Simone Veil (1927-2017)
An interesting podcast episode recounting the life of Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor, abortion rights activist and former president of the European Parliament.
Jodie Foster interviewée en Français
Jodie Foster est très talentueuse. Actrice et réalisatrice très impressionnante. J’adore.
Pour que je prenne un rôle, il faut que ce soit quelque chose qui m’obsède. Et je savais très bien que mon âge, la cinquantaine, allait être une période pauvre. C’est un moment un peu confus pour les femmes. Les gens ne savent pas écrire de scénarios pour les femmes de 50 ans. Ce qui m’intéressait, c’était de jouer des personnages plus vieux que moi, comme dans Désigné coupable [2021] ou Hotel Artemis [2018]. Mais c’était difficile, parce qu’on me proposait un peu les personnages que j’aurais joués à 40 ans. Et je n’ai plus 40 ans.
Lake Needwood, Derwood, Maryland
Lake Needwood is a 75-acre (300,000 m2) reservoir in Derwood, Maryland. Located in east of Rockville, in the eastern part of Montgomery County, it is situated on Rock Creek. The lake was created by damming Rock Creek in 1965 with the goal of providing flood control and reducing soil erosion. The Rock Creek Trail begins at Lake Needwood and can be followed along the course of Rock Creek, ending at the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. It’s a great place for walking, biking and running.
You can see more photos of Lake Needwood here.
Why Antisemitism Persists - A Jewish Perspective
Boaz Munro1 writing in Tablet:
Why don’t we see more efforts to dismantle antisemitism? Well, for one thing, Jews make up only 0.2% of the global population. We’re outnumbered more than 110:1 by Muslims and Christians—each. So if the onus is on Jews to start the conversation—which it shouldn’t be—then we’re spread laughably thin.
Non-Jews seem to have no interest in the subject; societies are loath to name the bigotries they’re founded on, much less challenge them. The American South was built on hideous racism, but do you think antebellum Southerners went around saying, “Hi there, fellow racist! Another wonderful day for racism”? Of course not.
That society couldn’t begin to change on its own. It had to be confronted.
After thousands of years of grinding persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, Zionism and Israel represent Jewish resistance—the stubborn assertion of our right to live and the legacy of those who refused to tiptoe, rationalize, or minimize any longer.
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Boaz Munro is a writer, web designer, and educator. He studied Hebrew, Arabic, and modern Middle East history at Brown University and The George Washington University. A grandson of Holocaust survivors from Poland with family in Israel, he’s originally from Pittsburgh. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter. ↩︎
Make One Friend a Year
Emma Nadler writing in The Washington Post:
The landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development suggests that close relationships are the most significant factor in personal well-being — yet it is not the number of relationships, but the quality of the connection that matters. Gaining one closer friend in 2024 may significantly boost your life satisfaction, as friendship is known to protect against stress and improve mental health. And one friend a year is manageable, yet could lead to three friends in three years and a handful of friends in five.
Finished reading: Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne 📚
I listened to this superb audiobook and enjoyed it. It’s 20 hours and 49 minutes long and worth every minute. The narration by Derek Perkins is superb.
Are Internet Prices in the US Too High?
Om:
[M] y parents [in India] pay $10 for a 500 Mbps connection, as long as they buy their “cable bundle” and phone service from the same provider. For about $35-a-month gets you a 1Gbps fiber connection. Wow, that is half of what I pay to Google Fiber in San Francisco for the same speed. It is clear we are paying way too much for broadband in the US.
Podcast: ‘Washington Welcomes’ Hosted by David Rubenstein
The Economic Club of Washington, DC has a podcast called Washington Welcomes. David Rubenstein, co-Founder of Carlyle Group and the Economic Club Chairman, interviews global leaders to discuss the major issues of the day. Rubenstein is witty and attracts a high caliber of guests. The episodes are under an hour long.
Highly recommended.
Text-only Websites
Sijmen J. Mulder has a wonderful directory of websites composed simple, marked up, hyperlinked text. These sites load quickly, scroll smoothly, spare your battery.
There are some interesting light sites on Mulder’s list including a text version of NPR. Try them. They load lickety-split.
