Marcel Ophuls died on Saturday at age 97. He was an acclaimed filmmaker who documented the Holocaust in The Sorrow and The Pity and Hôtel Terminus.
In this NPR article on Ophuls, he addresses the subject of his famously lengthy films:
Ophuls knew that by creating hours-long documentaries, he ran the danger of “not only seeming pretentious, but being pretentious.” But, as he told NPR in 1978, “there’s a relationship between attention span and morality. I think that, if you shorten people’s attention span a great deal, you are left with only the attraction of power.”
Interesting theory, huh? I think many of us recognize that short attention spans are a huge problem, and the general public’s net capacity for focus is only more splintered today than it was when Ophuls made his observation in 1978.
Short of an electromagnetic pulse that knocks Fox News and “Apprentice” re-runs off the air and simultaneously kills the internet, freeing everyone from the sensation of fending off attacks from waves of angry geese 24/7, I don’t know how we fix it. Pity!
Open thread.
satby
That’s an interesting way to look at it! And short attention spans also feed into the demand for drastic, radical change rather than incremental progress.
BritinChicago
Does anyone know whether The Sorrow and The Pity is available on-line anywhere?
Suzanne
I don’t know how to fix it, either. I feel it a great deal in myself, and I don’t like it.
Ezra Klein — I know, I know — made one observation that I thought was fantastic, about the “attention economy” and the value in commanding it. He’s wrong about some things, but bang-on on this one.
ETA: I will say….. Microsoft Teams absolutely doesn’t help! I hate you, Teams!
satby
@BritinChicago: If you subscribe to the Libby app through your local library, you also get access to Kanopy, the online film library. And it’s available there.
NotMax
Squirrel!
:) //
Old Dan and Little Ann
Sorrow and pity. Seems like a good time to say that today I turn 50. Not quite sure what to think about this yet.
Chief Oshkosh
@NotMax: Huh?
NotMax
@Old Dan and Little Ann
Have a happy!
BritinChicago
@satby: Thanks! The Libby app is new to me, but I will investigate. I do use the library a lot, as I like free stuff (that I’ve already paid for with my tax $$, of course, but no marginal cost).
cope
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I just turned 75 a couple of weeks ago. You ain’t seen nothing yet. From about 50 to my mid 60s was a pretty good span in my case. Buck up and Happy Happy Birthday.
I actually have seen “The Sorrow and the Pity” and it was a very revelatory movie. I must admit that it took a couple of sessions to get through the whole thing though. As we said in the day, “heavy”.
Another Scott
@BritinChicago: @satby:
It seems to be on the Internet Archive as well.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
Happy Birthday! 🎂 🎉
NotMax
@BritinChicago
While the Libby app is handy for downloading books and periodicals it is not required to gain access to Kanopy, provided your local library offers that service. Same goes for the other library-based streamer, Hoopla.
Old School
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Happy Birthday!
Ohio Mom
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Happy Birthday! I hope you have fun today and a 50th year full of health, prosperity and happiness.
That’s how my grandmother signed birthday cards. As a child, I didn’t get it, health was a given to me and prosperity had little meaning, almost all of my material needs and wants were met. Okay, I understood happiness.
Now I am an oldster and know how precarious health and financial security can be and how fleeting happiness often is. I’ve grown into an appreciation of my grandmother’s choice of words.
MagdaInBlack
I agree about attention spans being an issue. I can see it in my customers, my co-workers and myself. Keep it short and to the point or we loose interest and our eyes glaze over.
On the other hand, it has always been rare for me to be able to watch a movie or documentary in one sitting. An hour is my limit, and I am always doing other things while watching/listening.
Are documentaries like his meant for one sitting?
eta: I’m with Suzanne on the teams thing: it doesn’t help my attention span that I have 5 different forms of communication coming at me to monitor while doing my regular job.
Chetan Murthy
Betty, it’s so, so true! my theory (and it is mine ;-) is that we can all practice having longer attention spans by ….. reading a book! I do it with a kIndle — in airplane mode, so no ads! — but a paper book works even better! You get no interruptions, and you learn how to spend yours uninterrupted with your thoughts and one set of ideas. And the lack of internet is a blessing!
Elizabelle
@MagdaInBlack:
They were in the theater. Although it is a famously long documentary, at that.
@Another Scott: Thank you for finding it on the Internet Archive. That place is a marvelous resource.
And: WRT attention: it does feel like we are so screwed. I am not sure what will get us out of or past this.
MagdaInBlack
@Chetan Murthy: I’ve always been a reader, preferring that to television etc, but my attention span for that has shrunk considerably too. I do not like that it has, btw. Not at all.
eta: haven’t owned a TV in 27 years. my watching, what I do of it, is on this laptop thingie.
MagdaInBlack
@Elizabelle: Question answered, thank you.
Elizabelle
@Chetan Murthy: I just ripped through David Downing’s Zoo Station this weekend. Set in 1939 Germany and surrounding countries, and what could go wrong, eh?
The opening was poignant. Set on New Year’s Eve 1938, in Danzig. The hope for a better year.
I love novels and mysteries for giving one a sense of the history and culture of the time period. A good writer will have done a fearsome amount of research. And then, we can investigate further.
All these warnings. Don’t let this happen again! But, as Not Max said: Squirrel!
cope
@MagdaInBlack: I am dealing with the same thing. I used to have at least one book going at a time. I also subscribe to three periodicals (it used to be five or six) and it really is much harder for me to focus on reading anything for as long as I used to be able to. However, by forcing myself to ditch the screens and pick up something tangible, I feel like I am getting that mojo back.
Elizabelle
@MagdaInBlack: Have to find a book that keeps your attention.
I loved, loved, loved PD James when her mystery novels came out. Waited anxiously for the next. And now: they are so slooooooow. Have more a Law & Order style attention span now.
Should pick one up and try anew. Could have just been restarting with the earliest, and she got better as she wrote more.
MagdaInBlack
@cope: I used to have at least 3 books going at one time. Now, lucky to have one I’m working thru. It seems to be cyclical tho: right now is tough to focus on much of anything, which I think is understandable considering the current…….”political situation.”
Baud
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
Happy birthday!
