Seen / read / heard 2019
Or read the best things of 2019
— January
— February
— March
— April
— May
— June
— July
— August
— September
— October
— November
— December
— All caps, bold: MOVIE
— All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* or ONLINE VIDEO* or TV*
— All caps, Italics: ART / LIVE EVENT / THEATRE
— Italics, bold: Book or Short Story
— Quotation marks: “Audio”
— Italics: Article ^^
December 2019 #
31/12 — ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
30/12 — STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
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30/12 — Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away
The night before the election, for example, the BBC’s ‘serious’ channel, Radio4, broadcast a montage of moments in the election aimed to make the point that all the protagonists had misled voters in different ways. Those who cut this clip together were very careful to ‘balance’ their coverage, criticising each party equally. No doubt they are dedicated to what they see as impartiality.
But once you understand that the key Conservative campaign message was ‘don’t trust politics, get it out of the way’, while Labour’s was ‘trust politics to transform your life’, you can see this for what it was: an advert for Boris Johnson. This message was the main theme of most coverage of the election, and it pointed directly to the Tory slogan: ‘get Brexit done’.
25/12 — DESTROYER
25/12 — JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM
25/12 — THE REPORT
25/12 — MR ROBOT - series 4* ( < 26/11)
24/12 — THE IRISHMAN
24/12 — GET SANTA
08/12 — VICE
07/12 — THE LOUDEST VOICE* ( < 01/12)
05/12 — THE FAMILY SECRET*
04/12 — A PRIVATE WAR
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02/12 — WHY BILLIONAIRES WON’T SAVE US*
01/12 — ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD
November 2019 #
24/11 — THE UGLY TRUTH OF FAST FASHION*
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24/11 — NON-STOP
“Their goal was to frame Marks, thus ruining the reputation of the Air Marshals Service. Bowen wants revenge for the service not preventing the death of his father during 9/11 and, as a result, believes that “security is the country’s biggest lie” and its exposure is inevitable and necessary to get it addressed.“
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24/11 — “Cautionary Tales Ep 3 – LaLa Land: Galileo’s Warning”
Bad design, bad typography, tightly coupled + complication and caused by the protective systems put in place to avoid the situation
24/11 — THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY* ( < 17/11)
24/11 — Why Don’t Elevators Allow You To Toggle Whether They Stop At A Floor?
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23/11 — ADL INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP AWARD PRESENTED TO SACHA BARON COHEN AT NEVER IS NOW 2019*
17/11 — GUILT* ( < 10/11)
15/11 — THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS
15/11 — “#151 Thank You for Noticing”
13/11 — “Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness - 99pi”
12/11 — AMERICAN PSYCHO
11/11 — SPINNING MAN
11/11 — “The world’s most profitable company”
09/11 — “BROKEN: Jeffrey Epstein” podcast ( < 06/09)
08/11 — THE GUILTY
08/11 — BEYOND BREXIT, CORBYN AND JOHNSON: STOKE’S POLITICS OF HOPE | ANYWHERE BUT WESTMINSTER*
( < 07/11) — SILICON VALLEY - SEASON 6*
07/11 — GOODFELLAS
( < 06/11) — “The Missing Cryptoqueen”
05/11 — KNIGHT AND DAY
( < 04/11) — “The Grenfell Tower Inquiry — Phase 1 reports ep 109 - 113”
04/11 — “Adam Buxton EP.107 — Guz Khan” ( < 01/11)
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01/11 — SUCCESSION - SEASON 2* ( < 28/10)
October 2019 #
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29/10 — THE PERMANENT WAY at The Vaults, Waterloo
“If competition shows that the best companies to run Britain’s privatised railways are state-owned railways from other countries, what does that say about the justification of privatisation? And what does it say about what privatisation has done to Britain? How did we get to the point where this country’s railways, power stations and postal service were ready to be taken over by foreign versions of British organisations that our own government, claiming patriotism, systematically took to pieces?”
“The magic dust of the market was of little use to the bosses of the newly privatised Railtrack in the mid-1990s. They thought they could sack people with impunity – not just signalling and maintenance staff but expert engineers and researchers – and carry out a massive line-upgrade cheaply with the most advanced new technology. Unfortunately, the people who could have told them that the new technology didn’t exist were the people they had sacked. As a result, the company went bust in 2002, and had to be renationalised.”
Sale of the century: the privatisation scam
Train firms backtrack over pledge to ban raw sewage on railway lines
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29/10 — “How the Bristol bus boycott changed UK civil rights”
“A half a truth is a whole lie”
( < 27/10) — Milkman by Anna Burns
27/10 — Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe ( < 04/10)
26/10 — MOTHER!
26/10 — THE SOUVENIR
25/10 — GANGSTER NO. 1
25/10 — “Psychobros - Still Processing”
( < 20/10) — SPOTLIGHT ON THE TROUBLES: A SECRET HISTORY*
19/10 — SHAUN THE SHEEP: FARMAGEDDON
19/10 — Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev ( < 29/09)
( < 18/10) — “EP.104 - Chris Morris 1” & “EP.105 - Chris Morris 2”
16/10 — “Peace Lines”
16/10 — “Seriously… Presents The Puppet Master” ( < 15/10)
15/10 — THE DROP
14/10 — BETTING ON ZERO
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14/10 — “Shreds: Murder in the dock” ( < 04/10)
‘Oval Four’ could be cleared after 47 years in wake of corrupt officer case
13/10 — GODLESS* ( < 08/10)
( < 13/10) — “Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation”
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12/10 — THE DAY SHALL COME
Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI ‘entrapment’ questioned
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11/10 — EL CAMINO
“I had four kids, I took any job I could get,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year. “Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end, I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.”
10/10 — GONE GIRL
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07/10 — CHRIS MORRIS ON SATIRE IN THE TRUMP ERA AND HIS NEW FILM ‘THE DAY SHALL COME’*
“What do you do next?”
“I just keep my eyes and ears open. I don’t know. I could go backwards in time, I could go forwards. I’m looking at the coup in Iran in 1953, I have an abiding interest in that but I just don’t know. I really don’t know. I may just put a lot of effort into a tweet.”
06/10 — OLAFUR ELIASSON: THE DESIGN OF ART*
04/10 — The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion ( < 18/09)
01/10 — ON THE BASIS OF SEX
September 2019 #
30/09 — THE WIFE
29/09 — HEREDITARY
28/09 — GATSBY
27/09 — INCEPTION
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27/09 — “#24 Jimmy and Mark - Heavyweight”
Where some 10 year olds cycle for 3 days and 240 miles without any adults
22/09 — OLAFUR ELIASSON - IN REAL LIFE
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17/09 — The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Geesen ( < 07/09)
“Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible - and most eccentric - pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or hard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva - which happens to be incompatible with playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.”
17/09 — “363: Invisible Women”
17/09 — BLADE RUNNER 2049
16/09 — THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT at The Ed Sullivan Theatre, NYC
14/09 — PHOTOVILLE
11/09 — GOOD TIME
( < 09/09) — MINDHUNTER - series 2*
07/09 — IN BRUGES
07/09 — MINDHUNTER - series 1* ( < 17/08)
06/09 — HAVE YOU HEARD GEORGE’S PODCAST?
05/09 — “#FreedMeekMill” - Today Explained
04/09 — THE HARD WORK OF BEING LAZY*
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03/09 — “Ten Sessions” - This American Life
Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD … [is] all laid out in advance, and the same for everyone– what you’ll do in the first session, and the second, and the third, and so on. Each session is based on learning a skill and practising that skill on a worksheet. You go over each element of the trauma, piece by piece, and try to see it differently. The goal is to change the story you’ve been telling yourself about what happened.
“There’s a surge of women seeking help right now. A national sexual assault hotline saw a 200% increase over normal volume after the Kavanaugh hearing. There was a 20% increase in calls after the R Kelly doc aired. After the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar calls to the same hotline increased by 46%.”
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02/09 — “13 Minutes to the Moon” ( < 03/08)
“Here’s some 26-year-old kid, who could stop the lunar mission.”
01/09 — HELENE SCHJERFBECK
August 2019 #
30/08 — The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead ( < 20/08)
27/08 — UP
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26/08 — The Most Beautiful Icicle
Twenty years after the Apollo 11 mission, Janet and Neil separated. Neil became as inconsolable and indecisive in life as he had once been ambitious and single-minded. Letters and invitations went unopened. There was nothing his former wife felt she could do to help.
Once an astronaut had been measured, he was expected to stay exactly the same shape from his fitting until the moon mission he was assigned to, which might be many months later. Sixty-five body measurements were made and idiosyncrasies taken into account – Armstrong’s left arm was two inches longer than his right. Three suits were made for each astronaut – one for the real thing, another for practice, a third as a spare in case the first needed to be replaced. More A7L suits were made for back-up teams for each Apollo mission: overall, two hundred suits were made, each costing $200,000 – or about $1.5 million in today’s dollars.
The seamstresses of the International Latex Corporation were extraordinary, as Nicholas de Monchaux explains in his 2011 book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. ‘The most valued seamstresses were those like Roberta Pilkenton, who could sew together the outer Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment’s 17 concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of seams, without a single tool except her own guiding fingers.’ The first suits submitted to Nasa, in 1967, were rejected – not because they didn’t work but because International Latex hadn’t supplied the technical documentation that explained exactly how each suit was made. For Nasa, one thing that definitely constituted a problem was ‘non-conformance’ with set procedures or standards. But if there was no plan for a suit, how could it conform? Nasa carried on rejecting the suits into 1968. Eventually an agreement was arrived at but, as de Monchaux explains, it was something of a fudge. The process of sewing the final suit ‘was so dependent on the individual craftsmanship of [International Latex’s] employees that attempts to enumerate precisely the procedures used were inherently impossible. As a seamstress later reflected, “No two people sew alike.”’ There were never any issues with the spacesuits themselves.
The day after Armstrong took his photograph of Aldrin, Nixon had a meeting with his advisers in the Oval Office – among them his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who noted what was said in his diaries. The president wanted to reimpose a ban on New York Times reporters entering the White House – the paper hadn’t given him enough praise for his role in the Apollo programme. ‘Need now to establish the mystique of the presidency,’ Haldeman reports Nixon as saying. ‘All led up to his idea of using “GO” as the theme, much impressed by astronauts last night. Means all systems ready, never be indecisive, get going, take risks, be exciting. Must use the great power of the office to do something. Boldness. Now is the time to Go.’ The president was evidently much taken by Apollo 11, but there was another thing he wanted to talk about at the meeting: ‘Also, wants to set up and activate “dirty tricks”,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. Under the cover of the moon landing, which he had described as bringing about the ‘the greatest week in the history of the world’, Nixon set about the sequence of events that would lead to his undoing five years later.
22/08 — “1984 (the BOOK not the year)”
20/08 — KILL BILL (Vols 1. & 2) ( < 18/08)
( < 17/08) — Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith
17/08 — Making America White Again by Toni Morrison
17/08 — Art Spiegelman: golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism
16/08 — My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite ( < 13/08)
14/08 — LADY BIRD
13/08 — STREET ART TOUR AND CRAFT BEER
12/08 — FAHRENHEIT 11/9
04/08 — SULLY
03/08 — RESERVOIR DOGS
July 2019 #
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( < 30/07) — No Such Thing as a Free Gift by Linsey McGoey
“Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire (Part I) — Bill Gates and Western Media”
“Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire (Part II) — Bill Gates in Africa”
( < 29/07) — “The Songs That Make Us Cry” via Wilson
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( < 28/07) — “The Report”
“There is still so much confusion about the (Mueller) Report. What it says, who it implicates, and what it means for our country. At Lawfare, we are distilling the report into a multi-part audio narrative series, telling you the story of what is in this document, the story Mueller wants you to understand.”
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27/07 — THE GREAT HACK*
The Great Hack: the film that goes behind the scenes of the Facebook data scandal
“This was a military contractor that got into the business of election management. That alone is so unsettling. Everyone got so fixated on the Facebook data… The story is about so much more than misappropriated Facebook data. In fact, that’s the least troublesome part of the grand narrative that The Great Hack puts forward.”
“People have completely misunderstood the scandal as being about privacy,” says Naik, “when it’s actually about power.”
Cambridge Analytica’s ruthless bid to sway the vote in Nigeria
Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who spoke to the Observer, called it “post-colonial blowback”.
“The west found a way of firehosing disinformation into weak and vulnerable democracies. And now this has been turned back on us. This really is about our chickens coming home to roost.”
Another said: “Everything the company did after the Mercers got involved was about refining a set of techniques that they would go on to use in the US elections. These campaigns in other countries were experiments. They worked out how to harvest data and weaponise it. And they got steadily better at it.”
AP: Trump 2020 working with ex-Cambridge Analytica staffers
“Reporter Shows The Links Between The Men Behind Brexit And The Trump Campaign”
27/07 — APOLLO 11
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26/07 — BIG LITTLE LIES (season 2)* ( < 15/06)
‘Big Little Lies’ Season 2 Turmoil: Inside Andrea Arnold’s Loss of Creative Control
26/07 — “Jane Mayer On The Case Of Al Franken”
( < 24/07) — The Power by Naomi AldermanDITCHED24/07 — Women & Power by Mary Beard ( < 21/07)
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21/07 — In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne ( < 23/06)
20/07 — “S5, Ep1 How to Fail: Nigel Slater”
19/07 — THE GUILTY
15/07 — “Stop and search is discriminatory, so why is it on the rise?
13/07 — GET OUT
10/07 — BLACK MIRROR - SEASON 5 * ( < 07/07)
07/07 — THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS 2
06/07 — “Episode 77: Frugality Fables and the Poor-Shaming Grift of Financial Advice Journalism”
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( < 05/07) — Hired by James Bloodworth
“‘The difference … between the man with money and the man without is simply this,’ the downtrodden novelist Edward Reardon declared in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, ‘the one thinks, “How shall I use my life?” and the other, “How shall I keep myself alive?”’
Rail worker killed by train was fatigued and on zero-hours contract
03/07 — ”S5, Ep2 How To Fail: FLEABAG IS BACK“
02/07 — ”In The Dark: S2 E15: Revelations“
June 2019 #
29/06 — WHEN THEY SEE US ( < 28/06)
25/06 — ”The rise and fall of R. Kelly“
24/06 — LOKI’S HISTORY OF SCOTTISH HIP-HOP*
24/06 — YEARS AND YEARS* ( < ?)
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24/06 — ”In The Dark: Episode 14: The Decision“
Clarence Thomas’s Astonishing Opinion on a Racist Mississippi Prosecutor
23/06 — MINDING THE GAP
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23/06 — Natives by Akala ( < 26/05)
"Which brings us on to the two most obvious things that connect the teenage killers of London and Glasgow to those of Liverpool and Durham. They are almost always poor and they are almost always men. What is it about masculinity in our society that makes young men from entirely different ethnic backgrounds and geographic regions often react to the challenges of being poor with such territorial displays of violence?”
