Ring of Fire
Hot news and politics takes, a Malcolm Gladwell pan, and music from Muddy Waters with the Stones, Robert Earl Keen, Johnny Cash, and brand new Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen.
And here we go again, even though it burns burns burns, though I am no Hoochie Coochie Man. Enjoy, then share, comment, subscribe (it’s still free).
News & Politics
Jimmy Fallon on the cicada attacking Joe Biden: “Tomorrow, that cicada will be on Fox News in a neck brace calling for Biden to be impeached: ‘See what he did to me! It’s on tape.’” Stephen Colbert: “Forget the Secret Service; that man needs a swat team!”
Headline of the Day, from a New York Times newsletter: “Radicchio is having a moment.”
The Onion noted a true thing: “Arizona has refurbished a gas chamber to use hydrogen cyanide, the deadly gas used during the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, on death row inmates.” Then it made up (we presume) answers from average Americans: “Oh, I’m sure nobody remembers that.” “You just know the woke left will try to argue that this is something the Nazis would do.” “It must be a relief to have so much strong data on its effectiveness.”
Andy Borowitz claims: “Susan Collins Sad That Joe Manchin Has Replaced Her as Most Annoying Senator.”
Too rich for our blood? A "jaw-dropping report by ProPublica detailing how America’s richest men avoided paying taxes has intensified interest in Congress, even among some Republicans, in changing the tax code to ensure that people like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett pay their fair share," NY Times reports. Meanwhile, Attorney General Garland vows the billionaire tax leak will be “top of my list” to investigate.
XL End: Sponsor of Keystone XL crude oil pipeline says it's pulling the plug on the contentious project.
Trump in Exile: Bloomberg on his life at Mar-an-Elba, “He’ll show up to anything. In recent weeks, Trump has popped into engagement parties and memorial services. A Mar-a-Lago member who recently attended a club gathering for a deceased friend was surprised when Trump sauntered in to deliver remarks and then hung around, apparently enjoying himself.”
Now we can relax: Biden revoked a Trump-era order meant to ban TikTok.
Web and flow: A new Amazon service will automatically share millions of people’s home internet with strangers. It’s not as creepy as it sounds, Wirecutter says.
CNN said the Justice Department secretly fought to obtain one of its reporter’s email logs, and imposed a gag order on the network’s lawyers and president. The fight for the CNN reporter’s email data began in July 2020 under the Trump administration and was resolved on Jan. 26. CNN’s attorneys were not allowed to know what it was the government was seeking or who they were investigating.
Harper’s quirky week-in-review is always filled with fun/odd/important nuggets. A few this week:
“The only good thing that will come out of this is a lot of stupid people will be killed off,” an anti-vax talk show host said of current efforts to vaccinate shortly before he was hospitalized with COVID-19…. Google’s head of diversity was removed for expressing anti-Semitic sentiments, and the company apologized for listing Kannada as the “ugliest language in India” in one of its fact boxes…. Microsoft blamed the global disappearance of images of “Tank Man,” who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, from its search engine on “accidental human error,” and Hong Kong police arrested the organizer and at least six participants of a vigil commemorating the protests…An Ohio veterans’ group cut the microphone of its Memorial Day keynote speaker after he mentioned the contributions of formerly enslaved people to the holiday’s history.
On the first day of Pride Month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned transgender girls and women from playing on school sports teams, and boaters in Washington reportedly shouted homophobic slurs at another vessel until their own boat burst into flames….A father in Florida faced child abuse charges for throwing his infant at a deputy during a high-speed chase…. It was reported that a man who yelled, “You guys like protecting pedophiles?” at police through a megaphone during the January 6 riots had served jail time for raping a 14-year-old girl….It was reported that California prison guards did not notice when a “self-styled Satanist” convicted of murder beheaded and dissected his cellmate. Fifteen elephants in China were seen wandering through a city 300 miles from their nature reserve home, a migration that experts cannot explain
Film
If you've missed watching my award-winning Atomic Cover-up: Just up today streaming for 5 day s at Venezia Film Festival in Italy--$1.99 to view full shorts program. Note: This is the "short" version (at 29 min) vs. "feature" (52 min).
Music
On this day in 1964: The Rolling Stones, at the suggestion of Phil Spector, recorded two new singles at Chess while in Chicago, “It’s All Over Now” and “Time Is On My Side.” Nice enough but they also got to meet Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry. Seventeen years later, back in Chi-town, they got to do “Hoochie-Coochie Man” and more with Muddy…..
As you may know, I’m a fan of Sharon Van Etten, and now she has debuted a duet with fellow singer-songwriter Angel Olsen on the Fallon show this week. Not her best song, but you may still enjoy:
Get up for the “ring of fire” near-eclipse today at sunrise? Probably not but here's Johnny Cash classic "Ring of Fire"--with Carters backup singing.
Books
Glad to see this brave New Republic review of new Malcolm Gladwell book by Colin Dickey:
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a nasty, brutish book—if it’s also short, it’s not nearly short enough. It is a breathless and narratively riveting story about the best way to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. It is the story of two different approaches to killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and of the heroic men who each championed their own method for mass killing. Its central question is whether one should approach the wholesale massacre of the innocents with indifference or with hypocrisy, and its conceit is that this is a relevant or fascinating distinction. It is a book detailing a series of ingenious new technologies for butchery, dressed up in the polished technophilic language of a TED talk.
Song Pick of the Day
Terrific songwriter James McMurtry coming out with first album in seven years, reunited with David Grissom, so here’s one of his best, as brought to you by Robert Earl Keen.
“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
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“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.