Baud
My attention span has always been bad, well before the Internet was a thing.
oldgold
My attention span is so short I have decided to give up throwing boomerangs.
gene108
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
You survived half a century!!! I felt like I accomplished something, when I turned 50 last.
Happy Birthday!!! 🎉🎊🎈🎂🎁🍨🥂🍾
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack:
It’s ludicrous. It makes me feel like my brain has too many tabs open.
It’s interesting how the modern workplace develops this sort of balls-in-the-air skill, and how difficult it is to truly track the status of…. almost anything.
No One of Consequence
As a child of the 70’s I saw the beginnings of a lot of things now coming to fruition. Good and Bad.
My first interactions on a computer were at school in elementary. My first access to a network was in middle school at a TAG class at a local college. My first home computer when I was 10 or 11. I got a modem and utilized Bulletin Board Systems. My internet dabbling was minimal, UseNet, etc. – but in college I saw the advent of the World Wide Web. It was like seeing the invention of the printing press.
I saw the birth and rise of Social Media. Engagement herding, dopamine, and all the ugliness, pettiness and selfishness of modern humanity laid bare. For once (at least) in my life, I smelt that evil on the way, and avoided it (nearly) entirely.
We are where we have allowed ourselves to devolve to. Sadly, I have little confidence that we will change much at all, short of a big catalyst. That catalyst being necessarily big, like a massive catastrophe or a large war. Shared suffering and sacrifice are not a part of the current American Experience, and I think some of what we are living right now is a direct result of that.
Like Lincoln said to that group of lawyers in Kansas City, no worldly power will be able to set an enemy boot on the hills of Appalachia. When America falls, it will be because we have done it to ourselves. I would posit we are also seeing plenty of evidence in our current governance.
Ignorance produces a rather small sphere of appreciation and value. Much of the world exists outside that sphere, and as such, has little value. Add to this, brought to you by mendacity and modern technology, leaders who will tell their followers what to think about what they are told. To question veracity of establish sources, to doubt the Scientific Method, Empiricism, even causality.
For decades if not longer, our philosophy has not kept pace with our technology, and given the current makeup of our society and the power brokers and leaders, is it really any wonder we are where we find ourselves?
“Well I used to be disgusted… Now I try to be amused…”
-NOoC
Chetan Murthy
@Elizabelle: Oh, I’m on #10 in the Bernie Gunther novels (all set before, after, and during the Nazi years in Germany and Argentina).
@MagdaInBlack: My attention span has dropped too. Which is why I like using a Kindle: there’s no distractions there! When I get on the bus, I take out my kindle, not my phone, and that prevents me from fidgeting, checking the internet, blogs, mail, etc, etc, over-and-over as I travel. Instead, I get solid reading time. And that works basically anywhere that I can keep the kindle up-front instead of reaching for the “connected device”.
No One of Consequence
@oldgold: golfclap. nice.
MagdaInBlack
@Chetan Murthy: For me, with reading, it isn’t so much distraction as meaning: I understand what I’m reading, I just don’t care. I don’t read much fiction. Tom Levinson’s books are things I would read, if I could care. And that’s a whole diff issue, I think, the caring part.
It’ll come back, but it sucks right now.
gene108
Attention spans are shorter, but I think another corrosive change is expecting entertainment to be an eye popping spectacle.
A movie like “12 Angry Men” or “His Girl Friday” or a TV show “Barney Miller” could not be made today, where most of the movie or show is nothing more than people in one room talking.
The length of time characters spend talking with each other in movies and TV is noticeably shorter, which has to do with shrinking attention spans, but there’s also the ability of CGI and special effects to make up for the lack of dialogue carrying a movie or TV show. This gets back to my point of people expecting more eye popping attention grabbing media experiences.
There’s a level of stimulus overload with all the media options that wasn’t there before. To stand out requires a spectacle.
Chetan Murthy
@MagdaInBlack: Oh wow, I’m sorry, and I hope that that will change. Oof. Yeah, for me, reading is a way to escape from this world. And unlike the staccato dopamine hits of fear and loathing I get from reading the Internet (or, sadly, sometimes from reading this blog), reading a book is just being transported away to another world.
gene108
@MagdaInBlack:
That’s rough. I had a similar issue the last few years, until recently.
schrodingers_cat
Binge worthy streaming content and thriving longform YT videos are counter examples to the short attention span trend. Broad brush is too broad.
MagdaInBlack
@Chetan Murthy: Yay for podcasts etc: right now I’m learning about the “Aztecs” preconquest =-)
I can listen while doing other things.
Matt McIrvin
An interesting thing: A lot of people who make YouTube videos are struggling right now, but one thing I’ve occasionally heard them say is that, counterintuitively, very long videos often get more attention than short ones. There are some who make unbelievably long deep dives… especially in the area of pop culture ephemera reviews. You’ll get things like 7-hour-long retrospectives on some Nickelodeon show for tweens.
(And often the actual visuals are just one person talking, with maybe a few clips to illustrate.)
Elizabelle
@Chetan Murthy:
Easiest form of travel out there.
And. Book readers are different from TV and sports watchers.
We can see it in our politics, no? A surfeit of college and trade school graduates who have not cracked a book since college or high school.
Sucks to be us!
I think reading is a skill that really builds empathy. You are inside different characters’ points of view, and can draw lessons from their experiences and where they fall short.
gene108
@MagdaInBlack:
YouTube link to Dr. Scott Eilers. I find his advice helpful, when I’ve been depressed.
https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=scott+eilers
MagdaInBlack
@gene108: Thank you. I have listened to him on occasion and it is helpful.
This too shall pass. Just keep swimming. yadda yadda.
I do wonder tho, how much of the lack of attention span in this country is anxiety and/or depression.
Baud
I’ll be somewhat contraian and put out there that a lot of material seems poorly edited these days, which doesn’t help with keeping my attention.
Matt McIrvin
@MagdaInBlack: My thing is getting triggered into spirals of anxiety and self-loathing by *other people’s* depression. What if they’re right? What if it’s the lack of depression that’s a liar? Etc.
