What the End of Roe v. Wade Will Mean for the Next Generation of Obstetricians - An aspiring ob-gyn’s views on abortion might determine what training she seeks out, which specialities she pursues, and where she chooses to live. In a post-Roe world, that self-sorting process would grow even more intense. - link
The Atrocity of American Gun Culture - After mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Buffalo, pro-gun officials say they don’t want to politicize tragedy. But the circumstances that allow for the mass murder of children are inherently political. - link
Two Mothers Confront the Unimaginable in Uvalde - Years of frustration with the local police and school officials have boiled into rage. - link
Rachel Kushner Reads Edna O’Brien - The author joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris,” by Edna O’Brien, which was published in a 1962 issue of the magazine. - link
What Makes a Mass Shooter? - The authors of “The Violence Project” note that mass shootings have risen with fatal overdoses and other deaths of despair—which is not a coincidence. - link
From Vox
Staring down 30 at the Taylor Swift dance party -
On finding enjoyment, and cringe, in the world’s biggest pop star.
Two weeks ago, Taylor Swift received an honorary doctorate from NYU. One week later I went to a party in her honor in Brooklyn, an event devoted entirely to dancing — and more often, screaming — to the music of Taylor Swift.
The event had nothing to do with her getting a degree; rather, it was part of a popular traveling series called the Taylor Party that has, over the past five months, made stops in cities from Honolulu to Montreal, Omaha to Boston. It’s pretty straightforward: You pay something like $20 to go to a concert venue where a DJ plays literally nothing but Taylor Swift. In New York, where Taylor Parties take place every few months, tickets sell out fast.
There is something inherently cringey about attending a Taylor Swift dance party, but to be fair, there is also something cringey about Taylor Swift herself. There’s the ineffable, just-this-side-of-saccharine stuff: When she first got famous, the then-teenager was known for the “little ol’ me?” reactions she gave when accepting awards despite her glaring perfectionism. She has baked cookies for fans and sent her followers surprise Christmas presents; one time she wrote a Tumblr post about loving plaid clothing and pumpkin spice.
And then there’s the actually-cringey stuff: the tone-deaf music videos, her tendency to decry any criticism as sexist, the whole era where she trotted out various famously beautiful friends in some kind of performance of feminism. For the most part, though, Swift is the normal kind of embarrassing: Upon joining TikTok last summer, fans commented on her — truly quite cheesy — first video, writing things like, “Sometimes I forget she’s a millennial.”
So if Taylor Swift is unapologetically cringe, the Taylor Party is even more so. Most people, at least 80 percent of them women, dress up as Taylor and take photos in front of a giant Taylor Swift step-and-repeat. There are Taylor Swift-themed balloons, and the screen behind the DJ booth plays clips from Taylor Swift music videos on an endless loop. Founded by Pittsburgh-based DJs and nightlife producers Brian Howe, Josh Bakaitus, and Steve Soboslai, the first Taylor Party took place on December 3, 2021. Howe and Bakaitus were thinking of fun theme parties to organize in a post-vaccine world, and the latter had been listening to a lot of Swift’s music.
“He wanted a place where he could hang out and listen to the songs,” explains Howe. Tickets sold fast, and within 24 hours they planned and hosted another party in Chicago. “Based off the numbers and all the social media engagement, it made it really easy for us to start reaching out to other markets,” Howe says. So far, they’ve done about 50 shows, with dozens more scheduled through the rest of this year.
The Taylor Party is not so different from the wave of vaguely nostalgic theme nights that have sprouted up over the past decade. In the early 2010s, nightclubs began hosting a rash of parties dedicated to the emo and pop punk that was topping the charts only a few years previously; they remain big moneymakers to this day. Sign up for newsletters from Eventbrite or Bandsintown and you’ll receive an onslaught of emails about parties coming to your city centered around genres like dubstep, indie pop, mid-aughts hip-hop, or ’80s new wave, using the foolproof method of getting people in the door by offering a dance-ready crowd and the guarantee of a good playlist.
