Monday, October 7, 2024

Ta-Nehisi Coates Interview


Russia's Espionage in Norway

 













New Yorker - "Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic"
By Ben Taub

Juror #2

 

November 1, 2024
Written by Jonathan Abrams
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Kiefer Sutherland

Sinners


Written & Directed by Ryan Coogler
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Delroy Lindo

17-year-old Ryan Williams



The Death of the Minivan

 













The Atlantic - "The Death of the Minivan"
By Ian Bogost"

"Pickup was quick. In the first year after introducing them, Chrysler sold 210,000 Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers, its initial two models. Overall minivan sales reached 700,000 by the end of the decade, as the station wagon all but disappeared. But the new design also generated stigma: As the child of the station wagon and the service van, the minivan quickly came to represent the family you love but must support, and also transport. In a nation where cars stood in for power and freedom, the minivan would mean the opposite. As a vehicle, it symbolized the burdens of domestic life.

That stigma only grew with time. In 1996, Automobile magazine called this backlash “somewhat understandable,” given that the members of my generation, who were at that point young adults, had “spent their childhoods strapped into the backseat of one.” Perhaps it was childhood itself that seemed uncool, rather than the car that facilitated it. In any case, minivans would soon be obsolesced by sport utility vehicles. The earliest SUVs were more imposing than they are today: hard-riding trucks with 4×4 capabilities, such as the Chevrolet Suburban and the Jeep Wagoneer. These were as big as or even bigger than the plumber-kidnapper vans of the 1970s, and they got terrible gas mileage, cost a lot of money, and were hard to get in or out of, especially if you were very young or even slightly old. Yet the minivan’s identity had grown toxic, and for suburban parents, the SUV played into the fantasy of being somewhere else, or doing something better."

Related,
"Volkswagen ID Buzz Coming to U.S. by 2023" (Mar. 2021)

Returning Drones

Drones returning to their cradles/cases after a show
byu/rco888 inoddlysatisfying