I think a certain amount of empathy is necessary for this to even be a danger, so that’s something.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: AAAaahahahahahahahaahahahahahaha! [wipes tear from eye] Baud, so, so, so true! Esp. all reporting, all “columns”. The newspapers are so terrible about this! Have they no editors? [narrator: no, they don’t] At least, it seems, the better class of books still seems to have editors. But the news? That ship done sailed.
BellyCat
Just keep the B-J tab open and ditch the other four attention depriving tabs. Solved! :-)
Scout211
Short attention spans for many have always been an issue, IMHO. A long career of trying to understand the minds of my clients is my personal experience and anecdotal evidence. But what I see that has happened in the past 20 years or so is the exploitation of short attention spans by social media, media, entertainment and advertising. Add the exploitation of people’s basic need to connect with others, belong and matter, we now have a powerful propaganda machine for power and for profit.
I often wonder what the heck you are all talking about when I read the comments here. I decided decades ago not to join any social media (at the time, it was Facebook) because I saw the effect that it had on my clients and how it accentuated the drama and the food fights between friends and family members. It was a challenge to direct them back to their real world life when the online drama was so much more exciting. So when I read the comments here about this, that or the other Democrat, progressive or influencer say things that cause commenters to get upset and angry with them, I wonder if normies or near-normies even know what you are talking about. I don’t.
Rex Huppke has another great commentary this morning on USA Today that skewers the Democratic strategists who want a Democratic Joe Rogan to compete for attention on social media for Democrats. Huppke has volunteered for that position, tongue clearly in his cheek. (Read the whole thing). His conclusion, after a lot of laughs, is that oldschool may be the better option. So for him, being the liberal Joe Rogan? Nah:
I don’t know what the answers are but I do hope we start working together for the mid-terms. I worry that it will be too late.
MagdaInBlack
@Matt McIrvin: Josh Johnson had a good little comedy bit on just that.
Depressed folks tell you why they’re depressed and you think ‘You know what? They’re right.” ;-)
Baud
@Scout211:
Is he a commenter here?
Chetan Murthy
I have heard this referred-to as The Dopamine Economy. An entire segment of the ads biz (and hence, content producers) that is focused on “engagement”, and find that eliciting negative reactions, anger, fear, hate, is the way to getting that oh-so-valuable next “click”.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Depression is a medical situation. Being right or wrong has little to do with it.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: Just got into a conversation recently that reminded me that “oh, yeah, the fact that Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling recently turned her strange loathing of trans people into her whole personality and funded a destructive hate campaign against them is a thing that normal people barely know about.”
MagdaInBlack
@BellyCat: God, if I had BJ open at work, that’d be 6 things to monitor. I’m off today, thus here being chatty and whiny =-)
Baud
If y’all could make your comments a little shorter, that would be great.
Chetan Murthy
I have spent my entire career working with computers, and on the ARPAnet/Internet. In 2008 I got sent to Twitter to stand them back up when they’d fallen down. And at this point, I think a lot about a Democratic movement to create clubs at the neighborhood level in every city and town in the country. Entirely offline, and maybe connected to things like civic improvement. But with a focus on Democratic politics. I can’t see another way for us to survive as a nation. Sigh.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s why we shouldn’t be giving advice to politicians about how to appeal to normies.
pajaro
I saw The Sorrow and the Pity when it came out. I understand that dates me. I saw it one more time a few years later. It’s a great movie.
If you have seen Andor, you likely appreciated its take on the ways people cope with tyranny and occupation, and the costs of resistance. In a lot of ways, The Sorrow and the Pity deals with the same subject, except the people interviewed were, of course, real world participants in the historical events. Some of the characters are still in my head, almost 50 years later.
Chetan Murthy
@pajaro: I guess I need to watch it. Thank you for this recommendation.
tobie
What an amazing insight from Ophuls! So prescient.
One day we may understand how social media and the smart phone have rewired us. Social media played with something we were prone to already, but its rise also says something about the organization of our lives and the nature of our work. Multitasking only happens in an economy based on distraction.
Old School
@Baud:
There’s no way I could fill a three hour block of talk radio.
I could play music.
Baud
@Old School:
You’re our only hope.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: There was a psychology paper some years back that implied that clinically depressed people were better at gauging their own capability at tasks than mentally healthy people. Though it occurs to be that that may be because when you’re depressed your level of capability is very easy to predict.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve read that the clinically depressed are more accurate at all manner of real-world prediction than normies; the theory was that pessimism in real-world predictions is not adaptive (so what if you’re accurate, you’re still dead) whereas optimism can be adaptive (b/c if it’s a close shave, that extra effort by the optimist who thinks they’re gonna win out could push ’em over the top).
Suzanne
@BellyCat:
You only have four other tabs open?!
Suzanne
@Scout211:
I am “more online” than it sounds like you are, and often what I see on BJ or Xhitter has zero relationship to what I see out in the world. It’s part of what made last year very difficult.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@cope:
I’ve been taking that approach with the TCM broadcast of ‘Shoah’. At 9+ hours, it can only be done in 60 minute or so bits.
Plus, half the time it raises something I then go to the computer to look up or research.
Old School
@Baud: We’re doomed.
Belafon
@Scout211: Somehow we have to find the balance between the normies who don’t know what is actually happening, and the online world where people know so much they can spend days parsing the meaning of the word “centrist.”
KSinMA
@gene108: And also, it seems that movies lately are made for children. Upper age limit somewhere around 12.
Chetan Murthy
So, uh, re: this discussion of attention span and the death of our Republic, Brad Delong cross-posted this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/cp/164562578 entitled “The Age of Twitter is finally ending. Can Substack take its place?”
I’m no fan of Noah Smith. But I am a fan of Brad, and that is the only reason I paid this any attention. Any attention. How little of a fan of Noah am I? So little, that I didn’t watch the damn video! All I’m reporting, then, is that Delong reposted this video from Noah, on the above subject. I have a good deal of trust in Delong and his judgments.
Bupalos
I think the longer you sit with the reality of democratic decline, it comes down to 3 things all interacting with each other.