The Taylor Party offers that, sure, but to its organizers, it’s more like a fan convention. “An interesting comparison would be to a Comic Con or a Star Wars convention,” Howe says. “A bunch of people in a room that love one thing, and want to be around other like-minded people without the pressures of the outside world for a limited amount of time.” (Yes, the most-requested song is the 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”)
Arin Sang-urai
Rather than Taylor herself dominating conversations, though, the topics discussed outside the venue were more about attendees’ own feelings, our own histories and humiliations. In line for the bathroom, I meet a 21-year-old who’s in the process of cutting off her ex and has found solace in Swift’s oeuvre. (It’s a cliché to describe the particular intimacy of drunk girls in bar bathrooms, but at a Taylor Swift-themed event, in which everyone has already admitted to a certain level of sentimentality by being here, it is doubly true.) “Ever since I got heartbroken, I’ve never had someone describe that feeling so well,” she told me.
I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s music long enough that I’ve experienced most of the emotions she’s articulated over her career — heartbreak, lust, disillusionment, joy, vengeance — but the theme I’ve thought about most recently is Swift’s grappling with her own irrelevance, the fear that women, mostly, experience as they approach an age deemed worthless to society. I spent my early 20s terrified of getting older, convinced that the only value I offered the world was the dwindling resource of my youth.
“Lord, what will become of me, once I lose my novelty?” Swift sings on “Nothing New,” a track she wrote when she was just 22, which is sort of hilarious in retrospect. In the decade since then, and particularly since the pandemic, she’s shifted some of that navel-gazing ennui toward subjects outside of herself — imagined characters, invented worlds — and become a much better artist because of it.
I turn 30 in about three weeks, which means I’ve become very annoying and sentimental about the topic of one’s 20s. It also means that I have a far more reasonable perspective on womanhood and aging than I did a decade ago. It’s much harder, for instance, for me to care about “vibe shifts” or garbage trends or New York’s supposed “hipster wars,” media-invented cultural phenomena that affect precisely 12 people and won’t last beyond a few think pieces, things that are meant to make anyone outside these niche worlds feel woefully out-of-touch and unimportant.
Which is to say I’ve also been much more interested in embracing cringe, or enjoyment for its own sake. Attending a Taylor Swift dance party, or really any themed club night, is sort of an embarrassing thing to do; it’s an admission to the world that perhaps you’re not quite as comfortable in a regular club as you used to be, or that you’re more interested in reliving a bygone era than creating a new one. It can be embarrassing in itself to be part of a fandom for anything, but particularly that of the most famous pop star in the world, a wealthy, white, thin woman who has built a billion-dollar empire by portraying herself as the underdog.
But it’s also hard to think about any of those things when you’ve somehow managed to convince seven other friends, all in their late 20s and early 30s, to join you for the Taylor Swift dance party, and not only to attend but to dress up as various iterations of Swift over the course of her career (I went as her Lover era.) It’s impossible to worry about being cringe when you’re decking out your friend’s face in glitter and making St. Germain cocktails, and it’s impossible to feel stupid when you’re screaming “22” surrounded by a hundred other people who are for the most part emphatically not 22.
While addressing the class of 2022, a sizable portion of Swift’s commencement speech was spent extolling the virtue of unbridled enthusiasm. “Learn to live alongside cringe,” she said. “It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of ‘unbothered ambivalence.’ This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to ‘want it.’ That people who don’t try hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do.”
This is an incredibly funny thing to say to graduates of NYU, a school I also attended and that is full of the people most terrified in the world of being considered cringe. While I bristle at the hustle porn of it all, or the idea that “hard work” is a more important virtue than anything else, it is also exactly the thing that people obsessed with performing disinterest need to hear most.
The true genius of the Taylor Party, I think, is that it capitalizes on the fact that Taylor Swift is one of the few celebrities who would be the type of person to actually attend a Taylor Swift-themed party if she were not Taylor Swift herself. She’d probably be here too, letting off steam from her advertising job in Red-era heart-shaped sunglasses. She isn’t present, of course, so besides the looped music videos, there isn’t much to look at. Instead we all turn toward each other, gazing at our friends as we scream the songs we know all too well, feeling cringe and feeling free.
