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)
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.”
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
I LOVE THE RECAP THING!