• technology mediated social destabilitztion and individual mental stunting… ie computers and the internet
• climate change
• the “natural” flow of capitalism to create ever greater inequality
Any one of these alone would be practically trivial for our civilization to overcome, 2 would be challenging. All 3 together are going to be something else entirely.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: There have been many, many times when talking to people in the real world– and I mean *liberal* people, not MAGA folk–makes me feel like a wild-eyed left-wing radical, and talking to social-media people makes me feel like a reactionary. Without any change in the opinions I was expressing.
That was particularly true about COVID precautions during the pandemic. But it’s true of a lot of other things.
I also have hypertrophic guilt that is really easily triggered by people saying something broadly condemnatory with a tone of certainty, and I became immune to the right-wing form of this a long time ago but the online left version of it is still potent.
BellyCat
Only four that I can see. The rest extend off the page in both directions and are too small to be legible. I can’t believe my phone limits me to only 500!!!
Chetan Murthy
If you feel like it, I’d be curious for examples of such opinions. B/c you seem like a level-headed guy to me. Then again, I only see you on social media, soo ……
P.S. maybe that means I’m a reactionary too? Hard to imagine that, since [elided b/c I don’t want a visit from the [elided]]
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I am wary about saying too much online about any meatspace political activity, but I have shared before that my neighborhood is 75% Dems and fairly racially mixed (new Yemeni restaurant opening up on next block, woohoo). What I see and hear from my neighbors is so, so different. I have a feeling that there are some strong generational effects — the others here who have kids around the ages of my Spawns have shared some anecdotes that ring very true.
cain
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
My wife turned 50 about two weeks ago or so. She’s looks amazing despite everything happened to her.
I’m 56, so I’m closer to 60 than 50 now. I think I’m in good shape but I need to really hit the gym. One thing, you have to do is prep for old age and my wife tells me that is a lot of cardio and leg work. If you have strong legs you can handle anything.
I think you have to start changing diet, which I still have to do.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: COVID is a good example: in real life, I was *constantly* the bad guy killing everyone’s fun by refusing to go to a restaurant while there were high virus levels circulating… while online, I felt like a plague rat because I knew people who had basically stayed isolated in one room with rare outdoor exercise breaks for five years.
MagdaInBlack
Just flipped over to Thom Hartmann and he was talking about this book:
https://stolenfocusbook.com/
Just as we are talking about that very thing: why we can’t pay attention
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Matt McIrvin:
It happens in here almost constantly on a daily basis. The cognitive dissonance on display is revealing.
cain
@No One of Consequence:
Similar here. I started on a desktop computer on a trs-80 in the 70s. I was hooked. I got into BBS’s in high school. My first digital community was science fiction/fantasy authors who I used to meet up with at science fiction convention. I was typically the only indian there. (I was weird kid even as Indian or a white kid I suppose)
I’m amazed I met my wife who is also into some same stuff and from my community as well. Just a lucky break.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: aha. OK. I’m that guy isolated in his room (haha). Just joking, I made a resolution this year to eat out at restaurants weekly. Haven’t actually fulfilled it, but at least I’m pretending to try.
I get you now.
Gloria DryGarden
@BritinChicago: Kanopy the library movies service, is a separate app. It has so many good movies. In the next count6 over, there’s a different free movies service, hoopla. Your librarian will know.
..Libby is the one for ebooks, reading and audio.
Ohio Mom
@MagdaInBlack: I could have written what you said. I am no longer much of a reader and I haven’t watched TV in a quarter of a century, though I watch plenty of short videos on this small cell screen.
Some of my drift away from reading is probably my attention span but some of it is my vision. It’s not what it used to be, what with my dry corneas and increasing far-sightedness.
A couple of years ago I spied a large print version of a memoir I’d read a review of in my. library’s new books display. I devoured it, it felt like old times, to be so engrossed in a book.
The next time I was at the library, I excitedly went to the large print section and found it was mostly best-selling novels. Ugh. Not my thing.
Chief Oshkosh
@tobie:
OK, Boomer..
ETA: /s
Chetan Murthy
For a while I wasn’t reading books b/c my eyesight is also slowly failing [“old person’s eyes”, nothing dramatic]. One nice thing about kindles is you can adjust the font size!
Also, I “side load” all my books: I never buy from AMZN, b/c I want to actually have copies of the books on my computer where I can back ’em up with everything else. On Linux side-loading is easy (KDE’s file manager supports it) and I hear that the same is true on Windows/Mac. You just plug the Kindle into your USB port, and it shows up as something you can drag-and-drop files onto.
tobie
@Matt McIrvin: I mentioned in the thread below that I recently spoke to an elderly relative who is not online. She doesn’t watch TV. But she reads newspapers daily and listens to NPR on occasion. Her summary of the malaise of our moment: not a single Republican has the courage or morality to say that the Trump admin’s corruption and lawlessness is wrong. For her what counts is that Republicans control the House and the Senate. It’s incumbent on them to put breaks on the admin when it openly accepts bribes and/or violates the Constitution. I don’t think my relative is representative of the broader electorate. But because she’s not online she doesn’t get caught in the minutiae of inner-party debates.
MagdaInBlack
@Ohio Mom: I want to be a reader. I keep trying different things I know I would be interested in if….I cared. Last phase I discovered I prefer books written by non-american born women authors. I think seeing the world through different eyes pushed me past the not caring issue.
scav
It’s not exactly that being clinically depressed or being an optimist is adaptive, one and only one is best. No more than the adventurous mice leaping off to swim in milk blindly are better adapted than the cautious mice sticking to their little island. Or Day-traders are better adapted than people with cash-stuffed socks. In specific individual instances one sort may do better than the other, but in other circs it flips and a lot of times it doesn’t really matter.
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: that’s a case where normie perspective is probably a lot healthier than what we’ve got– the online intra-left discourse treats Republicans as a kind of wild beast from which we lost any expectation of decent behavior long ago, and the discussion is just how Democrats suck such that people won’t vote for us anyway. But to an average person this is still something they don’t expect.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Ha, I see what you mean: to me, I’d view her attitude as: while laudable, she’s being naive, b/c the G(r)OPer Congresscritters clearly are in on the plot, to expect them to actually do the patriotic thing is …. hopelessly naive. Here I am, with my hair on fire.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: Or, you know, there’s the partisan thing: IRL, Democrats are just getting around to realizing that Trump really is a fascist, but in online left Discourse, the question is to what extent Biden and Harris were fascists.
marcopolo
@Scout211: I’ve seen some stuff around the edges of what I look at referencing this current dem plan to spend 10s or 100s of millions of dollars to try to create some kind of liberal/progressive podscape/social media/influencer presence in order to attract more younglings (read young men) by finding/creating/paying joe rogan style social commenters. My reaction is barf. Joe Rogan (and any of a number of like minded social media stunters) are more often than not blathering idiots. Let’s not try to grow this landscape.
