Encounters

With this panegyric to airport culture, Eva Wiseman riffs on a Vice story about young Britons going to the airport to get (earthly) high and hang out. As a Briton I find this awesome, even while as an Israeli I find it a bit pitiful (ie, just go to the beach!).

A great grounds-eye view of the upset in Washington DC, “What I Saw at the Capitol Riot” by Declan Leary in The American Conservative.

To my left I hear “We don’t need Gitmo,” and I’m not quite sure what’s meant by it. From the same general area comes “I’ll donate a vaccination ⁠— .223 hollow point.” A little less ambiguous. Somebody with a megaphone is in the middle of a speech: “If you stand for nothing, you gotta stand for something.” Close enough. A young woman with a bullhorn of her own lets out a lone motherfucker. An older man looks at me with a smile and asks if she kisses her mother with that mouth. A few seconds later the same voice drones at nobody in particular: Pussy, pussyyyyy, pussy, pusssaaaaaaayyyyyy.

This fellow Guy Stagg did what I failed to do in reverse: walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem.

Chronicling from “below the API line”, as Venkatesh Rao calls it, are Austin Murphy with “I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon” in The Atlantic and Lauren Hough with “I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America” in The Huffington Post.

The depicted harshness of American work life for so many is terrible not just for those involved but for all. (Also these two share a prodigious unmet need to urinate on the job ⁠— is this the top new workplace tribulation?)

Brave Amy Brangwyn’s crusading ‘Titty Ditty’.

Thank you, earthhandsandhouses.org. May the movement flourish…

“You can’t cross the species barrier but, by bumping up against it, you can learn things.” In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman surveys ventriloquism of the soul. “Tolstoy’s animals teach us to be good,” he explains. “Joyce’s teach us to be alive.” [via aldaily.com]

Don Johnson speaks and oh my.

A fearsomely refreshing list of what the author has learned in her 40s. Enjoyable if you’ve reached the age, and I wonder if edifying for those yet to.

Andrew O’Hagan on Norman Mailer rather than on A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon, the book he’s supposed to be reviewing. “They had Ancient Evenings, his vast Egyptian tome (I read the first ninety pages) and The Naked and the Dead, which was filled with the word ‘fug’ and seemed both plain and good.”

On Google Glass:
What happens in Vegas stays… at Google.

It’s official: women are mate-poachers. I would have wagered on this anyway. “Offered a single man, 59% [of single women] were interested … But when he was attached, 90% said they were…”

Prescribing a new bit of etiquette: the phone stack. Everyone places their phone facedown in the center of the restaurant table. Whoever picks theirs up, pays the bill.

Guilty as charged: Shit White Guys Say… To Asian Girls.

On chatroulette.com.