This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why? -
Actors pretend to be in the Industrial Revolution as part of the opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012. | Harry E. Walker/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Two economic historians explain what made the Industrial Revolution, and modern life, possible.
You can crudely tell the story of our species in three stages. In the first, which lasted for the vast majority of our time on Earth, from the emergence of Homo sapiens over 300,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago, humans lived largely nomadic lifestyles, subsisting through hunting and foraging for food. In the second, lasting from about 10,000 BC to around 1750 AD, humans adopted agriculture, allowing for a more secure supply of food and leading to the establishment of towns, cities, even empires.
The third period, in which we all live, is characterized by an unprecedented phenomenon: sustained economic growth. Quality of life went from improving very gradually if at all for the vast majority of human history to improving very, very quickly. In the United Kingdom, whose Industrial Revolution kicked off this transformation, GDP per capita grew about 40 percent between 1700 and 1800. It more than doubled between 1800 and 1900. And between 1900 and 2000, it grew more than fourfold.
What today we’d characterize as extreme poverty was until a few centuries ago the condition of almost every human on Earth. In 1820, some 94 percent of humans lived on less than $2 a day. Over the next two centuries, extreme poverty fell dramatically; in 2018, the World Bank estimated that 8.6 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day. And the gains were not solely economic. Before 1800, average lifespans didn’t exceed 40 years anywhere in the world. Today, the average human life expectancy is more like 73. Deaths in childhood have plunged, and adult heights have surged as malnutrition decreased.
For a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. That’s changed: How the World Became Rich, by Chapman University’s Jared Rubin and George Mason University’s Mark Koyama, provides a comprehensive look at what, exactly, changed when sustained economic growth began, what factors help explain its beginning, and which theories do the best job of making sense of the new stage of life that humans have been experiencing for a couple brief centuries.
I interviewed Rubin and Koyama via email; a transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Dylan Matthews
What is economic growth? What is this phenomenon you’re trying to explain?
Jared Rubin
Economic growth occurs when there is a sustained increase in economic prosperity, which we can measure by the total number of goods and services produced in the economy. The world we know today is a direct result of the economic growth that began in Britain in the 19th century, quickly spread to parts of Europe and North America, and has continued unabated since. It has since raised living standards in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and parts of Latin America. There is real hope to believe this will continue into South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa in our lifetime.
We are trying to explain how this came about in the first place. Why didn’t growth happen before the 19th century? What were the preconditions that Britain had that allowed it to take off first? Why did some countries follow Britain’s lead and others did not? What can this history tell us about how wealth can spread to the rest of the world in the 21st century?
Dylan Matthews
Early in the book you write, “Most people who ever lived — at least, prior to the 20th century — lived in conditions very similar to those of the very poorest in the world today.” This is a common starting point in economic history, but I find it’s rather unintuitive to many laypeople; the people we read about from ancient Rome don’t seem like the poorest people today. There’s even been some claims recently that medieval peasants lived better than 21st-century American workers. How do we know humanity was so poorly off, for so long?
Mark Koyama
Certainly, when we look at the ruins of the Roman Coliseum or Pompeii or indeed read about Cicero’s property investments, it looks like a sophisticated economy and one that generated considerable amounts of prosperity. And in some sense this impression is right. The work of scholars like Kyle Harper, Peter Temin, and Willem Jongman does indicate that the Roman economy was highly commercialized and urbanized (for preindustrial standards).
But this impression is also misleading. The Roman world was extremely unequal, so we can’t infer much about average living standards from reading about the consumption patterns of senators. And as Kyle Harper summarizes in his book The Fate of Rome, commercial prosperity brought with it disease, and all the evidence suggests that ordinary Romans, perhaps living in the tenement flats or insulae, died young, had bad nutrition, and high levels of exposure to epidemic disease.
Now, the example of the medieval peasant is an interesting counterpoint. Unlike ancient Rome, the medieval economy (outside of places like Florence) wasn’t especially commercialized or sophisticated. Levels of urbanization in, say, 15th-century England, were low. So, our impression would be one of widespread poverty.