I did see one person suggest that this money might be spent buying up all the defunct or failing small town paper websites/internet footprints and paying a one/two/three reporters per small town to cover local news, high school sports, etc and then layering in the more current events/political stuff amongst that other content. I think there might be more promise to that since a lot of the fuckupedness of folks infospheres is how everything under the sun has become nationalized. I think it would be good for our country if more folks payed more attention to say the situation of their local hospital under the proposed Medicaid cuts than what they are seeing on Fox or hearing on local right wing radio shows. Anyways it was an idea that caught my eye.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Also, the extent to which the online left is allied with fascists.
Chetan Murthy
Ahahahahaha, now I see what you mean about being seen as a reactionary! Me too! Me too! Ha! Too funny! [lolsob, as I think about Gaza]
Matt McIrvin
@marcopolo: It does sound like “Why don’t we have a Fox News?” All over again. We don’t have a Fox News because we’re not idiots.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: Or, you know: I was talking with my daughter about political attitudes of the youth at college, and she said she saw a lot of nostalgia for Obama, and that actually really surprised me, because I read the kind of social media where “Obama sucked actually, he was basically a Republican” is a widespread attitude, and I assumed the youths were down with that.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Different propaganda for different eras.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: You’re getting me to thinking about offline a lot, Matt. It seems like we need to find a way to create offline community in our own neighborhoods. Which would be really, really hard: the only such communities I know of are churches. And I’m a rabid atheist. Sigh.
Baud
He also pardoned a corrupt VA sheriff recently.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: Indivisible is trying, but maybe you mean not explicitly partisan/political stuff.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/02/trump-pardons-cost-liz-oyer
“Trump white-collar criminal pardons cost public $1bn, says ex-DoJ official”
I found this while searching for “trump pardons crypto fraudster”. B/c he did that too (mentioned in article).
Anyway
@Matt McIrvin: LOL I am yet again convinced that there is not an iota of overlap between the worlds that Matt and I inhabit! I can not recognize anything he says (not just in this thread but BJ comments over the years). Take that back — we are in agreement that wooden rollercoasters and TMBG are cool.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
The pardons are obscene. Also the non- prosecutions. But no one seems to care except those of us who are already staunchly opposed to him.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Well yes, I get your point. What I mean is some sort of community organization that acts locally, and has explicitly Democratic political premises/leanings/whatever. And with a broad membership in each neighborhood. The thing about Indivisible is that it’s -activists-, and just a few people. Whatever is going to work, has to achieve a decent penetration — like, 20% or something? At the level of churches, basically, but for politics.
I’m the wrong person to be even thinking about these things: I found during the pandemic that decreased in-person time with other humans yielded a dramatic drop in my depressive episodes. But I know that other humans aren’t like that, and one would think that some sort of in-person social movement could work.
Steve in the ATL
@gene108:
I look forward the Michael Bay remake of “My Dinner with Andre”
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: My Spawn and his friends love Obama. About the same age as your daughter, I think. Like I said…. some generational effects.
Old School
Via Washington Post:
Easiest million dollars I’ve ever saved.
(It’s related to a Bitcoin conference.)
Elizabelle
Turning the conversation a little bit, and I have not seen The Sorrow and the Pity:
But I believe it existed to point out that the French were not necessarily a nation full of brave resisters. That most of them went along with the surrender to Germany, and the Vichy government? Is that the case?
Because I know that many had to make that point in Germany in the 1950s: Hey, you were not all as blind as you pretend. You know what went on.
There is a reason General Eisenhower was so intent on having what was found at the concentration and extermination camps filmed. He knew there would be too many who would not want to believe that those atrocities had occurred. He was very wise there.
Which brings me to Joe Biden, pointing out that democracy (actually its, counterpart fascism) was on the ballot in 2024. And the majority of Americans did not get that, or give a fuck. They could not be bothered.
The Sorrow might be very, very timely.
Steve in the ATL
@Elizabelle:
Same thing thing that will solve all of our problems: AI
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Obama was President when they were kids and they imprinted on him as a wise authority figure, at an age when you can do that with even a terrible President– except they were lucky because he was actually pretty good. (The first Presidents I remember were Nixon and Ford!)
Elizabelle
@Old School: The corruption is off the charts.
And it interests me that the WaPost and even the Vichy Times have been pointing that out, in understandable headlines.
The cool kids might be realizing that purveying Kool Aid has very real dangers, and is coming back to haunt them.
(And fuck the FTF NY Times again for trying to tell us that Trump is “normalizing” corruption. He has a lot of help from them, no? Disgusting paper.)
Chetan Murthy
@Elizabelle: I remember my French History grad student friends in the dorm in Paris where I lived for 2yr during my postdoc, telling me that the reason de Gaulle is reckoned such a great Frenchman, is that he managed the magic trick of turning France from a loser, into a victor, in WWII. I say this, as someone who loves France and French culture, loves the French language. Loves the French language. Loves it. Ah well.
schrodingers_cat
Has anyone seen Brachiator? I haven’t seen his name in a while. I hope he is okay.
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: My neighborhood has some great local organizing, non-religious. It can be done!
Of all places, it grew out of the local neighborhood Facebook page, which (of course) devolved into political fights and racist bullshit.
Elizabelle
@Chetan Murthy: I have William Shirer’s book on The Fall of the Third Republic. It is a doorstop, with relatively small print. Have not attempted it yet.
Curious about that, though.
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: There was a powerful antisemitic French right who basically liked what Hitler was selling. The MAGAts of the age.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: on a related note, I had french fries earlier today.
