5hIt’s hard not to feel at least a jot of sympathy for these parents who earnestly believed they were doing right by their children, and especially for the young athletes—who, like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, were brought out so far, and made to trot so quick—and who now must think that the world is conspiring against them.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Here comes the slime.
From the New York Times:
Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
This low-cost automated story generation has come to be known as pink slime journalism. In addition to the hundreds of titles that ape the look and feel of local news, our research has detected new sites in this network that address single subjects, appeal to religious orientation, and focus on business news.
Here's a full list of the participating sites.
A brief nature documentary "about the most formidable species in our oceans: plastic."
5hI didn’t know who Carlton was until I was presumed to be him: in school, at my weekend movie-theater job, in the checkout line at the Gap.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
The making (and remaking) of Timothée Chalamet (and Daniel Riley).
One of our favorite magazine profiles from 2018 was novelist Daniel Riley's extended take in "The Arrival of Timothée Chalamet." Now we get part two.
He backtracked a lot (“Wait, let me try that again”). He jumped on and off the record (“Sorry, sorry, sorry, this is just for you…”). It was important for me to know, he said, in order to communicate the context of his experience, if not the specifics.
Is Riley becoming Chalamet's biographer? From 2018:
His is a brimming exuberance that's reined in by a sober conscientiousness. Often there seem to be two competing forces pulling at either arm: the desire to let everything in, to not take any of this good fortune for granted, while also contending with a constant low-level fear of losing the thing he's only just grabbed hold of.
3dThousands of miles separate the fields of Honduras and the continental breakfasts in the States. But these are terminals of a single, continuous system.
↩︎ The Atlantic
3d“Look at the stock market—I’m making more money with my retirement than I’ve ever made. What else does he need to do? Who do you know that has told China to kiss my ass?”
↩︎ The New Yorker
From 2019, and funny whether or not you're familiar with Martin Roberts (Homes Under the Hammer), who seems to play a piano when he congratulates people on buying a house.