PicoBlog

Herb Sundays 95:Amedeo Pace (Apple, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon). Art by Michael Cina. “I have been making these playlists at home which focus mostly on soundtracks and songs that calm me. Through them, it has been really fun and inspiring to learn about music I have never heard before. I  have always been curious about film scores and how different instruments are used to create textures and emotions. I hope you can enjoy this playlist I made.

Hey there, readers! What a frankly bizarre week of reading, eh? It’s in these chapters that Herbert’s own weirding ways came through and his own experience with hallucinogenic drug use made some obvious appearances. The scheming seemed to soar to new heights this week as well. On all sides, we’re seeing “a feint within a feint within a feint.” It’s a li… ncG1vNJzZmismJqvqrPRnpidZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe8eeqZudoqnAbsPEoqmdoZ6cerit2Kxkna2emnqmusNmpp8%3D

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I’m the thing that gets you to the thing… Thanks to the strikes, plus inevitable post-Peak TV contraction, it’s been an awfully slow spring, review-wise. This week, though, I’ve got four reviews, including an early one timed to an embargo, for next week’s belated second season of House of the Dragon. I was not hugely enthusiastic about HotD early in its first season.

The announcement of the 2024 Oscar nominations launched a million tweets about Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig’s snubs, and not nearly enough about Zac Efron’s. His performance as Kevin Von Erich in The Iron Claw was one of the most moving of the year in my opinion, and showed such a depth to his talent.  In general I’m sad to see the lack of love for The Iron Claw this awards season - what a haunting movie!

LeBron James is not only one of the greatest basketball players ever, he’s committed to being a leader in the African American community in the fight against inequality. But his Thursday Instagram meme showing three cartoon Spider-Men pointing at each other—one labeled “covid,” one labeled “flu,” one labeled “cold”—with his message: “Help me out folks” was a blow to his worthy legacy. The meme’s implication is that LeBron doesn’t understand the difference among these three illnesses, even after all the information that’s been presented in the press.

I wasn’t planning on Duneposting, but I finally saw the second film and enjoyed it a lot! More of a vibes movie than a thoughts movie to be sure, but the vibes—as the kids say—were immaculate. The fight sequences were terrific, there was a sufficient amount of Worm, and the pacing was much improved compared to the first film (though it did feel like some connective tissue was missing here and there).

Installment Three: Randy Johnson smoked that bird. Since the advent of video broadcasts, every generation of baseball gets one most indelible moving image, a clip that is replayed until it has driven a thick groove into each of our brains. The first 20 years of televised baseball produced the Willie Mays catch. The next 20 years produced the Carlton Fisk stay-fair homer. Then Kirk Gibson, limping around the bases in the World Series.

Economic history, economics, political economy, finance, & forecasting. Here to try to make you (and me) smarter in a world with many increasingly deep & complicated troubles... Over 26,000 subscribers Not at this moment...“The first economics blog, and still probably the best.” “Essential economics follow. Brad DeLong is the original econ blogger. ” “Brad DeLong is impossible to summarize in a sentence or two, which underscores why you should be reading his Substack and his new book!

In a recent post cautioning against thinking our Donald Trump problem can be solved by legal means, I wrote that the former president “will be defeated in the political arena or not at all.” But will he be defeated in the political arena? An awful lot of Democrats and quite a few anti-Trump conservatives appear to think it’s a near-certainty that he will. The sitting president has all the normal advantages of incumbency.