Being a Europhile, I of course ate them with mayo rather than ketchup.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Idunno. I was ten in 1975, and my memory of Tricky Dick is as …. well, Tricky Dick. A real asshole. I was 20 in 1985, and sure, I didn’t like RaYgUn, but I know that lots of people of my generation thought he was Great! Great! Just Great! My theory (and it is mine *grin*) is that it’s about whether the President presides over a time the kids can think is good for the country (or them, which to a kid is the same thing really).
So I would expect that most kids wouldn’t view Trump as a nostalgia figure, 10yr from now. But maybe I’m wrong, idunno.
Kristine
Just wanted to say that MomSense’s featured photo is just beautiful. So peaceful.
Elizabelle
@Matt McIrvin: Yes indeed. And the US did not do much for the Jews, because we had some rampant antisemitism and isolationism on our own shores. We could have stepped up and saved a lot more people.
chemiclord
No shit… I remember when people scoffed at movies longer than 2 hours, saying that few people had the sort of patience to sit through something longer than that.
Social media has ruin… oh. That was in 1980.
Humans have NEVER had particularly good attention span. Like most everything, the only thing advancement is done is exploit who we always have been.
What can we do about it? Fuck all, unless we have some way to change human nature. At some point, we need to accept that this is who we are as a species, rather than what we want us to be.
Trollhattan
@Steve in the ATL:
I need that elevator pitch. Will there be robots?
Am also recalling the Seinfeld episode where Jerry got in trouble being spotted while making out in the theater with his GF during Schindler’s List.
Steve in the ATL
@Elizabelle:
as did the British aristocracy. But we were honored enough to US Senator Prescott Bush funding Hitler, including while we at war with him. The Bush Crime Family has deep roots.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I think a not-small amount of it is vibes, too. None of us like it, but those things affect people. Every election since the first time you voted for Student Body President has been a popularity contest and there is no evidence that that has changed.
I recognize that this contrasts with the old-people image of all young people being obnoxious pro -Palestine sit-inners vandalizing their college campuses, but tsk tsking about young people being not deferential enough to their elders is another time-honored tradition.
Trollhattan
@chemiclord: Seems true while the counterpoint has to be all the fvcking comic book movies that all seem to run 150 or more minutes to accommodate the half-hour penultimate battle scene.
Now that The Brutalist showed up on streaming I had to spread that sucker across two evenings. My attention, she could not be spanned.
Chetan Murthy
@Elizabelle: I haven’t read his book, but have read Robert Gellately’s _Backing Hitler_, E.A. Johnson’s _What We Knew_, Goetz Aly’s _Hitler’s Beneficiaries_. Maybe some others I’m forgetting about right now.
A work of fiction I started and couldn’t finish (but I need to try again) (b/c too much agita) was _The Passenger_ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(Boschwitz_novel) ). It was written in 1938 by a jewish German who fled Nazi Germany, got to Australia, was interned as an enemy alien. It was accepted for publication and all. But circumstances changed, he was reclassified as an OK guy, put on a troop transport back to Europe, and (sigh) the ship got sunk. So he died. The book sat in obscurity until 2021 when it was finally published.
It’s about an assimilated jewish German (Christian wife) and starts the day after Kristallnacht. He is the “passenger” in the title — traveling all over Nazi Germany trying to escape the Nazis trying to catch him (and put him in a concentration camp “for his own safety”). I don’t know how it ends, b/c I had to stop — again, too much agita.
But I think I need to read it, just as I need to watch _The Sorrow and the Pity_. Forewarned is forearmed.
Steve in the ATL
@Trollhattan: robots and cryptocurrency!
Chetan Murthy
@Steve in the ATL: AAAAAAhahahahaha! I remember a Danish friend and I would go to this resto at the bottom of the Rue Mouffetard for sunday lunch; I’d almost invariably get steak frites, and I’d use up a (small) bottle of ketchup on the frites. *grin* Good times.
Matt McIrvin
@Anyway: Part of it is that I have associations with a bunch of old GenX online weirdos who I follow for non-poltical reasons, and for whatever reason they tend to be into some intense super-lefty politics so I get sucked into that. (Others went full MAGA and I ended up abandoning them entirely.)
The other is an attempt to (over) compensate for some kind of toxic centrist tendencies I had during the Clinton-Bush years, which probably takes me to bad places.
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne:
Which used to be a really stupid thing, but now somehow is quite important!
Suzanne
@Trollhattan: I watched the first half of The Brutalist, and fell asleep. (Case in point.) I was enjoying it…. But there hadn’t been any Brutalist architecture up to that point! I still need to go back and finish it….. do they get to the Brutalism?
Bill Arnold
You’re wishing for a Myake event, allegedly a superflare (solar) that causes a geomagnetic storm that would knock back technological civilization a few decades.
Been having fun with the current solar maximum.
Suzanne
@Steve in the ATL:
LOL. There are times I want to ask people, “Do you even hear yourself?!“.
Young people get an excuse: they’ve never been old before.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: I was about 5 when Watergate was breaking and I don’t know how I got the idea that the President was ipso facto a good guy, because my parents certainly didn’t think so, but I did. I had no idea why people were picking on him.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Probably my first memory of TV, is watching John Dean testify. Googling, I see that that was 1973 (age eight).
Miss Bianca
Y’all are making me laugh about the attention span thing. I just finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a reread I hadn’t assayed since high school. It took me the better part of a month, where back in my high school days it might have taken a week or less!
But it was published serially, originally, as eight novellas rather than one big novel, so maybe the Victorian attention span didn’t have as stringent demands on it as we might think!
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: I haven’t seen it, but they seem to think Bauhaus is Brutalist.
zhena gogolia
@Miss Bianca: I’m in the middle of the miniseries, and boy is it a yawner. It perks up when Rufus Sewell or Robert Hardy is on screen.
ETA: I have read the book several times — about to start again.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: I KNOW!!! Everything I’ve seen so far is Breuer-ish.
I’m here for the concrete, y’all.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:…I suspect Millennials may also be more prone to the revolutionary-nihilist form of left politics than Gen Z.
chemiclord
@Trollhattan:
Oh sure. People ALWAYS have the energy, when they actually want to. Even now.
Getting humans to want to has ALWAYS been the rub.