But the research of economic historians suggests that this impression is wrong on at least some dimensions. Now, the claim that medieval peasants were better off than 21st-century Americans is palpable nonsense. But as measured by proxies such as real wages, an English peasant in 1450 was in all likelihood better off than the median Roman. The English peasant would likely have consumed more meat and alcohol, enjoyed more leisure, and possessed more durable clothes.
One reason for this which we discuss in chapter five of our book was demographic. In a world governed largely by Malthusian forces, shocks like the Black Death — which killed between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population — meant that the survivors had plentiful amounts of land per person.
Dylan Matthews
You try to explain two broad things about sustained economic growth: why it started when it did (in the mid-18th century) and why it started where it did (England). Let’s start with the when. What took so long? Humans invented agriculture maybe 10,000 years ago. Why did it take 9,800 years or so for that to lead to real economic growth?
Jared Rubin
This is one of the key questions in all of economics. Its answer is central to why some countries grew rich while others have not. The simplest answer is that economic growth occurred only after the rate of technological innovation became highly sustained. Without sustained technological innovation, any one-off economic improvement will not lead to sustained growth. Incomes will rise in the short run, but over time people will have more babies and those babies will eat up all the economic surplus. This is known as the “Malthusian trap,” after Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman of the late 18th century. This Malthusian logic explains the pre-industrial world pretty well.
Although there were ebbs and flows in pre-industrial economic growth, no society ever broke through and achieved sustained economic growth. This happened only after the overall rate of technological progress became high enough to more than offset the downward pressure imposed by population growth.
The question is why it took so long for the rate of technological innovation to grow as it did. This is one of the central questions we attempt to answer in this book. And there is not one “silver bullet” answer. For one, sustained innovation requires institutions that limit confiscation by the government (and protect other property rights more generally). But most societies in world history were weak on this dimension.
Sustained innovation also requires cultural values that support innovation and encourage understanding of how the world works. Societies in which work is looked down upon are unlikely to experience sustained innovation.
Ultimately (and this matters for the acceleration in growth we observe from the late 19th to the 20th centuries), it also helps if families limit the number of children they have. This does not necessarily contribute to innovation, but it does mean that innovation will more quickly translate into growth.
Most societies in world history had none of these features, let alone all of them. It took a while for all of these preconditions to coalesce in one nation. But once it did, economic growth took off.
Dylan Matthews
As you note repeatedly, the Industrial Revolution in England happened after centuries of European colonization, and after England and other nations created the international slave trade. Many theories of the revolution give exploitation of New World resources and of enslaved African people a key role in explaining industrialization. You have a rather nuanced view of the matter in your book. How did those cycles of exploitation relate to the eventual development of economic growth?
Mark Koyama
The story of European economic development involved huge amounts of violence and exploitation. And telling that part of the story is important. It would be wrong to focus solely on the positive or benign aspects of economic growth.
The crux of recent controversies and disputes between economic historians and historians is really about the question of necessity and causation. [In our view], the decisive break responsible for industrialization rests on developments that seem to be only indirectly connected to the story of colonial exploitation. But future work might change my opinion on this subject.
Jared Rubin
There is little doubt that the colonizers benefitted from colonial exploitation and the colonized suffered. In fact, a large literature has emerged showing just how persistent some of these effects have been on the colonized. The question here, however, is whether colonization was decisive for the onset of modern economic growth. On this, we are less sanguine.
On the one hand, the sugar economy boomed in the 17th and 18th centuries, and cotton was the major input into the textile factories at the center of Britain’s industrialization. These crops were produced with slave and coerced labor
On the other hand, the evidence is fairly weak of a connection between the products of exploited labor and the innovations that were central to the onset of modern economic growth. This is not to deny a connection between the two, and reasonable people disagree over the relevant counterfactuals. Had there been no slave labor in the New World, would the Lancashire factories have been able to get enough cheap cotton to make innovation worthwhile? Would innovation have been possible with more expensive cotton of different quality from other parts of the world?
Our book leads to the conclusion that there is no silver bullet explanation for why the world became rich. Colonization likely played some role, and it likely played a much greater role in keeping large parts of the formerly colonized world poor. But there are many key features of the onset of growth that cannot really be accounted for by colonization. Most importantly, explaining how the world became rich requires an explanation for why the rate of technological change rose so rapidly. Colonization may have played an indirect role in this process, but there are many other causes we highlight that were much more direct and relevant.
