So, Errol Morris made a new documentary called Separated, about the Trump administration's border policy when he was president. Here's the trailer:
The film is in the can, ready to show. But NBC, who bought it a few months ago, has decided not to show it prior to the election. I hate to link to Bloomberg, but here's Jason Bailey's excellent Opinion piece on how holding it is a disservice to voters:
Having seen Separated, I can confirm that, yes, it would absolutely ruffle Trump’s feathers. Through archival footage, first-hand accounts from government officials and damning interagency emails, the film provides a detailed, meticulous history of where his family separation policy came from and how his extremist Republican administration implemented it. Trump certainly comes off poorly.
News Minimalist uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. Significance is estimated based on eight factors:
scale: how many people the event affected;
magnitude: how big was the effect;
novelty: how unexpected or unique was the event;
immediacy: how close in time is the event;
actionability: how likely it is that a reader can act on the news for personal benefit;
positivity: how positive is the event — used to fix media negativity bias;
probability: how likely it is that events speculated in the news will actually occur;
Road to the Sea is a travel / nomad / sailing blog by a literal couple who've been on the road or water since 2011.
We have been full time land-based nomads since 2011. We became nomads separately at different times and in different places. In 2015, thanks to close friends, we met on the road, fell in love, and have been traveling together since. We have been all over the United States, parts of Canada, up to Alaska, over to Hawaii, and as far south as the tip of Baja. After eight years we decided to expand our travels and took to the sea. With no experience or knowledge about sailing, or boats in general, we were starting from scratch. We knew only two things when this all began; the style of sailboat we wanted, and that we wanted to sail.
I've always loved to watch people do their thing when they are expert at their jobs, especially if it's handwork. Though I am not at all skilled with anything artistic with my hands (painting, drawing, sculpting, etc.), I have always been dextrous in my manual labor jobs. For instance, I can check the quality of a vinyl record — something I sell for a living — with unreasonable speed. Within a few seconds, and mostly by touch, I can identify the provenance of the majority of records I handle — their era, the country of origin of the pressing, the flatness and condition of the vinyl, etc. It's one aspect of my work that I still enjoy after almost two decades.
When I lived in Vanuatu in 2019 and 2020, I witnessed two Ni-Vans (natives of the country) do astonishing things with machetes: prior to my arrival, a parcel of land neighbouring the one I was to manage, changed hands, and the purchaser needed to clear it of vines, thick overgrowth, and hundreds of trees. The new owner, a New Zealander, hired a team of men with a backhoe. After a month, barely anything was cleared. The machinery was too cumbersome for the dense forest, and the men, who were more experienced with cement, sand, and steel, were humiliated by the organic material that had thrived there for decades.
When asked how my employer had handled the job on their land, they answered that they had hired Jackson, a local man with a machete. When the new tenant did likewise, the majority of it was completed in a fortnight. I arrived midway through and it was astonishing to see. What is it the Marines say? "One man, one army"? I also witnessed Jackson spearfish from a kayak using only the light of a crescent moon.
The second expert with a machete was a worker on "my" property: Marie. We needed a tall, Y-shaped crutch to prop something up. She grabbed her blade, hopped a chest-high fence in one motion, and disappeared into the forest. In just a few minutes, she reappeared with a nine foot tree about 4 inches around. Carrying both the tree and the machete, she again hopped the fence. While covering the ground between the fence and myself, she chopped the extraneous branches from the trunk, leaving only the two forked limbs we required. A few more swings and the bottom was carved into a perfect spear to stab into the ground. In her real life, Marie is a 44-year old housekeeper:
The wonderful Marie Bo. You can see some of the dense forest on the left.
I think of these things because I've spent some of today watching this video: 15 Jobs That Take a Lifetime to Master, which features some wonderful handwork. It's 3 hours long but each job's segment is only 10 to 15 minutes and they're unrelated, so you can watch in chunks and skip around if one doesn't interest you.
Donna Kalil has plunged into canals in the dead of night, straddled two-hundred-pound serpents, and been bitten more times than she can count—all in the name of killing a thing she loves and playing a game she can’t win.
Fantastic piece in Garden & Gun on Donna Kalil, a professional, full-time Python hunter. Don't like to read? Here's a short video. But you should read the article. How could you not with a pull-quote like the one above.
Being a big walker, I listen to a lot of audio — mostly Podcasts and Audiobooks and occasionally music. One of my favorite podcasts is one that I never hear anyone else ever mention: Everything Is Stories.
They describe themselves as "an ongoing survey of personal histories. Each episode is a first person narrative from someone who has lived through consequential changes to their notion of self and the world... Sometimes these stories explore the philosophy of outsiders. But most importantly, these stories examine what it is to be human...We don’t record to defend or demonstrate an idea. Rather, we create a document of what was seen and felt during their transformative experiences."
Episodes are released sporadically and, with the exception of being top shelf quality and first person narration, the stories have little in common with one another. The current story, The Disorientation of Survival, is a multi-part piece about a gay fraudster growing up in the era of AIDS.
A good starter episode might be Reviled and Maligned: "Peter Stefan, owner of Graham Putnam & Mahoney funeral parlor in Worcester, Mass., found himself thrust into the national spotlight in the spring of 2013 amid a damning controversy. With implications that still linger to this day, Stefan and his team faced the question of where to draw the line on who deserves a burial. EVERYTHING IS STORIES explores the morality behind such decision-making and how one man—during a time of universal anger, fear and sadness—stood up for what he thought was right."
The part they're keeping hidden in that description is that Stefan and his team were burdened with the task of burying one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Here's the trailer:
Or what about this episode from last season:
"Charles Farrell could be labeled a number of things: pianist, writer, boxing manager, and hustler. As a teenager, Farrell lived in the streets of Boston, playing piano in mafia-owned clubs. With a love for boxing, he started gambling on high-profile matches while also managing fighters. He fixed an array of professional fights by using code-talk with trainers, foolproof matchmaking, and buying referees and judges. In this story, the highs and lows of gangster culture are explored as Charles Farrell describes the ease of taking advantage of society’s vulnerable parts."
Everything Is Stories is, of course, available for free wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen online.
As a sidenote, EIS is now funded by Oscilloscope, which was founded by Adam Yauch (Beastie Boys' MCA) and David Fenkel. Yauch died of cancer in 2012. That same year, Fenkel left Oscilloscope to co-found the wonderful distro, A24.
Of all things, The Pudding does a wonderful breakdown of the Canadian board game, Crokinole. Many of my Canadian readers will already know the game, but it's not very popular outside of southern Ontario. That link describes the rules and references this semi-final World Championship match.
Hearing Things is a new worker-owned music site with a roster of founders that have worked at Pitchfork, The Fader, Vibe, Spin, Gawker, and Jezebel.
I stopped reading music journalism altogether in 2003 when Pitchfork gave my favorite album that year, Bobby Birdman's Born Free Forever, a terrible review. Obviously I know "different strokes for different folks," but I still remember the eye-roll I did while reading it and it was sorta just the final straw for me on seeking the opinions of "experts". However, I know a lot of people do like reading music sites, and I've been happy with some of the other sites that are the creations of "supergroups" of ex-employees of other sites, most notably 404 Media, which hits it out of the park daily.
I wish Hearing Things luck! And here's that Bobby Birdman album:
