerprints, erasing your personal identity.
Don’t call it an invention— it’s an intervention! Stay tuned.
🤸🏻♂️ Operation Hopscotch has been wildly successful. Just the beginning…
💬 A quote from Faulkner:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Wish I had this one when I wrote my (909) piece.
🖍️ Sketch Notes from recent b-school class:
“When in a turnaround situation, the past is almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is the future and creating enough urgency for change.”
“When people are in crisis, they need to think fast; but it’s difficult to think fast and long-term."
“Speed, in a broken company, is a function of leadership and cash."
“If you don’t know your cash flows, you don’t know your business.”
“One benefit of not knowing the industry is that you can ask anything.”
“The numbers never tell the whole story— in fact, the numbers only tell the numbers.”
🎵 Remi Wolf’s latest album is shattering me. What a vulnerable project. The entire thing is on repeat, but here are some key tracks:
Not as experimental and textured as her old stuff, with a lot of country influence, but feels sincere and real.
For intellectual purposes only, I swear.
💬 This, from Rebecca Solnit, resonates deeply:
“I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.”
✏️ New Term Learned:
Skunk Works: a small, semi-autonomous group of people given high freedom and minimal bureaucracy within a larger organization to research, design, and rapidly build innovative or classified products
✏️ Did you know the word algorithm comes from two Greek words? Algos, meaning pain (as in analgesic), and arithmos, meaning number (as in arithmetic). Literally, pain-numbers. 🤯
I made that up, actually. It comes from 9th-century Arabic. But I think it’s believable, and that feels telling.