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The rest is probably good too though

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Bong Joon-ho on Filming Reality, Not Calls to Action

“There are people who are fighting hard to change society. I like those people, and I’m always rooting for them, but making the audience feel something naked and raw is one of the greatest powers of cinema. I’m not making a documentary or propaganda here. It’s not about telling you how to change the world or how you should act because something is bad, but rather showing you the terrible, explosive weight of reality. That’s what I believe is the beauty of cinema.”

E. Alex Jung, Let’s Talk About the Ending of Parasite

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Sam Kean on Metric System Social Justice

“Still, we shouldn’t romanticize ye olde units, because that flexibility also enabled chicanery and abuse.”

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“Even the humble alehouse couldn’t escape cheating. After a hard week’s labor, drinkers wanted to make sure they were getting a full volume of booze. So people insisted that tavern keepers compare their serving cups to a community standard. Some towns even required barkeeps to prepare wooden labels attesting to a 'just measure' of spirits. These labels were then attached to every cup with strings, which dangled down whenever people raised their wrists to quaff. And woe betide anyone who violated this custom: Many Polish churches had murals depicting sinners suffering in hell, and one prominent victim was often an innkeeper who shorted his patrons on vodka.”

Sam Kean, The Bitter Class Struggle Behind Our Definition of a Kilogram

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Benjamin Skuse on a No-Longer-Sacred Artifact

“On the outskirts of Paris, eight metres below ground in a climate-controlled vault, sits a 143-year-old platinum alloy cylinder. Standing just 39 mm tall, it has never been touched by human hands. Like a delicate Russian doll, the cylinder is caged inside three nested glass bells in a room that can be accessed only with three keys kept by three different people. Surrounding the mysterious object are 'the witnesses': six 'identical' cylinders cast from the same platinum alloy.

“Though preservation efforts rival those of the Turin Shroud, the cylinder is not a sacred religious object. It is the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), the one and only true kilogram against which all others are measured. Housed in the Pavillon de Breteuil – home to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) – the IPK will soon lose its unique status and become a relic of a bygone age. It will then be as quaint as the International Prototype Metre (IPM) – a platinum alloy bar also housed at the BIPM – that served as the world’s official metre until 1960.”

Benjamin Skuse, SI gets a makeover

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Todd VanDerWerff on South Park’s Change of Heart

“For a while now, the most succinct takedown of the smug self-satisfaction of South Park at its worst has been a screencap of a Reddit comment.  Its central paragraph reads:

It’s a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.

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“Yet that’s the larger conundrum South Park finds itself in. For a TV show driven by the same rationale as an internet troll — that provoking a reaction from those who care about literally anything is funnier than anything else on the face of the planet — it’s also become a show that increasingly seems uneasy about living in a world where the trolls have their way.”

Todd VanDerWerff, 12 years after mocking Al Gore’s fight against climate change, South Park reconsiders

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Maciej Cegłowski on Scientific Advancement Obscuring Past Innovation

“But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

“An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.”

Maciej Cegłowski, Scott and Scurvy

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Lee Drutman on Money in Politics

“Certainly money matters in elections. But it typically matters in a diffuse sense. Candidates who run are those who can raise large sums of money from wealthy donors, which means that they have to be broadly appealing to some set of wealthy donors. This makes certain candidates unlikely and keeps certain issues off the agenda.”

Lee Drutman, The Kochs are retreating from national elections. Here's what we should learn.

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Constance Grady on Inventing Words

“It’s a common myth that Shakespeare invented thousands of commonly used English words, including classics like ‘swagger,’ ‘eyeball,’ ‘puke,’ and ‘dawn.’ Unfortunately, this is almost definitely false. When the first editions of the Oxford English Dictionary were compiled, lexicographers had to painstakingly scan individual texts by hand to find the first recorded usage of every word in the dictionary. They ended up listing Shakespeare as the first person to write down 3,200 words.

“But today, with the advent of computerized word searching, Shakespeare has been dethroned from almost all of his etymological entries. (The same thing happened on a smaller scale to Charles Dickens, who it seems did not in fact coin the words ‘boredom’ and ‘butterfingers.’)”

Constance Grady, Serendipity, robot, and more common words invented by writers

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Joseph Stromberg on Attention

“Most researchers start by pointing out an underappreciated fact about attention: It's finite. ‘Over time, your ability to focus your attention gets depleted and fatigued,’ says Jason Duvall, who studies the effect of different environments on people's attention at the University of Michigan. ‘For instance, experiments show that the last 10 minutes of doing a task are much harder than the first 10 minutes.’ Your attention is gradually depleted throughout the day, though particularly taxing tasks can do so over the course of hours or even minutes.