I too would like to note, like Mark, that there is still much work to be done and future work may change my opinion on this topic.
Dylan Matthews
At first, you note, living standards in England did not actually improve much for average people due to the Industrial Revolution. That helps explain why critics like William Blake and Karl Marx were so fiercely critical of the industrialization process. But as of today, you write, the “long life, good health, literacy, education, female empowerment,” and on and on that we enjoy today are “made possible by economic growth.” How did growth go from something primarily benefiting capitalists to something that could broadly benefit humanity?
Jared Rubin
One reason is institutional: Groups like labor unions played a key role in redistributing income more broadly. Another is demographic. During Britain’s early period of industrialization, its population grew rapidly enough to keep wages down. It was only as places went through a “demographic transition” (the movement from large families and high birth and death rates to smaller families with lower birth and death rates) that productivity gains began to be translated into major increases in real wages.
A third has to do with education. Many of the innovations of the first Industrial Revolution were not science-based and thus did not require a highly skilled workforce. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, science became more important, and a better-educated workforce was desired. States began spending more on education, leading to a better educated workforce. Higher education typically leads to greater income. None of these causes explain why income became more broadly distributed by themselves; it was a combination of these factors that mattered.
Mark Koyama
I agree with everything Jared says. I’d add two points. First, the Industrial Revolution occurred during the Napoleonic Wars. This really repressed living standards for ordinary Britons because it meant that taxes went up, and the price of food soared.
Second, the Industrial Revolution was highly disruptive. It was characterized by the rapid rise of particular industries such as cotton textiles which were centered in the northwest of the country. Some of the most recent research suggests that in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution wages for workers in the North of England did go up, but this was counterbalanced by economic decline in traditional sectors of the economy (for example in East Anglia).
Dylan Matthews
Several economists, like Robert Gordon and Thomas Philippon, have worried that the past couple hundred years might be an aberration, and growth might now slow down. Does your research give you hope with regard to those fears? Or does it make them seem more reasonable?
Jared Rubin
I do not agree with these fears, although I understand the logic behind them. I think this is a point on which reasonable people can disagree.
The world became rich because of a massive increase in the rate of technological innovation. I think one thing the history of technology has taught us is that as long as the incentives are there for innovators to innovate, we will continue to be surprised. The most important new innovations are often impossible to foresee. Today, AI offers the possibility of such surprises (with major moral caveats). Three decades ago, it was the internet. There have been many such transformations in the last two centuries due to inventions such as the telegraph, locomotive, automobile, telephone, electrification, steam engine, and much more.
Another way to think about it is like this. Prior to about two centuries ago, most children lived in a world that was technologically similar to the ones their parents inhabited as children. This has not been true for a little over two centuries, at least in the most technologically advanced nations. My children live in a world of very different technology than I did as a child, as did I relative to my parents. I see little reason why this will not be the case over ensuing generations.
Mark Koyama
I find these arguments unconvincing. I am more persuaded by the argument of Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake that new technologies are often highly disruptive and need new organizational and institutional arrangements to make them function. They view recent decades as characterized by the rise of intangibles and they argue that growth has been slow because we lack the rules to best exploit the intangible economy. Growth might continue to stagnate but this will be because of institutional failures and not some inherent features of the growth process.
Two Good Things: Sad kids’ movies about magical seals -
The Secret of Roan Inish (left) and Song of the Sea both offer takes on the Irish selkie legend. | The Samuel Goldwyn Company/GKIDS
Why the Irish legend of the selkie endures in cinematic form.
There are few movie genres as frequently rewarding as “a young child gets wrapped up in some mystical bullshit,” especially when handled by a great director. From E.T. to Spirited Away to Pan’s Labyrinth to the recent Petite Maman, stories about kids who encounter the unexplained seem like a foolproof way to tell stories about the uncertain transition from childhood to adulthood. The same coming-of-age beats that can feel heavy-handed in a more realistic treatment of these themes often feel refreshing and new when cloaked in the metaphors that fantasy or science fiction provide.