Elizabelle
@Chetan Murthy: Some excellent suggestions. Had not heard of The Passenger. Wow.
Also, cannot just point at Europe. We had Jim Crow and busing and all that ugliness. It just went underground and showed up again sporting a red hat.
Sympathy for the Confederates and states’ rights. Playing out today.
Doc Sardonic
@Steve in the ATL: There are many of our elites in the 30’s and early 40’s that should have been tried and convicted of treason and sent over to Nuremberg and hung with their Nazi friends. However even back then, we must look forward not backwards was the mantra, America has been making that mistake since the 1860’s.
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: Yes. Charles Dickens and all his serials. And. You had to have leisure time to get through those hundreds of thousands of words.
Trollhattan
@Suzanne:
I can’t recall the expression ever being used, but he does get a commission and applies the principles in the design.
Found it a hard watch because it’s emotionally exhausting. Lots of awful people do a lot of awful things from start to finish. He earns that Oscar to be sure.
BellyCat
This. The sooner Dems realize what Cole realized with this here short-attention-span blog (wait, he was a Republican then!) the better off we might be.
BellyCat
This. The sooner Dems realize what Cole realized with this here short-attention-span blog (wait, he was a Republican then!) the better off we might be.
Chetan Murthy
@Elizabelle: You’re right about Jim Crow; the reason I look to Europe (and -specifically- the Nazis) is to understand how things might progress/worsen. Only for that. For sure, I know that our country needs to look to nobody else for models of inhumanity. I am reminded that the Nazis took inspiration from us: https://www.history.com/articles/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: The American mythology of WWII also ended up being that the Germans easily conquered France because they were effeminate wimps, not, you know, because a lot of them were Nazis. Which feeds into American right delusions.
Geminid
@Chetan Murthy: Charles de Gaulle’s second contribution to France was the Presidential system of the Fifth Republic. People complain about it plenty, but the Fifth Republic has been more stable than the one preceding, and political stability can have value in itself.
JML
Just found about https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/peter-david-death-cause-hulk-b2757683.html the legendary Peter David passing away this weekend. 68 is far too young. Very funny writer of the Hulk, Supergirl, Star Trek, and many many others primarily in comics but also many novels about varying things; before his health woes began to dominate his life he was also a prolific blogger. I enjoyed his work greatly.
Sigh.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: I think it’s interesting and a little puzzling that once the US was at war, our racist South became as enthusiastically anti-Nazi as anyone and did things like fly Confederate battle flags while invading Europe. Of course one of the things that drove the civil-rights movement later was the contradiction inherent in that.
Steve in the ATL
@zhena gogolia:
book recommendation: From Bauhaus to Our House by an obscure author who went to some little known college in rural Virginia.
NutmegAgain
I just watched it yesterday, due to all the commentary in obits. Super interesting. Coming before Shoah, it’s interesting to see the film making choices. Or it could just be that both directors are French. I doubt I’m not the only one who wanted to smack that smug German in the face. The one who was frequently on screen, saying shit like Alsace is really German, and that he knew nothing about the camp horrors. Yeah, I’ll just bet–pull the other one. Evidently there was a good bit of fallout at the time from this. That smoky-glasses aristo who joined the “Champagne SS” because he didn’t like the socialists et all in the Maquis. Another smug bastard, but apparently he paid dearly for his right-wingery. I’ve no idea who coined the expression, but it’s said that the French military always turns and runs, but they always have a terrific Resistance. Maybe b/c I’m older, the way films like this one bring WWII into the present is fascinating. I started high school not that long after this film was released, and I really have to wonder how much if all it touched the ’68-ers. A cousin went to HS in Paris, and she’s older than I am. I’m going to ask her how much this registered, and how. I know that in Germany, the ’68-ers were all about uncovering the sins and horrors of their parents & grandparents. Roughly speaking ’45-’65 there was a lot of under-the-rug-sweeping in Germany. I have the sense that there was a lot of myth making & contouring narratives regarding who did what during the occupation in France. Similarly in the Netherlands. I know that this movie really punctured a lot of bubbles.
NutmegAgain
@BritinChicago: You likely have a few options now, but I streamed it on Youtube for $3.99. Seemed to also be available on Apple TV for the same price. Related, I’ve been able to stream Shoah through Amazon Prime.
WaterGirl
@BellyCat: You were missing a Y in your nym so it went into moderation. I see that you fixed that and posted it again.
Timill
@schrodingers_cat: Last comment I can find is almost a year ago (6/08) on thread Late Night Open Thread: Dolly Parton Remains A National Treasure
suzanne
@Steve in the ATL: LOL. It’s a classic.
It’s also got a yellow spine, which means it is sitting to my left on my rainbow-arranged bookshelf.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne:
@Trollhattan: But does he get a commission to do a Brutalist building? Bauhaus does not equal Brutalist. I haven’t seen any visuals from the film that suggest Brutalism, but I can’t sit through it myself to find out!
Geminid
I realized how much my attention span has diminished when I ran across Hassan I. Hassan’s New Lines Magazine. It features great, in depth reporting on a wide range of topics: Druid society in the Orkney Islands, the role of cassettes in 1970s Egyptian pop music, Malcolm X’s life before he converted to Islam, organized crime in Malmo, Sweden, Lebanon’s civil war and the belief in reincarnation among its Druze population, to name just a few.
I used to lap that kind of stuff up, but now it’s hard work to read it. Instead I spend my time on news aggregation sites now, fixating on Middle East news on an hourly basis.
Chetan Murthy
@NutmegAgain: I have read that the reason it took until ’68 (and really, the 80s) to get going on uncovering the truth of what the Nazis did, is that the kids had to wait until Uncle Klaus had finally shuffled-off. Milton Mayer’s _They Thought They Were Free_ really effectively makes the point that the generation that lived or grew up in the Nazi years viewed them as the best years of their lives, and remained of that conviction ever afterwards. I think opinion surveys of Germans found this to be the case also.
