Plain English Podcast with Derek Thompson
The Big Winners and Losers From the Remote Work Revoluion
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Qatar World Cup Stadiums
- 2022 Qatar World Cup is under six months away ahead of the tournament's kick-off on November 21
- All eight venues are situated within a 21-mile radius of central Doha and will be linked by a metro system
- One of the venues is made up of 974 shipping containers and is fully dismantlable once the World Cup ends
- Al Janoub Stadium is one of Qatar's most controversial venues, with its design being compared to a vagina
- But where is the final held and what can travelling fans expect? Here's our guide to the World Cup stadiums
Sunday, June 26, 2022
MLS's 10 Year Broadcast Deal with Apple
Sunday, June 19, 2022
Duke Riley at the Brooklyn Museum
New York Times - "Duke Riley: Grand Master Trash"
"The audacious artist transforms seaborne plastics into maritime art at the Brooklyn Museum, driving home his message about their devastating environmental impact."
Previously,
Artist – Duke Riley (June 2018)
Dream On
The story of the 1996 US Women's Basketball Dream Team. Summary from ESPN: "Check out the story of the 12 women who were tasked with auditioning the idea of women’s professional basketball in the United States in 30 for 30's latest series, Dream On."
NBA 75th Anniversary Team Jackets by Jeff Hamilton
Jeff Hamilton made the jackets Kobe and Shaq wore in the early 2000s after winning titles.
Related,
Andrew Wiggins is an NBA Champion.
Andrew Wiggins is an NBA Champion.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Taco Bell Bank Concept (in Minnesota)
Axios - "Lots of Taco-bout our new Bell"
KARE 11 - "Take a look at the new two-story Taco Bell Defy"
Related,
Taco Bell is the true melting pot of American society. Where else can you find a line of cars ranging from a G Wagon to a beater missing the passenger window, covered in duct tape? Socioeconomic status is not a thing in Taco Bell.
— mr. yetter (@Yetter90) February 28, 2022
Sunday, June 5, 2022
Time Lord
NBC Sports - "Here's how Robert Williams earned 'Time Lord' nickname"
"The legend of Time Lord began shortly after Williams was drafted by the Celtics in 2018. The former Texas A&M big man overslept and missed his introductory conference call with the media and subsequently missed his flight to Boston. Not exactly the ideal start to his NBA career, but it was fully embraced by the diehards on "Weird Celtics Twitter."
The rabid C's fanbase didn't take Williams' tardiness to heart. Instead, they made the best of the situation by ingratiating him with a nickname that fits the "Weird Celtics Twitter" brand. Ryan Hebert (@HebertofRiffs on Twitter), a prominent "Weird Celtics Twitter" personality, is at least partly responsible for the Time Lord nickname being born.
"I'm embracing it, man," Williams told NBC Sports Boston's Chris Forsberg on the "Celtics Talk" podcast back in 2018. "I don't see a problem with it. ..."
Shipping Containers Lost at Sea
New Yorker - "When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink"
"All of this changed in 1956, because of a man named Malcom McLean. He was not originally a shipping magnate; he was the ambitious owner of a trucking company who figured he would be able to outbid his competitors if he could sometimes transport goods by waterway rather than by highway. When his initial idea of simply driving his trucks onto cargo ships proved economically inefficient, he began tinkering with removable boxes that could be stacked atop one another, as well as easily swapped among trucks, trains, and ships. In pursuit of that vision, he bought and retrofitted a couple of Second World War tankers, and then recruited an engineer who had already been working on aluminum containers that could be lifted by crane from truck to ship. On April 26, 1956, one of the tankers, the SS Ideal-X, sailed from New Jersey to Texas carrying fifty-eight shipping containers. On hand to witness the event was a higher-up in the International Longshoremen’s Association who, when asked what he thought of the ship, supposedly replied, “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”
That longshoreman clearly understood what he was seeing: the end of the shipping industry as he and generations of dockworkers before him knew it. At the time the Ideal-X left port, it cost an average of $5.83 per ton to load a cargo ship. With the advent of the shipping container, that price dropped to an estimated sixteen cents—and cargo-related employment plummeted along with it. These days, a computer does the work of figuring out how to pack a ship, and a trolley-and-crane system removes an inbound container and replaces it with an outbound one roughly every ninety seconds, unloading and reloading the ship almost simultaneously. The resulting cost savings have made overseas shipping astonishingly cheap. To borrow Levinson’s example, you can get a twenty-five-ton container of coffeemakers from a factory in Malaysia to a warehouse in Ohio for less than the cost of one business-class plane ticket. “Transportation has become so efficient,” he writes, “that for many purposes, freight costs do not much affect economic decisions.”