There’s an even more consistently amazing subgenre within this subgenre: movies about selkies.
In Irish folklore, a selkie is a seal who turns into a person and vice versa. People who can metamorphose into animals are a constant of folklore traditions around the world, but what makes the selkie tale such a good vehicle for coming-of-age stories is its inherent poignance. In many stories, the selkie may change into human form and spend many years on land, even falling in love and having children, but always, the sea will call to them. One day, finally, they will heed that call and return, leaving their loved ones sad to have lost them, but glad for their renewed happiness in the waves.
The myth lives at the center of John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, a live-action 1994 film about a young girl searching for her long-lost brother, and Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, an animated 2014 film about a boy who discovers that his younger sister is a selkie. (The 2009 film Ondine also features selkies. However, it’s not about children coming to terms with their maturation and/or mortality, so it doesn’t count.) Moore lives and works in Ireland, and Sayles is Irish-American, so their interest in the selkie legend seems almost as much an exploration of their own identities as it is a good yarn to build a movie around.
Roan Inish is by far the more unexpected of the two films. Sayles is a titan of American independent film, best known for movies like the 1980 “old friends reunite” drama Return of the Secaucus 7, the 1987 labor union historical drama Matewan, and a 1996 Western, Lone Star. All of those films are varying degrees of great, but you wouldn’t look at any of them and think, “I should watch this with my kid.” Yet Roan Inish is a great movie to watch with a child who enjoys something slightly more contemplative than the usual kids’ fare.
The film follows Fiona, a girl who goes to live with her grandparents on the coast of Ireland in the immediate wake of World War II. It’s family legend that Fiona’s ancestry includes selkies and that her younger brother, thought to be dead, was actually swept away to sea where he is currently being raised by seals. The secrets might reside on the mysterious isle of Roan Inish, where Fiona’s family used to live. As Fiona begins a project of refurbishing old family cottages on Roan Inish that have fallen into ruin, she also learns more about the still open wound of her brother’s disappearance, as well as other family sorrows.
Fiona is played by the wonderful Jeni Courtney, an actor who made only two feature films and who won the role after Sayles auditioned 1,000 actors for the part. What makes the film work is how subtly and perfectly she plays the moment in childhood when you start to realize that your family’s history extends beyond the moment of your birth and begin to understand all of the deeper emotions that threaten to well up in your parents and grandparents. Sayles’s skill at grounding those truths in quiet, melancholic moments between grandparent and grandchild creates something truly moving.
Song of the Sea is also about a relationship between siblings, though in this case, older brother Ben is trying to keep his younger sister, Saoirse, from running off to join the seals. Ben and Saoirse’s mother disappeared the same night Saoirse was born, which provides a rich undercurrent of metaphor. You can easily read this movie as being about a child who misses his mother blaming his younger sibling for the mother’s death in childbirth.
Or you could read it as a movie about a girl who can turn into a seal. Ben and Saoirse are being raised by their widower father, Conor, in a lighthouse along the Irish coast. Early in the film, Saoirse discovers a strange coat locked away in a closet. When she puts it on by the seashore, she turns into a seal and is able to frolic and play with the other seals. When Conor catches her, however, he takes the coat, locks it in a trunk, and throws it into the sea. Then, for good measure, he moves his kids to the city far away.
And that’s just the first third of the movie. The rest of the story unspools on an eerie Halloween night when the spirits lead Ben and Saoirse closer and closer to the truth about what happened to their mom (and also a bunch of super cute animated seals).
Song of the Sea is the second film in Moore’s “Irish folklore trilogy,” alongside The Secret of Kells (2009) and Wolfwalkers (2020). All three films are terrific, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Song of the Sea, simply because of how beautifully it evokes the sadness at the heart of the selkie myth. The structure of the film is like a sob the characters are holding back, which finally releases as the film reaches a graceful, elegiac climax.
That sadness drives both films, really, because the selkie myth has always been about grief and the unexplainable nature of death. For most of human history, children have had to grow up in a world where their parents or other loved ones might just suddenly be gone. Neither Song’s Ben nor Roan Inish’s Fiona can quite adjust to that reality. The story of both films forces the two kids to confront something many children begin to realize just before adolescence: The people you love are going to die someday.