“Not a single slave ship survives.”
22/06 — BRAZIL
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15/06 — Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy ( < 01/06)
“The problem was that the government was at once contractor and client.”
“The mind refuses to believe that the worst that could happen has happened”
A Chernobyl man and a Kyivan meet in heaven. “What brought you here?” asks the Kyivan. “Radiation,” answers the Chernobyl man. “And what about you?” “Information,” responds the Kyivan.
12/06 — “Last Days of August” ( < 04/06)
11/06 — CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
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09/06 — CHERNOBYL* ( < 31/05)
INSIDE THE CLEAN-UP OF CHERNOBYL, THE WORLD’S WORST NUCLEAR DISASTER (HBO)*
“Plenty of Fantasy in HBO’s ‘Chernobyl,’ but the Truth Is Real”
“‘Chernobyl’ on HBO: The Truth About Biorobots, the Joker, and "Egg Baskets”“
”What HBO’s “Chernobyl” Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong“
08/06 — Before, and After, the Jogger
07/06 — VALKYRIE
06/06 — LORENA* ( < 03/06)
01/06 — DOROTHEA TANNING
May 2019 #
( < 30/05) — Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
29/05 — THE KING OF COMEDY
28/05 — ”Have You Heard George’s Podcast?“ ( < 19/05)
27/05 — WILDLIFE
26/05 — The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai ( < 06/05)
26/05 — THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
21/05 — HOW TO UNDERSTAND OUR TIMES: FINDING PURPOSE IN AN AGE OF SELFISHNESS
( < 20/05) — ”Working“ by Robert A. Caro
19/05 — AMERICAN MADE
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19/05 — AirPods Are a Tragedy
“Why did we make technology that will live for 18 months, die, and never rot?”
“But now, AirPods have normalized the idea that anyone can demonstrate expendable wealth to the world. If you’re “courageous” enough to invest in a pair of AirPods, there’s a sense that losing them is not a big deal.”
18/05 — A STAR IS BORN
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17/05 — SALOME at Greenwich Theatre
Everyone SHOUTS. Gold telephone trollies slowly across the stage. Balloons. Panting. Daniel Radcliffe wanks.
17/05 — ”How To Fail: Phoebe Waller-Bridge“
16/05 — ”How to Fail: James O’Brien“
14/05 — PATHS OF GLORY
06/05 — HALF NELSON
05/05 — DEADPOOL 2
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Hector Berlioz
05/05 — Washington Black by Esi Edugyan ( < 21/04)
05/05 — ANTONY GORMLEY - ‘ANOTHER TIME’
04/05 — KINGSMAN 2
04/05 — THE EQUALIZER 2
03/05 — CREED 2
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01/05 — STOP MAKING SENSE
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01/05 — “We Don’t Say That”
Where, in France, the word for ghostwriter is their version of the N-word
”… the word used to describe black people during slavery. Like, it’s funny; like, France is really proud of the fact that slavery was illegal in France, but if you cross the Atlantic and landed in the New World, places like Haiti or Guadalupe - which is where Nelly’s family is from - or Louisiana, that’s where France enslaved black people, in its colonies. They were the n*. So n* came to mean ghostwriter because a n* is the person who’s doing all this work and not receiving any of the benefits of that labor.“
April 2019 #
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28/04 — FIRST REFORMED
The man who says nothing always seems more intelligent. Why couldn’t I just keep silent?
How easily they talk about prayer, those who have never really prayed.
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28/04 —
STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION at The Design Museum“A victim of our own success” -
27/04 — US
27/04 — “The Runaways”
26/04 — THE DOUBLE
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26/04 — “The Secret Lives of Colour”
Purple: There is a famous story in which Emperor Nero attended a recital and spotted a woman wearing Tyrian purple. She belonged to the wrong class, so he ordered her removed from the room, whipped, and her lands confiscated because he saw her clothes as an act of usurping his power.
Blue/pink: If you go back a century and a half … Blue was viewed as a feminine color because of its association with the Virgin Mary while pink was seen as a lighter shade of red, and viewed as a more masculine colour.
21/04 — MUD
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21/04 — The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner ( < 15/04)
“Rachel Kushner Reads “Stanville””
Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind
“Every age has had its hopes,” William Morris wrote in 1885, “hopes that look to something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce into the future.” Morris was a proto-abolitionist: In his utopian novel “News From Nowhere,” there are no prisons, and this is treated as an obvious, necessary condition for a happy society.
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20/04 — Who owns the country? The secretive companies hoarding England’s land
Peel Holdings operates behind the scenes, quietly acquiring land and real estate, cutting billion-pound deals and influencing numerous planning decisions. Its investment decisions have had an enormous impact, whether for good or ill, on the places where millions of people live and work.
Legally obliged to maximise profits for their shareholders, and biased towards short-term returns, companies make for poor custodians of land. Nor are corporate landowners capable of solving the housing crisis. Hoarded, developed, polluted, dug up, landfilled: the corporate control of England’s acres has gone far enough.
19/04 — FIRST MAN
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19/04 — The Truth About Dentistry
A masked figure looms over your recumbent body, wielding power tools and sharp metal instruments, doing things to your mouth you cannot see, asking you questions you cannot properly answer, and judging you all the while.
Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding… Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months.
“The body of evidence for dentistry is disappointing,” says Derek Richards, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry at the University of Dundee, in Scotland. “Dentists tend to want to treat or intervene. They are more akin to surgeons than they are to physicians. We suffer a little from that. Everybody keeps fiddling with stuff, trying out the newest thing, but they don’t test them properly in a good-quality trial.”
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18/04 — SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace – whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call “me,” trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.
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18/04 — “D.I.Y. Mosul - Rough Translation”
Amazing acts of rebellion – “In my opinion the best revenge against ISIS is to be humane”
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17/04 — “Beware the Jabberwock - This American Life”
Including Alex Jones faked origin story and anecdotes about his school bullying and his father who nails him out
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17/04 — FACEBOOK’S ROLE IN BREXIT — AND THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY*
“This entire referendum took place in darkness because it took place on Facebook. And what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook because only you see your newsfeed and then it vanishes.”
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16/04 — “Robert Caro”
“You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers”
15/04 — GUAVA ISLAND*
15/04 — “Going viral: Fox News, Davos and radical economics”
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15/04 — “The End of Empathy”
“Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!”
13/04 — THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
10/04 — FLEABAG - SERIES 2* ( < 04/03)
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( < 09/04) — The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure our Lives, Behaviour, and Well-Being by Lily Bernheimer
When you come into a room to play a card game or enter a tense business negotiation, where do you sit? Across from your opponent. But what about when we meet a friend to catch up over coffee? Do we sit across from them as well? Or perhaps side by side, as benches and couches invite us to do? This is what personal space researcher Robert Sommer expected to find. But he discovered that people actually tend to sit corner to corner when conversing: a 90-degree orientation. While we tend to think that sofas are a good place to get together for a chat, side-by-side or 180-degree orientation can actually be detrimental to conversation. In cooperative situations, people tend to sit adjacent, as this facilitates looking at the same material. But what about sharing a table with someone you don’t know in a library or crowded café? When people want to ignore each other they tend to sit diagonally – ‘catty-corner’ as we call it in the US. Much of this comes down to eye contact. Sitting directly across from someone allows direct eye contact – an ideal oppositional position, which can be too intense for more friendly situations. Similarly, strangers sit diagonally to gain greater distance from each other, but also because it allows them to avoid eye contact. Extend these concepts to broader office layout and you can start to see how an entire workspace can function sociopetally or sociofugally.
He and his colleagues have observed that even people with very advanced Alzheimer’s can eventually find the water fountain. But they do this in a very different way than you or I would. They are not capable of plotting an overall wayfinding plan or making decisions based on memory and inference. They rely entirely on easily accessible environmental information, allowing them to move from one decision point to the next.
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08/04 — “Revisionist History: My Little Hundred Million”
“I think the weak link/strong link distinction is incredibly useful in making sense of certain kinds of problems. Suppose I said to you, for example, “Here’s $50 billion. Spend it in a way that makes air travel in the United States more efficient.” The last thing you would do is to go to Denver, which has that big, gorgeous new airport, and make it even bigger and even more gorgeous.”
“I think American society really is [football]. We’re so interdependent and we need so many perfect passes to score a goal that our challenges are weak link; not strong link. What matters is how good our eleventh player is; not our first.”
“They were, at the time, trying to raise $750 million. And my little hundred million wouldn’t have made hardly any difference at all.”
07/04 — WALL STREET
07/04 — “Revisionist History: Food Fight”
07/04 — “Revisionist History: The Satire Paradox”
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07/04 — Winter by Ali Smith ( < 08/03)
“The man who wrote the dictionary … The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meanings of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.”
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06/04 — They Had It Coming
“These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them.“
05/04 — VAGABOND
05/04 — “Broken Record: Questlove parts 1 & 2”
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04/04 — WIDOWS
The car tracking shot scene is great
04/04 — “Broken Record: Tom Petty and the creation of “Wildflowers””
03/04 — “What women really want”
01/04 — “108 The Story of Flat 113”
March 2019 #
31/03 — ANNIHILATION
31/03 — “Palaces for the People - 99% Invisible”
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30/03 — In Praise of Public Libraries
“public libraries dismantle the walls between us”
“the reference librarians on call to answer questions about, say, Pussy Riot, obituary etiquette, and the life span of parrots”
“At Starbucks, and at most businesses, really, the assumption is that you, the customer, are better for having this thing that you purchase. Right?” he said. “At the library, the assumption is you are better. You have it in you already…. The library assumes the best out of people.” What we learn from The Library Book, Ex Libris, and Palaces for the People is that we are all better off, too, when people assume the best out of libraries.
30/03 — JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2
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30/03 — PIERRE BONNARD: THE COLOUR OF MEMORY
“Not everyone who sings is happy”
30/03 — VAN GOGH AND BRITAIN
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29/03 — THE GANGSTER SQUAD
“In conclusion he describes Christian Slater’s 1991 film Mobsters as still a marginally better film than Gangster Squad.”