A First Person Account from Gaza
Jehad Al-Saftawi1 wrote a moving piece entitled Hamas Built Tunnels Beneath My Family’s Home in Gaza. Now It Lies in Ruin:
Since Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, the bustling and beautiful streets I knew have been dominated by terrorist chaos. Hamas is driven by an ideological stand originating in the concept of annihilating the state of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic Palestinian one. In striving to make this a reality, Hamas has continued to normalize violence and militarization in every aspect of public and private life in Gaza. They have in the process obliterated the chances of a successful Palestinian state alongside Israel, even if the prospect of one had increasingly looked dim amid successive Israeli governments that worked against that.
[…]
[Hamas] began destroying my family home in 2013 when they built tunnels beneath it. They continued to threaten our safety for a decade—we always knew we might have to vacate at a moment’s notice. We always feared violence. Gazans deserve a true Palestinian government, which supports its citizens’ interests, not terrorists carrying out their own plans. Hamas is not fighting Israel. They’re destroying Gaza.
The full piece in Time is worth reading.
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Jehad al-Saftawi is the author of My Gaza: A City in Photographs and is founder of Refuge Eye, a nonprofit organization which supports refugee journalists. ↩︎
Japan Loses Spot as Third-Largest Economy
AP reports that Japan’s economy is now the world’s fourth-largest after it contracted in the last quarter of 2023 and fell behind Germany:
Japan was historically touted as “an economic miracle,” rising from the ashes of World War II to become the second largest economy after the U.S.. It kept that going through the 1970s and 1980s. But for most of the past 30 years the economy has grown only moderately at times, mainly remaining in the doldrums after the collapse of its financial bubble began in 1990.
The U.S. remains the world’s largest economy by far followed by China and India. Russia is now number 11, just ahead of Mexico. You can see the full list here.
Report: Former Google CEO Bought Former Jackie Kennedy House in Georgetown
Former Google CEO ERIC SCHMIDT and his wife, WENDY, are the anonymous buyers of the historic Georgetown mansion that JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS used to own and that sold at auction for $15 million in November, a Georgetown neighbor familiar with the purchase told Daniel Lippman. The N Street house is formally called the “NEWTON D. BAKER House” after a former secretary of War and also known as the “Jacqueline Kennedy House” since she lived there for a year after JOHN F. KENNEDY was killed (she paid around $175,000).
USC Shoah Foundation Lecture Series on Antisemitism
With anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence on the rise around the world, the USC Shoah Foundation has launched the Daniel and Marisa Klass USC Shoah Foundation Lecture Series on Antisemitism. Leading scholars will guide audiences through the latest research and explore a diversity of approaches to understanding and combating the current upsurge.
The USC Shoah Foundation houses over 56,000 audio-visual testimonies conducted in 65 countries and in 44 languages. Steven Spielberg founded it in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.
London’s Wiener Holocaust Library Celebrates 90 Years of Service
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is celebrating its 90th birthday. It is the oldest continuously functioning archive documenting Nazi crimes.
The Library has its origins in the work of Dr. Alfred Wiener (1885-1964). Dr. Wiener was a German Jew from Berlin who campaigned against Nazism during the 1920s and 30s and gathered evidence about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Dr. Wiener and his family fled Germany in 1933 and settled in Amsterdam. Later that year he set up the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO) at the request of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. This archive collected information about the Nazis, which formed the basis of campaigns to undermine their activities.
Following Kristallnacht (the November Pogrom of 1938), Wiener prepared to bring his collection to the UK. It arrived the following summer and is believed to have opened on the day the Nazis invaded Poland.
During the war, staff gathered evidence to document and publicize reports of Nazi efforts to annihilate European Jewry, including an eyewitness account of Kristallnacht.
Throughout the war, the JCIO served the British Government as it fought the Nazi regime. Increasingly the collection was referred to as ‘Dr Wiener’s Library’ and eventually this led to its renaming.
Wiener’s recognition of the danger posed by the Nazis didn’t begin after Hitler came to power in 1933. Instead, he can justly lay claim to having been one of the first intellectuals to raise the alarm about the rise of antisemitism after World War I.