“This means you shouldn't treat your attention like, say, electricity — something you can switch on and off easily whenever you want. It's more like money: an asset you need to conserve, use wisely, and replenish when you're out.”

Joseph Stromberg, The internet is full of distractions. Here are 7 tips to help you focus.

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The New York Times on Jeb Bush

“His campaign should get better at stage-managing press events.  This one, at a Mexican restaurant, was weirdly free-form, with kids yelling and assorted invitees mumbling at the microphone. The grim, adobe-and-stucco backdrop was like a Spanish colonial dungeon; it looked as if the grim-faced Mr. Bush had come to announce the arrest of Zorro.”

The New York Times Editorial Board, Jeb Bush Falls Into a Trap

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Drew Magary on Die Hard

"...it's a little bit weird now to hear Al Powell's sob story about accidentally shooting a kid. He sees a kid with a Lazer Tag gun, shoots the kid, and gets to keep his gun. Oh, but now he's too SCARED to ever use it again. That's the real tragedy! He should have been fucking indicted. And then, at the end of the movie, Karl's brother rises from the dead, and Powell shoots his ass, so the feel-good ending of the movie is basically, 'Hey, that cop finally got to shoot people again!' That is such an '80s movie ending."

Drew Magary, What's The Worst State In The Union To Get Drunk In?

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John McCain on Security and American Ideals

"I believe the American people have a right — indeed, a responsibility — to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values."

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"The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.

"They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good."

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"We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world, not by just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests, but by exemplifying our political values, and influencing other nations to embrace them. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea, not for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a king, but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. How much safer the world would be if all nations believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget it ourselves even momentarily."

John McCain, Sen. McCain's full statement on the CIA torture report

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Christopher Hitchens on Torture

"You may have read by now the official lie about [waterboarding], which is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The 'board' is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted."

Christopher Hitchens, Believe Me, It's Torture

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Pete Docter on the Montage from Pixar's Up

"Q: Audiences and critics have had a very emotional reaction to the sequence. Has there been a response that's had particular resonance for you?

"A: The one that springs to me is from a woman who wrote to me. We'll get letters from time to time, mostly from younger people who are interested in animation. But this was from a woman in her 70s who wrote that she had just lost her husband a couple of months before the film came out. And she didn't want to sit around the house, so to cheer herself up, she went to see 'Up.' And as I'm reading this, I'm going, 'Oh, no....' because this is obviously very close to home for her. But it turned out to be a very restorative thing for her, because she said that as she watched the movie, she felt like she was getting to spend a little more time with her husband. It was very meaningful to me that that film could do that for someone."

Paul Gaita, Scene Dissection: "Up" director Pete Docter on the film's emotional opening montage

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Drew Magary on Fandom

"Sports hate doesn't have to make sense. I have cheered for scumbags and booed perfectly decent people. The athletes are characters in a drama that only makes sense in my own head. It's like the movies. Sometimes you like the bad guy character more than some bland asshole nice-guy character. In real life, you gotta be nice to a lot of people: relatives, bosses, other people standing in line, etc. Sometimes it's fun to let all that go, breach etiquette, follow your basest impulses, and boo the people you aren't supposed to boo."

Drew Magary, Yes, It's Ok To Hate Russell Wilson

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Will Bunch on Journalism

"That inside-the-Beltway mind-meld is no accident -- it starts on the playing fields of elite universities and metastasizes over lunch at the Capitol Grille or drinks at Georgetown or Upper West Side cocktail parties. One drug fuels this lifestyle: a drug called 'access.' Lose access to the people in power, it is believed, and you lose everything.

"Gary Webb, in the backwaters of northern California, didn't have access. That didn't hinder his work. To the contrary, that made him a great journalist. He wasn't scared about offending anyone at the CIA, because he didn't know anyone at the CIA."

Will Bunch, Gary Webb, Jon Stewart, and the Stories That Are Too True to Tell

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William Safire in the Event of Moon Disaster

"These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

"These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

"They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown."

William Safire, In Event of Moon Disaster

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Dan Steinberg on Bad Football

"Washington’s final possession of the first half was like when you quickly drive to the corner store to get some emergency diapers, except first you break some traffic laws, do a few slow circles in the middle of the road, run into three trees and a mailbox, and then finally just park your car in the neighbor’s driveway and go to sleep."

Dan Steinberg, Best and worst from Redskins-Texans