29/03 — “The Remote Control Brain”
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28/03 — THE BARKLEY MARATHONS: THE RACE THAT EATS ITS YOUNG
British woman one of last to quit ‘toughest ultra-marathon’
Meet Lazarus Lake, the Man Behind the Barkley Marathons
“It’s easy to design an impossible race, and it’s easy to make a race everyone can finish,” Cantrell says. “It’s really hard to find that point where impossibility is just so close.” The Barkley was, and has always been, the pursuit of that line.
“Your job as a race director is to provide a platform for runners to find greatness in themselves,” he says. “Everyone can find success within the process of discovering what they’re capable of. If they do that, they walk off feeling a winner.”
28/03 — MORVERN CALLAR
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26/03 — “In the Dark S2 E13: Oral Arguments”
“And then something happened that no-one in the room was expecting… It was Justice Clarence Thomas. He was asking a question. Something he hadn’t done since 2016. This was only the second question Justice Thomas had asked in oral arguments in the past thirteen years… A question from one of the most silent justices in the court’s history.”
It was a shit question :)
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25/03 — One thing now unites Britons – a sense of national humiliation
“We are a nation that lost a war we declared on ourselves.”
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20/03 — STORYVILLE: THE INTERNET’S DIRTIEST SECRETS: THE CLEANERS*
The moderators are expected to approve/delete 25000 images or videos a day
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20/03 — “Never Go To Vegas”
“the poor spend over a quarter more on funerals than the rich”
“The rich cremate more and the poor bury more” 18/03 — “How to Fire People”
17/03 — THE FRENCH CONNECTION
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17/03 — DETOUR
“Listen Mr., I been around, and I know a wrong guy when I see one. What’d you do, kiss him with a wrench?”
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16/03 — FREE SOLO
Opinion: The Free Solo Documentary Addressed Some Uncomfortable Truths, But Ignored Others
15/03 — BIRTH
( < 15/03) — “The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)” by Philippa Perry
15/03 — “Macpherson: What Happened Next”
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14/03 — RUSSIAN DOLL* ( < 24/02)
13/03 — “Live At SXSW: Late Night Trash Can With Amber Ruffin & Jenny Hagel”
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08/03 — LEAVING NEVERLAND*
Amazingly well put together documentary. Patient and understated in its telling of the myriad conflicting feelings and hurt. Pretty impossible to watch and not be convinced that Jackson was anything other than manipulative to a string of kids & families and a pedophile
Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Breaks It.
10 Undeniable Facts About the Michael Jackson Sexual-Abuse Allegations
Some Observations on Leaving Neverland
04/03 — LOUIS THEROUX: THE NIGHT IN QUESTION*
- 04/03 — Autumn by Ali Smith ( < 25/02)
February 2019 #
28/02 — The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA
27/02 — How to see beyond Brexit
( < 25/02) — THIS TIME WITH ALAN PARTRIDGE *
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25/02 — Less by Andrew Sean Greer ( < 17/02)
DITCHED ... for nowShouldn’t have started it in half term week! 24/02 — COUNTERPART SEASON 2 * ( < 10/02)
21/02 — T2 TRAINSPOTTING
( < 18/02) — “The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast with Eddie Mair”
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17/02 — BLINDSPOTTING
17/02 — DIANE ARBUS : IN THE BEGINNING
17/02 — “The News Is Dying, but Journalism Will Not”: How the Media Can Prevent 2020 from Becoming 2016
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17/02 — Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ( < 12/02)
15/02 — COST OF LIVING - Hampstead Theatre
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15/02 — A FORTNIGHT OF TEARS - Tracey Emin / White Cube
”hard to love”
15/02 — “The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson” ( < 11/02)
12/02 — HOW ONE TWEET CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE* – Jon Ronson
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10/02 — The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami
“I think there are three points to this anecdote: one, criticizing someone is easy; two, creating something original is very hard; three, but somebody’s got to do it. I’ve been doing it for forty years; it’s my job. I think I’m just a guy who’s doing what somebody’s got to do, like cleaning gutters or collecting taxes. So, if someone is hard on me, I will hold out my instrument and say, “Here, you play it!””
10/02 — COUNTERPART SEASON 1 * ( < 04/02)
10/02 — DON MCCULLIN - TATE BRITAIN
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10/02 — Normal People by Sally Rooney ( < 01/02)
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09/02 – No thank you, Mr. Pecker – Jeff Bezos
The United States Of American Media, Inc.
I/ The Tabloid Triangle
II/ Angels And UnAmerican Activity
III/ Suburban Decay
IV/ Electile Dysfunction
V/ No Stone Left Unturned -
08/02 — IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
“I think the step beyond that relates to something Arthur Jaffe says when he speaks about cinema, which is that people of colour have been looking into the eyes of white people forever. Throughout the history of arts and letters. And that’s fine. I think they understand more about the experience of your everyday white person just from watching sitcoms and movies all these years than they do about me. I make these films in a way that is not concerned with that dynamic. It’s more a contribution to that idea of sharing that we’ve been forced to have, because for so long there was a dearth of material we could see ourselves in. You had to see folks like you, forever. And now you guys get to come into the cinema and see folks like me.
