February 16, 2024 Roundup (Patreon)

I'll have an essay on Martin Scorsese's The Departed ready for you by tomorrow. After the season finale of True Detective: Night Country airs, I'll have a season review out (spoiler: it kinda blows). Additionally, I'm planning to do some freelance reporting, so I'll keep you posted on that.

News is all over the place. The Super Bowl was fun. I'm historically not a sports girl (aside from... all the sports I played as a kid but that's a story for another day), so I mostly went to my housemate's Super Bowl party to fight my reclusive streak. But it turns out that watching the Super Bowl with queer football fans is a lot of fun, and I got extremely into it. I doubt anybody in the room was expecting to hear me shout "fuck 'em to death," but we have to start coming up with better football chants.

Other news... oy. The Kremlin has murdered Alexei Navalny. For all the harm he's done in the past (which he denounced to his credit), Navalny was an important voice of the Russian opposition to Putin. Whatever happened to him is happening on a greater scale to many people. Navalny's death is a tragedy, but it's a symptom of an utter catastrophe.

The Fani Willis stuff is tedious to me. Some idiotic professional mistakes used as a distraction from a former president being prosecuted for election interference. Same with Biden's health and cognitive performance making the news; the man is older than Methuselah. Historically, he's a quiet political actor who specializes in backdoor deals and struggles to speak to an audience. That's a double-edged sword: the White House understands that people were sick of hearing about the president everyday when Trump was in office, so having someone doing quietly competent politics behind the scenes was a reprieve for a while. In an election year, having the president be frail and nervous is a bit of a curse (and yes, the Jon Stewart bit about the election is fucking awesome).

Personally, I had a pretty good week. But a lot of people didn't. If you didn't, share some stories, and we'll be happy to listen. See you next week.