Fight Night at the Discourse

Rick I want to ADDRESS this issue.

March 8th, 2023

Welcome back to the Garden everyone, it’s day two of Agnes Callard discourse and the fans are revved up and on their feet. That’s right, Rick,1 the excitement is palpable and nobody knows what’s gonna happen. Yesterday I made a bold prediction right here on this show that Agnes herself wouldn’t recognize what a clichéd doofus she is, and folks we did not have long to wait on that one:

That’s a strong start, Rick, but… wait, are you seeing this? Can we zoom in right there Rick? Is that Paul Graham in the mentions, trying to make this about Ethics in Journalism? How did that man even get in here, he’s never read a book in his life.

But now straight up the middle here comes Sam Circle in Last Week’s New Yorker Review stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends:2

Callard hates it when her colleagues say “I’m so glad it worked out,” which Callard takes to mean that part of the narrative of her life resolved cleanly in their eyes, but maybe is meant to mean “Congrats on escaping professional consequences while retaining your boy toy!”

Still, I must credit Callard for the freshness of her ideas’ expression; it turns out that you can find unique-sounding phraseologies for your mind’s workings when you intentionally avoid reading anything written after the Partition of Babylon.

This crowd is simply delirious, the rafters are shaking here at the Garden, Rick. But there’s a commotion in the tunnel now, as… oh my God, is that Rod Dreher entering the arena? It is! Now he’s flinging off his trademark rhinestone “Most Divorced Man in Media” cape and grabbing the mic, looks like he’s getting ready to weigh in. The fans are still on their feet but an uncanny hush has fallen over this standing-room-only crowd. They know what’s about to happen, and they know it’s not gonna make a goddamn bit of sense, Rick. Let’s listen in:

…when I think about the narrative arc of my family and its dissolution, I realize that what brought us to ruin was the insistence that our Story was the ideal, not the reality—and when reality contradicted the official story, well, we ignore the reality, and expect those who point out the contradictions to bear the weight of stress displaced by the load-bearing structures not doing their part. But you know, isn't this just how it is with all of us, all the time? I was telling a Hungarian friend the other day, as we talked about church stuff—

OH MY GOD IT’S JOYCE CAROL OATES WITH A DARRYL DAWKINS DESTRUCTION DUNK FROM MIDCOURT!

It’s over Rick, stick a fork in Callard, I don’t see how she comes back from this before next season, at the earliest. What a show we’ve seen here tonight! I think they’ll be talking about this one for a long time. Stay tuned for your local news, and then Frasier at 11:30.

Damon Krukowski wrote about the ongoing decline of movie theaters as a way into the larger point that the personalized, digitized AI future is kind of a lonely place. This kicked up a lot of debate in the Discord, but I don’t think he’s trying to make any bigger point than that. But judging by Julia Love and Davey Alba’s Bloomberg report that Google is now panic-shoving AI into everything the way they tried to panic-shove Google+ into everything in 2011, maybe we don’t have much to worry about. Dave Karpf thinks Twitter has less than 6 months left, for what that’s worth, and Elon Musk was forced to apologize to Haraldur Thorleifsson for explicitly firing him because of his disability, which will surely clear all of that up with no further consequences. Meanwhile, keen observers have noticed that Twitter already appears to have no functioning HR department, leaving it wide open to the Circuit City grift:

Gif from the linked Tiktok of @pearlmania500 saying “Don’t like your job? You haven’t been doing that job. you worked at Twitter for four years.”

Marianne Williamson solved the Israel-Palestine conflict, with “Avatar.” Amazon is supposedly launching an NFT marketplace in April, because Andy Jassy knows that the key to comedy is timing. Rob Meyer to Heatmap dot news. “Tesla Under Investigation After Steering Wheels Fall Off While Driving.” Personally, I’m not surprised.

The Italian guy from the “I Think You Should Leave” focus group sketch pointing and saying “That is a good idea.”

And Finally: CNN reports that intelligence sources are pushing back on yesterday’s NY Times report that other intelligence sources were nearing the conclusion that someone may or may not have been responsible for destroying the Nord Stream pipelines. Apparently “the assessment was not made with high confidence and is not the predominant view of the intelligence community,” leaving us once again uncertain over who believes what about who may or may not have done what where, and if so, why, or why not. More on this story as events warrant, or don’t.

Nice Game:

Today’s Song: Modest Mouse, “Broke”

Why did we stop listening to “Building Nothing out of Something?” What a good album. Hey, if you applied to be an intern you should have gotten an email from me acknowledging that by now. If you haven’t, email me again! I’d hate to have missed anyone and my own HR department is frankly not the best. Such a classic excuse it should be bronzed by now. Subscribe to find out who Rick is.

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