PicoBlog

On Wednesday, Fox Sports Radio host Colin Cowherd provided one of the most insightful commentaries on the right-wing attack on Taylor Swift imaginable. After I posted the clip on my Threads feed, a few people commented about Cowherd’s past rhetoric, though agreeing with his analysis. I’m woefully ignorant of sports commentary—I love playing and watching sports but have long felt men spend way too much brain power and emotion discussing them—and so this was my first interaction with the man.

From the time I was 10, I’ve been obsessed with what it means to grow older. I’m curious about what it means to others, of all ages, and so I invite them to take “The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.”Here, acclaimed poet and memoirist responds. -Sari BottonMaggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change.

Very quickly before we begin — I am never going to charge for my Substack, but I am really enjoying writing on here, and I feel like if I can get a couple hundred subscribers, I might be able to start doing it more regularly (also I am not employed full-time at the moment so every little bit helps). If you feel like contributing, I would really appreciate it. If not, I still appreciate you reading.

Look. I’m on vacation this week, so my brain isn’t too keen on working too hard at the moment. The best I can do is, “Aren’t these costumes neat?” With that said, I did set some criteria for myself on how to separate them. The first section will be interesting one-off costumes that popped up in main continuity (Earth-616 stuff). The second section will be costumes worn by Magneto in the main continuity that have spanned multiple comic books and series.

Hi everyone, (By the way, I’m not late, I just forgot to tell you last week that for scheduling reasons I’m moving these to Tuesday mornings. So, now you know) In the spirit of complaining about things as a way of creating a shared understanding, I thought I’d complain about a problem that I’m pretty sure many of you share: I have (at least briefly) a lot of really niche interests, and I often don’t find people to share them with, and this makes it difficult to maintain those interests for an extended period of time.

Nice post! I'm not a Maintenance Phase listener, but I have seen some online discourse about this particular episode and was googling around to see if anyone had bothered to address some of the claims from the episode that didn’t make sense to me. I hope to make some time to check out the sources you cited here. One thing I did want to point out is that I’m fairly certain that Hobbes and Gordon are actually technically correct when they say that the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to open systems like the human body (I’m saying this based off of what I half-remember from my only semester of thermodynamics, and what I’ve read on Wikipedia), in the sense that the first law is only even really *defined* for closed systems.

Dear readers, It’s official: the members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team have chosen to unionize with SEIU Local 560 by a vote of 13-2. (We can’t lie — we’re a little curious about the two holdouts.) While it might not seem like a big deal that a bunch of Ivy Leaguers have joined a union, the implications of the team’s decision could be far-reaching. The powers that be at Dartmouth have already appealed the decision to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which could be forced to decide once and for all whether college athletes ought to be considered employees of their universities.

Back in 2011, a new generation of Korean pop acts were ascendent in Japan. That was the summer of Girls’ Generation becoming inescapable, of increased K-pop concerts across the country, of “the butt dance.” It was a thrilling moment in the history of Japanese and South Korean culture blurring — and clashing — and you could see it manifest itself outside of entertainment too. The moment I knew the times were changing came via a fast food item.

After a month in the US, I’m finally back home in Buenos Aires. All the travel in recent days means I haven’t had time to write as much as I would’ve liked. So this week I’m reaching into the archive. One of the last things I did before leaving NY was to pick up a hard drive containing a few terabytes of outtakes, roughs, refs, demos, entire shows in one wav file, backups of full recording sessions, and general detritus from the cutting room floor.