I’m reminded of the movie Nasty Girl ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nasty_Girl ) about Anna Rosmus and her struggle to uncover the truth of what was done to Jewish people in and around Passau during the war. She eventually fled to the US. Sigh. I think about her and what she must be thinking these days.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: By the midway point in the movie, he’s done a Modernist private library in the U.S. The backstory is that he studied at the Bauhaus. But that’s only up to something like 1948-ish? So I am hoping that the Brutalism just hasn’t happened yet.
satby
@Timill: Wow, on a thread with Steeplejack and Ozark Hillbilly too. 😢
NutmegAgain
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, I’ve heard that people waited until their perpetrator family died. And the immediate post war generation was confronted with a country devastated by war, pretty much of their own making. Finding food & adequate shelter was a preoccupation for a great many folks. But ’68 was also a moment of sea change among youth all over. In the US we had the summer of love (actually ’67), and much of the opposition to the war in Viet Nam started to seriously bubble up, and there were a series of anti war marches on Washington (post MLK,Jr).
Chetan Murthy
@NutmegAgain: I’ve also read that the US miniseries on The Holocaust had a big role to play in galvanizing youth to find out WTF happened.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: most Trump fans are gonna be MAGA til they die no matter what happens. The question is just whether we can make any progress on the margins.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t think you meant this, but ….. a natural corollary of your (well-taken) point is that American Hegemony is done for. And with it, the exhorbitant privilege that makes us so wealthy as a nation.
And nations on the decline rarely react well to that decline. Sigh.
Gloria DryGarden
@gene108: and yet, josh johnson is well watched on YouTube and other video platforms. He’s low key, doesn’t try hard, or push, or act like a shorty demagogue. Just presence, and spot on truths woven through his stand up comedy.
not an attention grabber. But so good.
he’s also well written, and doesn’t go on too long.
sab
@Steve in the ATL: I laughed out loud, then told it to my husband. He had never heard of My Dinner With Andre. Sigh.
sab
@Old School: Another one of those conferences where no one tips and they come into town with one spare clean shirt and leave with the same clean shirt still packed in their bag?
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: American *hegemony* probably is done for– we won’t be the colossus bestride the whole world–if we come out of this in any way intact we’ll have to figure out how to be a decent society without being the hegemon. The British have had a rough time of it but could have been worse, all told.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: I haven’t seen a comment from him in months.
sab
@Miss Bianca: Lord of the Rings was published as a trilogy because it was too long for a book in 1960s.
Gloria DryGarden
@Chetan Murthy: on French: are you on blue sky? About half the geography feed there is in French. There’s one guy who posts a lot, a series of numbered comments on a topic. Really fascinating content. And a chance for you to swim in so much French language world events and human/ land studies. Just an example:
Geography in French, cars and suburban life
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Chetan Murthy: I think that too. Solves the loneliness problem as well.
jowriter
@Kristine: She had a couple others posted last week. All of them are just beautiful.
Miss Bianca
@zhena gogolia: btw, probably too late to catch you in real time – but do you have a favorite English translation of War and Peace? Now that I’m done with Middlemarch, one of my dear friends is urging me to try that one!
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: I am interested in that answer too, re War and Peace. And then I hope the translation will be on the Internet Archive.
For another classic on the 2-year reading list: I have heard that The Count of Monte Cristo translation by Robin Buss (Penguin Classics) is the one to get.
The translation makes such a difference on how much of the original meaning you can catch.
sab
@Elizabelle: The version of Count of Monte Cristo that I was reading is boring beyond belief. I couldn’t get more than a third of the way through and I almost always finish books. I hope yours is better.
It came highly recommended, and I am “like what?”
Miss Bianca
@sab:
@Elizabelle:
It’s really hard to find an unabridged translation of Count of Monte Cristo – at least, in the past, I have found it to be so. Maybe there’s a reason for that! >:>
sab
@Miss Bianca: Version I read spent lots and lots of pages on his lots of time in prison. Important to the story and the author’s point, but prison time is really boring from a narrative standpoint. The point of prison is that it is boring.
No One of Consequence
@cain: Lucky man, indeed. One might imagine you lied to your peers/parents about discussions of matters during the early dating. They want to know all about her, but how can you convey the amount of sheer respect you have for someone who can discuss the nuances of THAC0 AND can wear a bikini?
It has been an interesting span of time, no?
-NOoC
Elizabelle
@sab: Yeah. So far “Count” has stopped me in my tracks too. Which translation??
I wonder how many jackals honestly ever finished Moby Dick?
Miss Bianca
@Elizabelle: Err…me?
(I loved Moby Dick. Not sure I have enough time left on this earth for a re-read, tho’!)
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: Good for you.
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
Me too.
Elizabelle
@No One of Consequence: You had a really good comment at #30. (Found it again by searching for “mendacity.”)
Entertaining ourselves to death. Escape from freedom — looking too much to influencers and the dreaded religious leaders, and not thinking all that much, until one has to.
I wonder if climate change will serve up something big? Dog save us if we hit another pandemic with this crew of fools in office. We managed two world wars in the last century … “shared suffering and sacrifice” got forced upon the Allies and the Axis countries. It does not look like the wealthy learned a damn thing from that, and how uncontrollable some forces are once you let them loose on the world …
Elizabelle
@Baud: Yay you too. And you were claiming a poor attention span, upthread.
sab
@Elizabelle: I never even started Moby Dick. A couple of weeks ago the Metropolitan Opera did it, and our Ohio announcer said ” You can really save a lot of time just by listening to the opera version.”
I liked the opera version, but who was that soprano character?
sab
@Miss Bianca:
@Baud:
Hmm. I have liked other Melville books. And the Opera was probably a serious spoiler.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: I finished Moby Dick when I read it ten years ago.
It wasn’t easy. By the time Ishmael and the Pequod were two years into their voyage, I felt like I’d been on that goddam for two years myself.
sab
@Geminid: A classmate of mine in college borrowed my Oxford Annotated Bible to write his Moby Dick papers. Then he never returned my bible.
That made me wary of the book.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Sounds like a direct to video Steven Seagal flick.
//
TerryC
@Chetan Murthy: You’re getting me to thinking about offline a lot, Matt. It seems like we need to find a way to create offline community in our own neighborhoods. Which would be really, really hard: the only such communities I know of are churches. And I’m a rabid atheist. Sigh.