Horrified by the surge in anti-Jewish right-wing nationalism that he encountered when he returned from the trenches to his homeland, in 1919 Wiener published a tract, “Prelude to Pogroms?”, in which he warned: “A mighty antisemitic storm has broken over us.” If left unchecked, Wiener predicted, this antisemitism would lead to “bestial murders and violence” and the “blood of citizens running on the pavements.”
Sources:
Blogs I Like
I like traditional blogs, which harken back to the early days of the internet when people wrote to share for the joy of sharing. The main goal wasn’t to make money via advertising or subscriptions. It was people sharing and connecting with other people. There aren’t as many blogs like this around anymore. I value the ones that remain and share this list in the spirit of sharing and connecting person to person:
- Om Malik – Knows Silicon Valley first hand; great writer; excellent photographer.
- Scripting News – Dave Winer’s eclectic posts.
- Pixel Envy by Nick Heer – Blogs about tech and other topics. Well curated and interesting.
- Worms and Viruses – A tech blog by Jack Wellborn.
- The Euro TV Place – Reviews and clips of European TV available in the US. It amazes me how much European TV can now be streamed in the United States.
- Michael Tsai’s Tech Blog – Michael pulls out the essential nuggets from many sources and posts them on his blog, It’s a real time saver and his site loads likety split.
- Philip Greenspun’s Weblog – I have followed Philip Greenspun since he founded Photo.net, which I loved. Now he blogs about lots of stuff. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t but I keep coming back to read what the founder of Photo.net has to say.
- Visual Science Lab – Written by Kirk Tuck, an excellent photographer in Austin.
- Paris Diary by Laure – An excellent blog about what’s happening in Paris
- Mal Warwick on Books – Has been reviewing books on his blog since 2010
- The Homebound Symphony – A well written blog by Alan Jacobs.
- Matt Mullenweg – A founding developer of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic.
- Swissmiss, A popular design journal and more.
The list is in no particular order. Please suggest other blogs to follow.
Last updated: February 14, 2024
Forgetting Doesn’t Mean President Biden Can’t Do the Job
Dr. Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, writing in The New York Times:
Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.
I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job.
Podcast: ‘Travel with Rick Steves’
Travel with Rick Steves is a weekly one hour podcast with guest experts and callers about travel, cultures and people. This, in my opinion, is the best travel podcast.
Steves is well-traveled, bright, articulate, positive and most of all curious to learn about the world and the people who inhabit it. Although Steves’s guidebooks and organized tours focus on Europe, the podcast covers the world.
Guests include authors and professional guides Steves uses for his tours and guidebooks. The information he provides is timely and accurate. For example, Steves has interviewed great authors such as Paul Theroux and David McCullough (1933-2022).
After listening to the interview of David McCullough, I was really charged up to get out and explore the world, in part because McCullough started his life and explorations in my hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. McCullough has written extensively about the United States starting near home with the The Johnstown Flood. He was also a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. That’s the caliber of guest Steves can corral. And he does it once a week.
Why Having Your Own Home on the Internet is Important
Om:
Why do “creatives” forget that the platform exists for one reason—the platform’s overall growth and viability?
The Substack founders are staying true to form — trying to save/grow their business. They have to grow in order to raise their next round of funding. If they don’t, then it’s lights out.
Yes, Substack is blogging, and it’s totally valid for a blogging system to be better at publishing one kind of writing.
What’s wrong with Substack, and why it will ultimately need to change or be replaced, is that they require writers to use their editor.
That’s lock-in.
My Perspective on WordPress
I’ve always thought of WordPress as the default for personal websites focused on writing. However, I have never found a WordPress theme I love. Some themes are feature rich and slow and others are fast but, at least to my eye, not visually appealing. And I know there are many WordPress themes.
The theme I’m using on this site is called TinyTheme. The developer, Matt Langford, even helped me to customize it. It now suits me perfectly. Both the hosting on Micro.blog and the theme are fast.
Having said that, for photography, I haven’t found anything I like better than Squarespace, where I also have a site. Squarespace sites aren’t fast but I want to post large images so there is a tradeoff, especially because I don’t know how to code.