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A few weeks ago, I ended my comparison of Gossip Girl book and show fashion with a breakdown of Book Vanessa Abrams, a black turtleneck–clad, white-coded character—literally miles from TV Vanessa, the role that Jessica Szohr assumed in season one, episode six. Not long after her debut, New York magazine caught up with Szohr, and she explained TV Vanessa’s new style: In the book, Vanessa was very gothic, always in black, with piercings and when we started the show, they wanted to make her kind of Lower East Side .

The Outbursts of Everett True was an American two-panel newspaper comic strip created by A.D. Condo and J. W. Raper that ran from July 22, 1905 to January 13, 1927. It followed this setup: Panel 1: Someone annoys Everett True. Panel 2: He yells at and/or physically punishes whoever annoyed him. The original strip revolved around an ill-tempered man in late middle-age who was typically dressed in a suit and bowler hat of antiquated and comical appearance for the time.

Here’s the promised second installment of the series built around Caitlin Clark’s pursuit of various Division I career scoring records. Today, we shift over to the men’s game. At some point in the next week, almost certainly by the end of her team’s March 3 regular-season finale against Ohio State, Caitlin Clark will have cleared another historical marker. Having already eclipsed Kelsey Plum’s NCAA Division I women’s basketball career scoring record in a Feb.

A legacy sequel to The Ticket Booth at Forbes.com and (especially) Mendelson's Memos. Pure, unfiltered and less formal pontification about the movie business and the entertainment industry for those who desire such a thing. By Scott Mendelson · Over 3,000 subscribersNo thanksncG1vNJzZmirk6TBtbnEp5uepKOku2%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xo

I had a lot of fun writing this one. Palo Alto Networks is a company I’ve admired for a long time; it’s the world’s biggest standalone security company, has an arm in virtually every category of cyber, and is an active acquirer of dozens of pioneering startups. So I thought it was important to peer into the company’s history, understand how it’s managed to innovate over the last 18 years (an eternity, in cyber years!

Something that many of us do in life is look back on our youth with, if not exactly regret, then melancholy puzzlement. The things that seemed so important to us back then are rendered inert, even pointless with the perspective of the passing years. We ponder the years and mental/emotional energy spent on stuff that we now regard with little value. This can be especially true when it comes to our schooling.

Living in the U.S. for a while has led me to believe that the struggle for racial justice, as it is currently formulated in that country, does not actually provide any workable solution to the various inequalities of race in America, but has become rather a formula for the intergenerational reproduction of racial conflict. The failure of American liberals to understand this has many perverse effects, one of which has been to drive other minority groups into the arms of the Republican party.

It’s been a little while, folks, but I’m back with another thought™. This week, I want to talk a little bit about Barbie (2023) and the paradox of Weird Barbie, the character played by the brilliant and funny Kate McKinnon. There will be whole movie spoilers in varying degrees of detail, so here is your warning to stop reading and return to it! This piece is not a real critique of the film, as with anything I post on this substack, these are my thoughts, feelings and opinions.

Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back.