Now, if I’d made the work with the dynamic implicit in my intentions, I think the work would suffer. Then I’m doing you a disservice. I’m showing you what I think you need to see as opposed to making the material the way I feel it should be made. It’s about creating a shared experience. And I hope that’s what all the white people have been doing with all the white characters throughout the history of the world. They haven’t been thinking about me. But when I go and watch the movie, I’m allowed access to that experience.”
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( < 08/02) — Call Them by Their True Names by Rebecca Solnit
“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine” — Hidden Brain
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05/02 — A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions
“ I was recently told about two former publishing colleagues of Mallory’s who called him after he didn’t show up for a meeting. Mallory said that he was at home, taking care of someone’s dog. The meeting continued, as a conference call. Mallory now and then shouted, “No! Get down!” After hanging up, the two colleagues looked at each other. “There’s no dog, right?” “No.””
( < 05/02) — “About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge”
03/02 — You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It.
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03/02 — GENERATION WEALTH - Lauren Greenfield
Blisteringly depressing & at times personal documentary - 10 years in the making
“It’s almost like there’s a new version of the American Dream. The physical makeover as the rags to riches success story.”
“I was a hamster in a diamond-studded gold wheel”
“I have lived on private jets, Cristal flowing nights and I have partied with rock stars and celebrities and actors, but you know what they say - be careful of what you wish for”
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02/02 — Aretha’s Grace
“…she appeared on the TV quiz show “What’s My Line?” Asked by its host to describe how her girlhood singing in church still shaped her outlook and her music, she replied with marvellous concision: “From there, here.””
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02/02 — “Seeing White” by Scene on Radio ( < 21/01)
Fourteen-part documentary series, released between Feb & Aug 2017.
“The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he deserves it and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune thus wants to be legitimate fortune.” — Max Weber
Episode 44: White Affirmative Action (Seeing White, Part 13) is particularly good
"When it comes to U.S. government programs and support earmarked for the benefit of particular racial groups, history is clear. White folks have received most of the goodies.”
January 2019 #
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31/01 — THE AMERICAN FRIEND - Wim Wenders
“I’m on the roof with a gun - but I don’t want to use it because of the neighbours”
30/01 — Cream by Haruki Murakami
30/01 — A Confedercy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole ( < 12/01)
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30/01 — It’s Time for Some Queueing Theory
How to Pick the Fastest Line at the Supermarket
“Research has found that, on average, people overestimated how long they waited in a line by 36 percent.”
Also Same Ole Line Dudes is a New York-based service that will stand in line for you. “New York’s Premier PROFESSIONAL Line Sitting Team”!
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29/01 — White gold: the unstoppable rise of alternative milks
90% of humans can drink milk without a problem (due to various genetic mutations) but two-thirds are actually lactose intolerant. Almond milk makes up 2/3 of all plant-milks sold. Almond is mainly water (only 2% almonds). Whilst milk sales declining the rest of the dairy industry is still strong and growing (worth $400bn, produced by a global herd of more than 274 million cows)
“One issue is environmental: it takes 4.5 litres of water to grow a single almond (technically not a nut, but a seed).”
“Elmhurst’s Cheryl Mitchell said. “As a business model, it’s great – any time you can sell water, right? That’s essentially what they’re doing.””
“reduced demand for cow’s milk and falling prices led to the closure of 1,000 dairy farms in the UK between 2013 and 2016”
“90% of plant milk buyers still purchase other dairy products, like cheese and ice cream, both of which are still growing.”
“Other plant milk entrepreneurs were more cautious. Everyone knows how quickly health-food hype – juice cleanses, coconut oil – can die off… Mellentin was blunt: “Peak plant milk is about three to five years away, at most.””
28/01 — DO THE RIGHT THING - Spike Lee
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28/01 — Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?
This is about more than the Oscars, although the “acceptable” historial retelling in cinema is real.
“We’d all been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies. Why can’t Mookie and Sal be friends? The answer’s too long and too raw. Sal can pay Mookie to deliver pizzas ‘til kingdom come. But he could never pay him enough to be his friend.”
Also: Spike Lee vs. white savior films: “BlacKkKlansman” Oscar nod is nearly 30 years overdue
“"Green Book” is the film version of color-blindness, of the white people who quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and yet have no empathy for black people who are killed by the police, no concern for the racial wealth gap or mass incarceration or the privatizing of education and the defunding of public schools, or for the U.S.‘s constant military intervention in predominantly black and brown nations.“
Related: Alvin Hall’s fascinating audio on the reality of "The Green Book”
25/01 — The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”
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24/01 — The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives by Robert Caro
“Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.””
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“In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking and to let silence do its work… As for me, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.
