Watched: Room 999. This revisiting of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary Room 666 is often interesting and sometimes fascinating. (It must be said that not all filmmakers are especially articulate about what they do — this is evident in the original film as well.) Perhaps the comment that strikes me most forcibly is when Audrey Diwan wonders what will happen to her children’s sense of narrative when all the stories they experience are less than a minute long. And this is something to be concerned about. Many of the most important things in our lives develop over years; will people be capable of reckoning wisely with their experience if the only stories they know reach a resolution in 60 seconds? 🍿
I wrote a lengthy, passionate evisceration of everything about that disgraceful exhibition — by which I mean both the anti-football and the anti-entertainment surrounding it — and then deleted it. There are things one has to write that one does not have to post. ⚽️
In fact, I’m reconsidering my footy fandom. Eight-five minutes in and anyone showing up now will have missed absolutely nothing. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
Update: Extra time and I am extra done. I don’t care any more. Time to watch a guitar repair video or some such.
A good many of the people who have become soccer fans in the last few weeks are probably reconsidering right about now. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
When I follow a link to X or another social network, I inevitably see people slinging abuse at one another in the comments, and think: You’re still doing this? After all these years? I left Twitter a decade ago to escape all the sniping. I guess the people still doing it must like it. I can’t even.
Hard to think of a cooler nickname in all of history than the Finnish farmer-turned-sniper known as the White Death.
Why Am I Left-Handed? | Natalie Wolchover:
Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operating machinery. That aside, overall, I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes.
But our difference hasn’t always been welcome. My 91-year-old Texan grandmother remembers starting out left-handed … before being forced to switch, a common practice in much of the world until about the 1970s.
I too was pressed to use my right hand to write, though if my memories are accurate I was originally wrote and drew with either hand, indiscriminately. But it’s noteworthy that all the things that people notice (writing, throwing, swinging a baseball bat, shooting a basketball) I do right-handed, but the things they don’t notice (combing my hair, brushing my teeth, shooting pool, drawing a bow) I do left-handed. I am not, strictly speaking, ambidextrous, because the things I do one way I can’t do the other: handling a bow and arrow right-handed is extremely awkward for me, as is throwing lefty. In any case, Wolchover’s essay wonderfully explores the difficult question its title asks.
My hope for the World Cup final: that it also ends 6-4, with four goals for Messi and goals by six different Spaniards. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
Dear Me, England - by Ian Leslie:
To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”
The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.
About five years ago I stopped using Overcast as my podcast player because it would not play more than one show at a time. I could set up a queue, but it would not play the queue. (Many users were complaining about this at the time.) I just downloaded it again to give it a try and… It will only play one show at a time. (Many users are still complaining about this.) I really don’t want to use Apple Podcasts because it defaults to promoting crappy shows it likes rather than just letting me see my own library… but I may be stuck with it.