PicoBlog

The feel-good movie of the year just might be a golf movie. “The Long Game” is coming to theaters Friday, April 12. The movie is based on a book, “Mustang Miracle,” a true story about five Mexican-American kids who caddie at a swanky local country club in 1957 and fall in love with golf. Due to racial discrimination at the time, the junior golfers — Joe Trevino, Gene Vasquez, Felipe Romero, Mario Lomas and Lupe Felan — have no place to play and only a few second-hand clubs.

Happy almost-October, loyal readers. I’m excited to announce that this month, we’ll be reading and discussing “The Instagram Account that Shattered a California High School” by Dashka Slater. It’s a big one, and important, especially if you’re a teenager, educator, or parent. Originally published in The New York Times Magazine in August, the article tells the story of a racist social media account and its repercussions on young people and their community in the Bay Area.

Sometimes when I am explaining the somewhat eclectic variety of topics I write about in my newsletter, compared to the work I did at other publications for many years, l joke that “I just ran out of ways to say the Senate shouldn’t exist.”  I say “joke,” but it’s also a fact. I was blogging this in 2010. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the Senate “works” since George Packer wrote the damning portrait of a dysfunctional institution that I reference in that old Salon piece.

Writing for the Bulwark the other day Cathy Young asked a brilliant question: what on earth happened to the Intellectual Dark Web and its critique of the left?   Go back to the 2010s, and all kinds of people, myself included, were wondering why leftists allied with the most fascistic versions of Islam, and why there was such screaming intolerance in liberal institutions.  All of a sudden we were told to accept that white people were inherently racist and that men could become women –  just by saying they were.

Hey, hey, now! Easy on the weird, right? Well, the European Middle Ages were, in many ways, a very weird period. They ate weird food. They put animals on trial. Poor fido. In Germany, they divorced by combat. You read that right. The man and woman could fight it out in a small arena to settle marital disputes. Lots of weird. As a trumpet player, I think discovering the “butt trumpet” was probably one of the most weird things I’ve encountered in reading about medieval times and practices.

The Internet is boring. We’re bored of it because it is boring. We spend so much time on it, clicking and scrolling and rotating through a perpetual cycle of our default apps and platforms because we are looking for something that we can’t find, something that should be there but isn’t. We’re looking in vain for energy. For signs of life. For a little bit of excitement and authenticity and humanity.

Welcome to the Brown History Newsletter. If you’re enjoying this labour of love, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your contribution would help pay the writers and illustrators and support this weekly publication. If you like to submit a writing piece, please send me a pitch by email at brownhistory1947@gmail.com. Check out our Shop and our Podcast. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter. In today’s increasingly sectarian climate, communities in South Asia seem more detached from one another than ever.

Sex is weird. What turns you on is probably different to what turns me on. Some people might get a charge from wearing high heels and a short skirt, others might get a sexual charge out of wearing a sharp-looking suit. I don’t think anyone should be shamed for this. People should be free to wear whatever clothes they want so long as it is within the bounds of decency.

PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Steam Deck $29.99 7 hours long The Invincible is a sci-fi adventure game where you search for your missing crew on a mysterious planet. You’ll walk and drive across deserts and cliffs, unearthing clues from abandoned bases and robot probes, all while talking to your boss on the radio. It’s based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, about humanity’s reckless quest to dominate the universe and the nature of intelligence, and adopts a period-appropriate “atompunk” aesthetic: vivid colours, chrome surfaces, ray guns, and flying saucers, everything westerners thought the future was going to be in the 50s and 60s.