The selkie myth, however, allows for one last chance to reconnect, for a second chance that might result in a happy ending or might just result in getting one last chance to say goodbye. Somewhere out there in the sea, seals are playing, and if you can take joy in that, you can hope that someone you loved and lost might be out there, too, just beyond the waves.
The Secret of Roan Inish is available to stream for free (with ads) on a number of platforms, including Tubi, Pluto TV, and YouTube. You can also digitally purchase or rent it on all major platforms. Song of the Sea is available for digital purchase and rental on all major platforms. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
From The Hindu: Sports
Anand outwits Vachier for a winning start -
Ooty races postponed -
Manchester United confirms record signing Paul Pogba will leave end of June - France World Cup-winner Paul Pogba will leave Manchester United, six years after joining for a then world-record fee of £89 million
Last Wish, Sedar, Multifaceted, Karyna, The Inheritor, Inexhaustible and Ravishing Form excel -
Footballer Kurt Zouma banned from keeping cats for shocking abuse video - West Ham and France defender Kurt Zouma has been banned from keeping cats for five years and ordered to carry out 180 hours of community service by a London court
From The Hindu: National News
World Bicycle Day to promote fitness, sustainable development -
Congress should have been more astute in choice of RS poll candidates: Sanjay Raut - Sena leader urges Congress to get its act together, says non-BJP Opposition cannot move forward without it
Andhra Pradesh: Water released to Godavari delta to irrigate 10.13 lakh acres in kharif - Early release will help farmers save crops during cyclones usually experienced in winter, says Water Resources Minister
Andhra Pradesh: No deadline for commissioning Polavaram project, says Minister - ‘Experts are yet to find solutions to the damage done to diaphragm wall’
Andhra Pradesh: Godavari delta farmers advised to commence kharif operations soon - Farmers should reap it rich by cashing in on early release of water, says district incharge Minister Venu Gopala Krishna
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: US to send longer-range rockets in latest aid package - The new weapons are part of a $700m (£556m) aid package US officials said would be unveiled on Wednesday.
Germans get €9-a-month travel in response to energy price rises - For the next three months, public transport costs are being cut to tackle the soaring cost of living.
Denmark holds referendum on dropping EU defence opt-out - Denmark is the latest Nordic country to reassess security policy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine war: Stories of torture emerging out of Kherson - The BBC speaks to residents from a Russian-occupied region who say they were kidnapped and tortured.
Universities warn of EU-UK research scheme ‘close to precipice’ - Vice-chancellors ask both sides to work together to save the UK’s role in a multi-billion-pound scheme.
From Ars Technica
Diablo Immortal impressions: A good smartphone game saddled with F2P nonsense - Great ARPG-on-phone production values, hampered by terrible economic decisions. - link
World’s first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor starts testing - Ammonia is already a widely used fertilizer, so the infrastructure is in place. - link
Sorry, Texas: Supreme Court blocks law banning “censorship” on social media - 5-4 ruling halts law that bans social media moderation based on “viewpoint.” - link
Experts warn of continued monkeypox spread as hundreds of cases found worldwide - “At the moment, we are not concerned of a global pandemic.” - link
Broadcom plans a “rapid transition” to subscription revenue for VMware - Subscription software is continually updated—but also continually paid for. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
I asked the librarian if they had any books on paranoia. -
An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates. -
St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an engineer — you’re assigned to hell.”
So the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of accommodations and starts designing and building improvements.
After a while, they’ve got air-conditioning and flush toilets, escalators, elevators and so on … and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.
One day, God calls Satan on the telephone.
“So, how’s it going down there in hell?” God says.
“Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air-conditioning and flush toilets and escalators. There’s no telling what our engineer is going to come up with next!” Satan says.
“What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake — he should have never gotten down there. Send him back immediately!” God says.
“No way! I like having an engineer on the staff — I’m keeping him!” Satan says.
“Send him back up here or I’ll sue!” God says.
Satan laughs uproariously and answers:
“Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”
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Arin Sang-urai
