Nintendo was founded the same year Van Gogh painted The Starry Night.

It’s the summer of 2010. Life is good and you’re a Cleveland Cavaliers fan, too. Someone steps out of a time machine, says they’ve traveled back from 2026, and hands you a folded slip of paper. You unfold it and read: “Trump criticizes LeBron for not standing still during national anthem.”

Sometimes obscure song lyrics just careen around forever. “A maze of bars and rented rooms remains,” “only young on surface,” and my personal favorite “alone with my thoughts, yeah alone with my cellphone.”

Cocktail, Vanilla Sky, and Digger were all Tom Cruise vehicles. That’s range.

Painting I did as a teenager

I feel bad that Digger is a flop (well relative to its massive budget; it still has grossed over $40 million) because it’s maybe the only good movie ever about climate change.

Gen-X guys¹ love to say Nirvana was the last canonical rock band, whatever that means. However, here are some of the latter-day rock acts with more monthly Spotify listeners:

• Oasis
• Coldplay
• The Goo Goo Dolls (!)
• Arctic Monkeys
• Radiohead

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1. I don’t really hold Chuck Klosterman in high regard. ↩︎

The main differences between Trump and Romney’s presidential campaigns were Trump’s greater moderation on abortion, gay rights, Medicare, and Social Security. Indeed, that’s probably why he won.

One reason I struggle to get into any modern fiction is that most major novelists now have MFAs, and so they’ve all learned the same techniques and want to dazzle you with trauma.

People lose perspective with time. For example, Obama didn’t think Ukraine was worth fighting for against Russia, didn’t support same-sex marriage his first run (and only belatedly the second time), and signed the legislation that repealed the 40-year ban on petroleum exports.

Wanna feel old? Trent Reznor is only 8 years younger than Johnny Cash was when he recorded his version of “Hurt.”

I’ve been selling on eBay to try and declutter but I can’t bring myself to sell my 90s Magic: The Gathering decks

Sometimes I can’t believe I still get to text every day about Greek and Latin lit with a woman who walked up to me sitting outside a cafe listening to Joy Division on a Discman in 2004. A friendship for the ages.

One of the most distasteful forms of 9/11 apologism from the left was that there was a legitimate grassroots beef with the U.S. being in Saudi Arabia, a country that requested said presence and otherwise would’ve been flattened in the Gulf War and/or destroyed by Iran.

People will unironically post stuff like “having ADHD means hitting someone with your car and not realizing it til a year later,” as if it’s some sort of flex about how quirky they are

Just realized that Mark Carney looks like Duck Philips from Mad Men.

Finished reading: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 📚

A tough and funny as hell novel you’ll never believe was written in the 18th century (it’s got footnotes, tons of digressions, fourth-wall breaking, and more).

Quite the paragraph here

It’s so fitting that if people know anything about Theodor Adorno, one of the most annoying and self-regarding writers ever, chances are it’s that he hated jazz in such a way that it makes you dismiss all his other ideas.

Very good chance that Donald Trump is the last U.S. politician who has unbridled public enthusiasm for AI.