Here’s What Retirement With Less Than $1 Million Looks Like in America (WSJ / Veronica Dagher and Anne Tergesen). Five retirees open up about their financial lives and how they spend their time and money.
The poop emoji: a legal history (The Verge / Sara Jeong). Amusing story about a serious problem: Emoji are used in mainstream communications. Those communications are cited in lawsuits. Judges are often confused about what they mean; they’re now taking emoji classes. And legal databases can’t manage them.
… the only rational explanation for why he bought Twitter in the first place — aside from possible market manipulation — is because he’s a pathologically divorced dweeb that became so obsessed with online popularity during the COVID-19 lockdown that it scrambled his brain.
— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, “There’s always some idiot ruining your favorite website.”
New trailer for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." Holy cow, this looks fantastic.
‘Farce of Democracy’: Tennessee Republicans Just Expelled 2 Black Democrats for a Peaceful Protest. “Republicans voted to kick Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson out of the legislature, while a vote to oust Rep. Gloria Johnson failed by one vote.” … “Asked why she was not expelled along with the other two Democrats, Johnson told CNN: ‘I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young black men.’”
Republicans are the party that supports free speech.
Republicans: The party that cares about children.
If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.. Ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods. (NYTimes / Julia Angwin).
Not covered in this article: Microtargeted ads are reportedly no more effective than contextual ads. So we’re giving up our privacy, advertisers are paying a premium, and the advertisers aren’t even making more money than they’d make if they just advertised their refrigerators against people searching Google for the word “refrigerator.”
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Dallas businessman Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The luxury trips contrast starkly with the public reputation Thomas has cultivated.
In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”
— Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica
Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas’s ignominous career. “… the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss.”
Thomas wants to ban same-sex marriage again, Cory notes. “And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair.”
Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard.
Today I learned “Fiddler on the Roof” is a smash hit in Japan.
Since 1967, the musical’s seen hundreds of Japanese revivals. Joseph Stein, who penned the book to Fiddler, was once approached by a Japanese producer who asked, “Do they understand this show in America?”
“Yes, of course,” replied Stein, “we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” the producer said, “it’s so Japanese.”
— 12 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Mental Floss / Mark Mancini)
We watched “Murder Mystery,” a 2019 comedy-mystery starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as married couple Nick and Audrey Spitz, a New York cop, and a hairdresser. On a flight to Europe for a bus-tour vacation, she strikes up a friendship with a dapper gentleman on the plane. The dapper gentleman spontaneously invites the New Yorkers to join him for a celebration on his billionaire uncle’s yacht. On the yacht, someone is murdered, and the Spitzes are the prime suspects.
It is an oddly old-fashioned movie. The gags all depend on the premise that the Spitzes are amiable lower-class shmos in a world of elegant toffs. We’re at an Agatha Christie murder mystery on a yacht, but instead of Hercule Poirot, our heroes are Oscar Madison and Laverne from Laverne & Shirley. Even the names Nick and Audrey Spitz seem to echo Nick and Nora Charles. I particularly liked the wardrobes—Sandler in baggy cargo shorts surrounded by men and women in tailored evening wear, Aniston in her outfits from Target (not Marshalls—she’s very clear on that point!).
The movie clocks in at 97 minutes, the ideal length for a movie, and ends in a lovely car chase through European streets.
You will like this movie very much if this sounds like the kind of movie you’d like. It is, and we did. 🎥
📷 My Bar Mitzvah photo. That jacket was kickin in 1974.
Well played, Switchzilla! Cisco trashed its offices and equipment as it rolled back operations in Russia, and then claimed the property damage as depreciation in its tax filings to Moscow. (The Register / Simon Sharwood)
We’ve been watching “Shadow and Bone.” I’m not into it but Julie is, so I guess I’ll give it another episode or two. jwz is really not into it, and he gave it both seasons.
… the villain in this show looked like he wandered in from a different sound stage. He looked like the kind of guy who would be trying to shut down the rec center to build a condo, not an evil wizard. Everyone else had their Tolkien costume on, and this guy just looked like some douche you’d have met at a goth club in the 90s who called himself “Vlad” and carried a wolf-head cane. Maybe there was a casting mix-up and some lawyer show ended up with a prosecutor with a giant Gandalf beard.
I’ve been thinking lately that I read too much national political news and post too much about national politics.
I may have more to say on this subject, but until then here is an excellent related article by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
Yesterday, in a lull between the release of the Barbie movie trailer and the second Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse trailer, former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned. I do not have cable because it’s 2023 and I am under the age of 55, but according to the clips that made it to Twitter, it seemed like a fun time for America’s news anchors. For instance, CNN gave us some valuable insight into how many doors and hallways the Manhattan courthouse has.
Also, None of This Garbage Is Important. Hamilton Nolan at In These Times:
NEW YORK CITY — At the criminal court in downtown Manhattan today, nothing important happened. Believe me. I was there. There were no meaningful occurrences of true consequence. Certainly nothing worthy of a claim on your limited attention. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, except that I fear that my friends and I in the media may be about to gleefully poison this nation, one more time.
One thing about New York City is that it is home to a large population of reporters, of which I am one, that will reliably turn up at any spectacle. Not out of any nefarious motives. We do this for the same reason that residents of small towns turn up at the county fair: It’s something to do.
For decades, scientific studies suggested moderate drinking was better for most people’s health than not drinking at all, and could even help them live longer.
A new analysis of more than 40 years of research has concluded that many of those studies were flawed and that the opposite is true.
— New York Times / Roni Caryn Rabin
That kind of bad news will drive a person to drink
I’m supposed to go for a blood test tomorrow morning for life insurance, but the address they gave me on the phone is one number off from the address on Apple Maps, and Apple Maps shows the clinic as permanently closed, and the operator on the phone said the name on the sign is different from the name of the clinic. So now I’m wondering whether I’m going to get my blood taken by a couple of meth-heads in back of a 7-Eleven parking lot.