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The Present Age Weekly Recap: January 28, 2022
www.readtpa.com
TPA Weekly Recap

The Present Age Weekly Recap: January 28, 2022

MLK, The Daily Show, M&M's, Twitter, and more dominate the coverage this week (and last)

Parker Molloy
Jan 28, 2022
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The Present Age Weekly Recap: January 28, 2022
www.readtpa.com

Welcome to the weekly recap. In this post, I’ll be linking to my work from the week, sharing some stories from others I thought were interesting, and providing a few casual thoughts on [gestures at everything]. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “TPA Weekly Recap.” If you don’t want to receive the weekly recap, leave all boxes except “TPA Weekly Recap” checked. (This format and disclaimer was inspired by Ty Burr’s Watch List)


Since this is the first weekly recap, I’m actually going to highlight the past two weeks’ worth of posts.

First up is my Monday, January 17th, post about the fragile state of American democracy and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lesser-known quotes about the filibuster.

"I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority of senators vote. Certainly, they would not want the majority of people to vote because they know that they do not represent the majority of American people. They represent in their own states a certain small minority. Senator Eastman of Mississippi represents a very small minority of the number of people who live in that state. I think this is true across the south.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr., July 5, 1963

The Present Age
Martin Luther King Jr. on the filibuster
Good morning, everybody. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day to all. Let’s jump right in. No person’s life can be summed up in a tidy quote. You can’t define King by a single soundbite, no matter how comforting your interpretation of said soundbite may be. Still, some people try. Today, you’re likely to see this… more than once…
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a year ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Parker Molloy

Next was the January 19th podcast with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s Matt Negrin. We had a lot of fun making that one. Matt is a really smart guy, and he’s definitely someone you should be following on Twitter if you’re not already. (link)

The Present Age
The Daily Show's Matt Negrin may or may not be Chuck Todd's nemesis. [podcast + transcript]
Listen now (38 min) | Parker Molloy: My guest today is Matt Negrin, a senior producer for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And just about the only person on the planet, I know who gets more irritated about the way politics gets covered in the media than I do. Matt, thank you so much for joining me…
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a year ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Parker Molloy

On Monday, January 24th, I published a piece about fake outrage in right-wing media about the latest ad campaign for M&M’s. The tl;dr is that M&M’s has a new ad campaign coming out, it used some pretty basic “inclusiveness”/”togetherness” language and imagery, and right-wing media had a meltdown over “wokeness” (as they often do). I explain more in the piece.

The Present Age
I never knew so many people wanted to bang the Green M&M.
As certain as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, people in right-wing media will lose their minds whenever a company changes its logo, branding, packaging, or, well, just about anything. So when I saw that Mars, the company behind M&Ms (and a whole bunch of other things, ranging from food to pet care to chewing gum), decided to refresh the …
Read more
a year ago · 27 likes · 28 comments · Parker Molloy

And finally, on Wednesday, I put out a paid newsletter about online pile-ons, specifically focusing on the recent outrage involving a tweet from journalist Katelyn Burns. (While this post is for paying subscribers, a decent portion of it is still free to read before the paywall comes in.)

The Present Age
Understanding the Twitter pile-on.
Ahoy, readers! A few weeks back, I wrapped up my 2021 newsletters with a reflection on the “dunk culture” of social media. For all the good that social media (and the internet, generally) can bring, there’s always been a whole lot of bad. The piece ran through a couple of examples of people who had been put through the ol’ online criticism ringer, and I definitely recommend checking it out before reading the rest of this post…
Read more
a year ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Parker Molloy

The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to become a paid subscriber.


Posts from others that I want to draw attention to:

Tegan and Sara, two of my favorite musicians and songwriters, started a newsletter called I Think We’re Alone Now. I’m not sure what it’ll end up becoming, but knowing how great everything they make tends to be, I was sure to subscribe as soon as I saw it.

I Think We're Alone Now
I Think We're Alone Now
Listen now (3 min) | …
Read more
a year ago · 166 likes · 89 comments · Tegan and Sara

Over at Jeet Heer’s The Time of Monsters, he writes about a Tennessee school board’s decision to remove Art Spiegelman’s Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum. I’m hoping to put out a piece next week that looks at the worrying trend of conservatives, newly empowered by anti-“critical race theory” propaganda, removing works from curricula, school libraries, and even public libraries. Stay tuned for that.

The Time of Monsters
Maus in Tennessee
I first became aware of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in the summer 1981 when I was 14 years old. Spiegelman had just started serializing the first chapters of his eventual graphic novel in the pages of RAW, a graphic art magazine he edited with Francoise Mouly. I saw a review of the first issue of RAW in…
Read more
a year ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Jeet Heer

Similarly, Judd Legum’s Popular Information touches on that same subject. As is true to his style, Legum’s piece is packed with helpful stats and links to give you the context you need to understand what’s happening on the ground (for instance, did you know that Missouri has 19 pending bills restricting free speech? I didn’t!)

Popular Information
2022: The year of the thought police
For years, people on the right have complained about the supposed left-wing assault on free speech. "We talk a lot on this show about the threat to free speech. It turns out it’s very real," Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News program on December 18, 2019. Carlson was upset becau…
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a year ago · 127 likes · 44 comments · Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby

Adam Johnson’s The Column has become one of my favorite reads in recent months, and his piece on the anthropomorphization of COVID (see: people declaring that they’re “done with COVID,” as though it is something that can care or change based on public attitudes) really hits the mark.

The Column
Covid isn't a human being, it doesn't care what you think about it.
One of the more strange, uniquely American phenomena over the past two years is when media personalities and politicians talk about Covid like it’s a sentient, rational enemy that must be defied, stood up to, and spited. It’s not just a quirky cultural framework that’s interesting to note in its own right, but part of a larger epistemological regime in …
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a year ago · 60 likes · 6 comments · Adam Johnson

And finally, Alex Pareene’s “We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Policing Our Behavior” post from his The AP newsletter is something I’ve been recommending to just about everyone I can for the past week. This pairs really well with the above piece from Johnson.

The AP (Alex Pareene) Newsletter
We're All Trying to Find the Guy Policing Our Behavior
I dropped my kid off at school this morning, as I do most mornings. We took the city bus, which, as always, crawled in traffic and grew steadily more crowded as it approached the Kings County Hospital campus. We live close enough to the start of the route to get a seat most…
Read more
a year ago · 44 likes · 1 comment · Alex Pareene

That’s it for this week! Please leave any questions, comments, feedback, or recommendations (definitely recommendations) in the comments below. Have a good weekend, everyone!

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The Present Age Weekly Recap: January 28, 2022
www.readtpa.com
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DCBoyisangry
Jan 28, 2022Liked by Parker Molloy

I LOVE THE RECAP THING!

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