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“Which leads to a final question: Why am I publishing these random recollections[?] … The answer is, I’m afraid, quite obvious, and, if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it, by journalists who, in writing about me and my hope of finishing, often express their doubts in a sarcastic phrase: “Do the math.” Well, I can do that math. I am well aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.” -
24/01 — BLACKKKLANSMAN - Spike Lee
Powerful film, Some great & beautiful scenes - Kwame Ture speech and reaction, Harry Belafonte, the ending. The bar-scene near the end & the arrest of the “bad apple” is weird
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22/01 — FYRE - THE GREATEST FESTIVAL THAT NEVER WAS
Why was he filming himself at the end, whilst on bail, doing more dodgy stuff? People kept asking but clearly psychopathic. Total white-bro privilege
Is It Time to Regulate Social Media Influencers?:
“In 2016 an endorsement from a top-level influencer would generally cost about $5,000 to $10,000,” Wired’s Paris Martineau reported. “Now, brands are expected to pay well over $100,000 for the same placement.”The Follower Factory:
“By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower… In November, Facebook … indicat[ed] that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform.”Fyre Festival Was a Huge Scam. Is Netflix’s Fyre Documentary a Scam, Too?
22/01 — Time to Break the Silence on Palestine by Michelle Alexander
21/01 — From femme fatale to cattle rancher: how Barbara Stanwyck bucked convention
21/01 — “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
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21/01 — The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros
“Finkelstein’s premise was simple: Every election is decided before it even begins. Most people know who they will vote for, what they support, and what they oppose. It’s very difficult to convince them otherwise, Finkelstein believed. It’s a lot easier to demoralize people than to motivate them. And the best way to win is to demoralize your opponent’s supporters.”
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20/01 — THE FAVOURITE - Yorgos Lanthimos
Some great scenes (the fallover, the dancing) and each actress amazing. Not historical (or rather hugely speculative) but doesn’t matter
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19/01 — REVIEW OF CLINT EASTWOOD’S THE MULE - SNL*
“Thats when we realised that this was a super hero movie for old people about a guy who’s super power is that he can drive unsupervised.”
19/01 — THE BLUES BROTHERS - John Landis
19/01 — MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FALLOUT - Christopher McQuarrie
19/01 — ANNI ALBERS - TATE MODERN
19/01 — “106: Linda - Criminal”
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18/01 — “The Room of Requirement - This American Life”
About the library between the border of U.S and Canada. “… only at this time in America would this exact requirement exist. And a room appeared, a reading room.”
The loop between Brautigan, Todd Lockwood, Field of Dreams & Bill Kinsella
17/01 — THE FLORIDA PROJECT - Sean Baker
16/01 — IN A NUTSHELL *
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16/01 — “Bag Man” (< 07/01)
Seven-part Rachel Maddow podcast. A wild ride and bizarrely reassuring. A story which involves envelopes of cash being delivered to the White House. Previously my knowledge of Spiro Agnew only extended as far as a puerile anagram
15/01 — MAD MEN *
10/01 — Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday ( < 05/01)
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08/01 — LEAVE NO TRACE - Debra Granik
Simple, moved, paced. Great actors
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08/01 — BREXIT - THE UNCIVIL WAR*
Didn’t make it through - annoying way to tie things together. Everyone a caricature (except Cumberbatch)DITCHED -
06/01 — The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Her mother wrote to her that “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker … [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?”
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06/01 — BILLY CONNOLLY: MADE IN SCOTLAND*
Really great two-part documentary about him, Scotland and ageing. Turned my back onto “A Confederacy of Dunces”!
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05/01 — 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari ( < 26/12)
Good start and then baffling. Tried to like it. Some parts interesting (early) but chapter structure (1 side + 1 side and then intro to the next) got me down.DITCHED -
05/01 — YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE - Lynne Ramsay
Intense, discomfiting, jarring, rhythmic, amazing use of sound/silence, shocking violence (CCTV footage scene)
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04/01 — SORRY TO BOTHER YOU - Boots Riley
Includes a great scene with Cassius & Salvado fighting through compliments and well-wishes. Warming, ridiculous, true
In real life: “The Seven Minute Rule”
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30/12 — Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit ( < 27/12)
“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”
“The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.” **
Images #
- My Reading Year by Tom Gauld
- Antony Gormley & Margate
- Katie Paterson, Totality, 2016
- Still from Us
- Rembrandt (Self-Potrait with Two Circles) + K
- Jenny Saville “Untitled” close up (in response to Rembrandt)
- Still from Guava Island
- Let me start by saying no one is a bigger feminist than me - The New Yorker
- Part of Dining Room in the Country by Pierre Bonnard
- Part of Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh
- KH & Schlieren by Franz West
- Walter via NYT
- Pegasus by Jean-Michel Basquiat
- Hannah Arendt letter, declining an invitation
- Seaside pier on the south coast, Eastbourne, UK by Don McCullin
- Photo from Generation Wealth by Lauren Greenfield
- Photo from When The Big Mac Came To Moscow
- Granted, it would save countless lives—but to what end? — The New Yorker
- Fragile by Alex Norris
- Still from Blues Brothers
- Photo from Anni Albers Exhibition
- Still from The Florida Project
- Still from Leave No Trace