Carl Sagan on Critical Thinking, Vintage Attenborough, The B-52's, Pulp Fiction, etc.
In which I share some good shit this week, including a story on undercover publicans in 1970s Chicago.
🙋♀️ Hi there.
🎼 Reminder! I asked you to share “a song with me that you love. And not just really like or think is great, but love, to your core.” Wasn’t looking for “correct” or “cool” answers, just honest ones. Everyone more than delivered: here is a playlist of over three hours worth of answers.
🤘This footage of The B-52’s at the US Festival in ‘82 is something else, you guys.
🍔 This dude rules. Hardcore punk-turned-Italian pastry chef-turned-owner/operator of one perhaps the buzziest vegan burger joint in the country.
🎻 Advice for struggling musicians, advice that can be applied to most creative endeavors. “Every day learn more and get better in your craft—and take satisfaction in this.” “Never let gatekeepers control your sense of purpose and self-worth.”
🍺 How is this not a movie? In the 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times and a local watchdog group purchased a bar in order to “investigate widespread allegations of official corruption and shakedowns visited on small businesses by city officials.”
💩 The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s “rules for bullshit-busting and critical thinking.”
🪲 Australian scientists have discovered a rare example of an insect using tools to capture prey. Dubbed “assassin bugs,” they “make a particularly promising case for understanding the ecological and behavioral conditions that facilitated the otherwise unlikely evolution of tool-use.”
🍿The previous box office record holder congratulating those that have surpassed them is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood. Spielberg has received and written more than a few.
📽 Pulp Fiction debuted at Cannes on this day in 1994. From 2013, how a movie-obsessed video clerk became almost inarguably the most critically acclaimed director of the last thirty years. “Surrounded by videos, which he watched incessantly, he hit upon an idea for recycling three of the oldest bromides in the book.”
🎨 The Simpsons has made many astute observations on art over the years, many of which still resonate today.
📍Interesting video on the neighborhood depicted in The Gangs of New York.
🌎 David Attenborough has been exploring for a long time. See him encounter animals in their natural habitats in these videos from the 1950s and 60s.
🌕 A 1.3-gigapixel image of the moon, “comprised of 280,000 individual photos captured on two telescopes, one for detail and one for color. Taken on the unusually clear night of April 29 during its waxing gibbous phase, the work reveals a surface rich with history.”
🪐 Saturn’s rings are only 450 million years old. Sharks have been on Earth longer than that.
🌊 “Jellyfish blooms can swamp entire ecosystems, but there's growing interest in their culinary potential.” This could solve some of the ocean’s problems: eat more jellyfish.
🤬 Kurt Vonnegut’s unyielding stance against censorship, taken from a 1967 letter. “[My books] beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us. After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, ‘Yes, yes— but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.’ This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.”
␘Can we separate art from the artists? “The solution to the monstrous men of art, Claire Dederer argues, is not to smash our idols but to avoid making them idols in the first place.” The last paragraph: “The art itself isn’t awful, or we wouldn’t be clinging to it despite our misgivings about its creators. The obdurate truth remains that some of the most beautiful and profound things humanity has created are the work of terrible people. We can decide, in a fury of righteousness, to cast those works aside. Or we can choose to view them as a kind of grace, the miraculous salvage from the inevitable wreck of our lives.”
🐠 I posted this before but also on this day, eighteen years ago, David Foster Wallace delivered a speech that would end up sticking with me for the rest of my life.
“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.”
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Thanks for considering, and always remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