...
For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life—the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world. The only thing those flat-screen TVs and Garfield telephones and all the other wildly variable contents of lost shipping containers have in common is that, collectively, they make plain the scale of our excess consumption. The real catastrophe is the vast glut of goods we manufacture and ship and purchase and throw away, but even the small fraction of those goods that go missing makes the consequences apparent. Six weeks after the Tokio Express got into trouble at Land’s End, another container ship ran aground sixteen nautical miles away, sending dozens of containers into the sea just off the coast of the Isles of Scilly. Afterward, among the shells and pebbles and dragons, residents and beachcombers kept coming across some of the cargo: a million plastic bags, headed for a supermarket chain in Ireland, bearing the words “Help protect the environment.”"
Food shopping in China
Rest of World - "How to buy a chicken sandwich in Shenzhen"
"By combining social media and infomercial sales tactics, livestream retail has grown into a $100 billion industry in China during the pandemic. On shopping and social apps, fast-talking hosts pitch their sales around the clock, while buyers interact with them and place orders with a few taps on their phones. By the end of 2021, 464 million users were shopping during livestreams, a 20% increase from a year ago. McKinsey estimates 10% of all e-commerce revenue comes via livestreaming in China."
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
John C. Reilly on Playing Dr. Jerry Buss
New York Mag - "In Conversation: John C. Reilly The actor thinks audiences just want to be surprised. He’d do (almost) anything to oblige."
You were offered the part of Jerry BussReilly was cast as Buss after Michael Shannon exited the role, reportedly due to creative differences over scenes in which the character talks to the camera. in Winning Time just a week before you shot the pilot.
That’s right. Seven days.
Buss seems like a difficult role to step into. He was a beloved public figure with a complicated personal life, plus in addition to owning the Lakers, he was a real-estate baron, chemist, aerospace engineer, and poker player. How do you become somebody like that in seven days?
First of all, I was lucky I kind of look like him with the help of hair, makeup, and the right clothes. Once I had all that, I was like, Okay, what did this guy do in his life? He passed away in 2013, and he didn’t write an autobiography, so I just tried to imagine what it felt like to be in his position. I had a lot of help from Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980sThe series’ source material. HBO changed the TV show’s title from Showtime (the nickname of the 1979–91 Lakers’ flashy play style) to Winning Time to avoid confusion with the competing cable network. and showrunner Max Borenstein, who did so much research. Plus Adam McKay and I had a common sense of humor about men in this era, about the entitlement and craziness of the male ego.
In some ways, I felt similar to Jerry. Like him, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth — I come from a working-class family in Chicago — so I knew what it felt like to be an outsider who comes to L.A. seeking their fortune. He also reminded me of my dad, that generation of man that was unapologetically macho, that had seen real hardship. So I was intuiting my dad’s energy. The more layers of the onion I unraveled, the more I was amazed at how much I was already in the zone to play this character.
That still sounds like a busy week.
Actually, I also went to Nashville that week and played a couple shows with my bandThe folk band John Reilly & Friends — the one place where Reilly says SAG doesn’t make him use his middle initial. because I’d already committed to them. I was like, “Well, I can do a costume fitting on Tuesday, but I’m leaving for Nashville on Wednesday.”
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